The New (Green, White, Black and) Red Scare

The Ruling Class knows something you don’t know… that the facade of capitalism is crumbling around us.

The fight for Palestinian liberation — and the suppression it has faced — is not only about rights and freedom for the people of Palestine, but is a struggle against capitalist imperialism for the whole world. The ruling class are fighting the movement as if they know this — and we should fight back as if we do, too.

The New Palestinian Red Scare

The Palestinian solidarity movement has rocked this country and the entire world over the past year. It’s upended the pro-Israel consensus which the US has been able to steadfastly rely on for 70 years as the bedrock for pursuing its domination of the Middle East. And now the ruling class is fighting back in the best way they know how: a Red (Green, White, and Black) Scare. 

For those who have been fighting with, for, and in Palestine for decades, most especially, Palestinians themselves, state repression is nothing new. But as millions of people in the U.S. have joined the struggle for Palestinian liberation since October 2023, they also have been exposed to the reality of media censorship, campus and workplace repression, surveillance, and protest illegalization that together belie the U.S. as a democracy.

Right now, thousands of people’s jobs are in jeopardy for the crime of standing up for Palestine.

On May 1st of this year, Congress voted to define ‘antisemitism’ to include the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” over the objections of hundreds of thousands of anti-Zionist Jews. This has become the theoretical groundwork for mass censorship, as universities, companies, and local school districts use this to legitimize draconian enforcement against free speech criticism of Israel’s war crimes.

Right now, thousands of people’s jobs are in jeopardy for the crime of standing up for Palestine. CAIR marked the highest ever reported employer retaliations in its 30 year history since the attacks on Gaza began, logging 1,200 employer retaliations. These are some of the best relative numbers we have, but in no way captures the scale.

Education especially is in the crosshairs. The University of Texas dismissed two teaching assistants for sending a message to students titled “mental health and violence in Gaza.”  Jewish Professor Maura Finkelstein became the first tenured professor fired in this Red Scare for her personal Instagram posts. In December 2023, two university presidents resigned after being brought before Congressional hearings which accused them of not condemning students’ chants of “intifada” (uprising) as calls for genocide.

The Red Scare is in full swing on college campuses across the country…
Even at the high school level, teachers and students have been targeted.

The Red Scare is in full swing on college campuses across the country. In response to the wave of pro-Palestine protests in the spring, we have seen a brutal crackdown on campuses. Arrests of over 3,000 students and faculty, mass expulsion of students, and new policies that crack down on even tame protests such as vigils and treat anti-Zionist criticism of Israel as hate-speech. 

Even at the high school level, teachers and students have been targeted. In Seattle, where one of us teaches in public schools, one teacher, Ian Golash, was harassed by a right-wing vigilante who came to his school all the way from Florida with a mobile billboard that read “Public School Teacher & Seattle’s Leading Antisemite.” How did the supposedly progressive Seattle Public Schools respond? They removed Ian from the classroom. You can read my op-ed about it here. 

Solidarity organizations, and even aid organizations, have been targeted as well. On October 15, just after the one-year anniversary of the ongoing brutal genocide in Gaza, the US government designated the Samidoun Palistinian Prisoner Solidarity Network as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.” This effectively made it an illegal organization that had to be disbanded. Even Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has been branded as antisemitic and, along with Students for Justice in Palestine, been banned from Columbia University and other campuses following the historic student uprising last spring.

UNWRA, the leading United Nations organization for delivering aid to Palestinians since 1949, had their funding cut off by the US and EU over shifty allegations of connection to terrorism where, at most, the actions of a few employees has been used to discredit the organization as a whole. This has given a green light for war crimes, and now the Israeli military has killed more UN workers in Gaza than there were hostages taken on October 7th. This left Palestinians without critical food and shelter, and meant Americans, already facing repression on the streets and at schools, had yet another vehicle for the most basic form of solidarity—material aid—cut off from them. 
Moreover, there have been hundreds of anti-protest laws introduced since 2017, ramping up after the 2020 George Floyd uprising against police murder, and now even more in response to the Palestinian solidarity movement. These laws have made it a felony to “riot”, but given a definition so broad that any peaceful protest could be found guilty as even the perceived “imminent danger” of property damage is sufficient. If the protest is considered a “riot”, there are now laws in some states that protect drivers who run over protesters. They have overturned precedent to make organizers legally responsible for the actions of attendees. They can now charge nonprofit organizations with felony fines for “conspiring” with protesters. This is not to say that each instance will now be enforced. But they are effectively a climate of fear, which serves the purpose of keeping many people from participating.

It Happened Before

Red Scares can take different forms. But what they all have in common is that they are a response to the rise of a mass movement gaining steam, and create an atmosphere of fear that encourages people to distance themselves from these popular movements. By using labels like “terrorist,” “antisemitic,” “socialist,” or “communist”, and setting up spectacles of mass repression, the ruling class employs the powerful media to turn once-mainstream activists into pariahs that the general public fear being associated with.  

Credibility for the capitalist system was in freefall and the working class was getting massively organized— strikes swept across the country.

The year 1920 was the height of what became known as the first Red Scare. The US ruling class were panicking over the mass upheaval that broke out following WWI. Credibility for the capitalist system was in freefall and the working class was getting massively organized— strikes swept across the country. The capitalist class feared that a revolution like what happened in Russia would spread to the US. 

So with revolution on the agenda and the population radicalizing more and more against the robber-baron class, capitalism’s most aggressive defenders went after everyone who opposed their agenda. The New York Assembly expelled the elected members of the Socialist Party, the government discredited Black freedom efforts against segregation and Jim Crow as being puppets of nefarious communists, and US Attorney General Palmer used the Department of Justice to terrorize leftist organizations in high-profile raids across the country, deporting hundreds of foreign-born socialists. In cities that went on strike—including our home, Seattle, where workers took over the whole city—the government used brutal state violence, even military intervention to put the strikes down.

After the raids subsided, the damage was done. The Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party, the biggest radical working-class organizations of their time, were gutted and would never recover. The mass labor movement which had come out of WWI emboldened was cut across, with the Palmer Raids paired with and enabling an “open shop” anti-union drive by employers in 1919 and 1920. This opened up a dark decade of capitalist free reign,rampant speculation, and stagnant union rates that lasted until the Great Depression.

Workers heroically organized throughout the 1930s and 40s, creating new fighting unions, forming a new labor federation based on inclusive unions willing to fight for everyone, and rose to the heights of taking over more cities with general strikes. Just like before, they developed incredible tactics such as the sit-down strike where workers would go on strike inside the factory, taking over the building rather than marching outside of it. 

Then in the 1950s, during the height of the Cold War, we had another Red Scare, bigger and more successful. This time, instead of raids on meetings being the centerpiece, the big spectacle was a series of trials of federal employees and other workers led by Senator McCarthy. Their goal, just like before, was fear through mass repression. The spectacle of the trials was important to drive it into the public consciousness that they must silence their criticisms or they could be next. This had the effect of isolating individuals, destroying working-class organizations, and silencing any critiques. Ideas can be killed, at least publicly, and at least for a while. They used this witch-hunt to target the best fighters in the unions who had led strikes on scales never-before-seen.

It is also worth noting that Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel during these trials was Roy Cohn, who actually led most of the closed-door hearings. Cohn would later go on to serve as Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor. So there’s a direct continuity between the Second Red Scare and the current anti-Palestinian efforts, even down to being led by some of the same people calling the shots. With Trump returning to office, it is almost certain that Trump will escalate these attacks, going after pro-Palestinian organizations and potentially deporting foreign-born pro-Palestinian activists, as is laid out in Project 2025. 

These Red Scares didn’t last forever, but tore mass movements apart like a tornado, leaving wreckage that would take far longer to repair than it took to do the damage, and some things were destroyed forever. The Red Scare of the 1950s left us with a dark decade before the growing Civil Rights movement and anti-colonial revolutions led a new generation into the struggle to shake off the chains of the Red Scare. But the US labor movement has still not yet fully recovered from exorcising the activists and organizers who led to their biggest victories.

So, we’re all completely doomed?

So, is there anything to take from this history other than that we’re all doomed?

No, we’re not doomed, and the ruling class is not all-powerful. We stand a chance, but only if we learn from those who came before us and gave their lives to the struggle. History is not linear. It is a dynamic push and a pull between those in power and those without it. Red Scares always come on the heels of mass movements that have successfully changed public opinion. The best way to wield power is to not use it for violent repression, but to keep it as a silent threat. That’s the reason that, on the whole, the countries in the imperialist core get the benefit of a seemingly democratic government. If the people believe in the system, there’s no threat that needs to be repressed. A strong system has no need to fire people for their beliefs, to brutally attack students on campuses, to censure and expel grassroots politicians, or to raid organizations and meetings. These are the desperate mask-off flailings of a weak power structure that is losing the battle for ideas, and must resort to brute violence. 

1. Create independent media to challenge the corporate narrative

One of the biggest sectors of establishment reaction around Palestine has been over TikTok, which at the time of publication, is in its final countdown to being banned in the US. While politicians from both sides of the aisle have tried to point the finger at Chinese government surveillance, this is in fact, and ironically, U.S. government propaganda. The US version of TikTok is not owned by the Chinese government — but it is uniquely the only mass social media platform we have access to in the US that isn’t censoring us on behalf of the US government. It has proved to be the essential way that millions of Americans found out about the realities of the genocide in Gaza and dove deeper to uncover how and why our government is ultimately responsible for it.

As Senator Mitt Romney lays out in an interview with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken:

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

If this New Red Scare takes away the very minuscule amount of media we have that isn’t owned by U.S. media conglomerates under heavy censorship by the U.S. government, then it’s up to us to create new media. We are starting to see these crop up—from In These Times to More Perfect Union and Means TV. We need the People’s TikTok, not owned by Chinese or U.S. companies, but independent and funded by unions, socialist and progressive organizations, and with transparent algorithms.

2. Build a new political party of solidarity as an alternative to the far-right

Both Democrats and Republicans had nearly identical stances on Israel-Palestine in the 2024 presidential election. The DNC prohibited Palestinian organizers from speaking at the convention, even after the Undecided Movement’s leaders promised support for Kamala Harris. Trump was able to pull votes from working-class voters by refusing to cheerlead the U.S. funded war efforts in Ukraine and Palestine. If we are to stop a right-wing populist political hurricane from tearing through this country any further, then we’re going to need to build a left-wing working class party that is clearly independent from the Democrats. We can engage in infinite debates about timing and tactics, but at the end of the day, the longer people have no alternative to Trumpism as an alternative to the Democratic Party, the stronger the forces of fascism we will have to fight.

3. Organize, reform, and grow unions willing to fight for everyone

The Red Scare of yesterday lives on in our unions—organizations that are supposed to be on the working-class side of history through and through, but which over the course of decades of raids, purges and crushing defeats, have largely chosen a strategy of compromise with the ruling elite. One of the biggest ways this manifested is with the idea that unions shouldn’t be political—as if our everyday lives can somehow exist outside of the political system we live in. The new Palestine solidarity movement has begun to challenge this notion in important unions, with unions representing over 4 million workers forming the ‘Labor for Ceasefire’ coalition and demanding that “the U.S. Government must halt military aid to Israel immediately”. This did not come automatically, but was hard-won by rank-and-file union activists organizing and networking across the country. This is an important next step in efforts to reform and rebuild our unions into the political organizations capable of truly challenging the agenda of the billionaire class in the international fight for peace and liberation.

The Palestinian solidarity movement alongside the genocide and escalating war being waged by Israel has caused the US government to lose the debate with the American people. They are using more and more tools of repression to try to destroy a population they can no longer convince—not just about Palestine, but about capitalism itself; about working long hours for not enough pay; about living in increasingly isolated and lonely conditions; about parasite healthcare, radicalized class disparity, and so much more.

Red Scares are inevitable, but they’re not invincible. If we keep on getting more organized, if we take the leap and build our own party, our unions, our media, our mutual aid and solidarity groups, we will face more repression. This is something to both fear and prepare for. But we can also use it to gauge how organized we are, while fighting like hell against all repression. We have a world to win, and if this past year is any indication, we can do it.