Friday, May 15, 2026

Memes of the Times

























See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

ISRAEL AND GAZA
The Architecture of Settler Colonialism
Kym Staton: Quote of the Day – March 3, 2026
Thomas Fazi on How Western Hegemony Has Entered a Phase of Irreversible Decline
Omid Safi: Quote of the Day – March 7, 2026
Do Nation States Have the “Right” to Exist?
Chris Hedges: “The Genocide in Gaza Is the Beginning. Welcome to the New World Order”


MINNESOTAN RESISTANCE TO THE TRUMP REGIME’S FASCIST OCCUPATION
Only the Beginning
The North Remembers
“It’s All Lies and Propaganda”
What This Moment Feels Like in Minnesota
Quote of the Day – February 23, 2026
The “Power, Peril and Importance” of What's Happening in Minnesota
Greg Ketter: A Valiant Minnesotan


THE EPSTEIN FILES
Something to Think About – February 28, 2026


THE FAILURES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party
Genny Harrison on Brian Tyler Cohen’s Interview with Obama: “A Careful Meditation That Comforts More Than It Challenges”
Adam Bates on the Team Blue / Kamala “I Told Ya So” Smugness Tour
Caitlin Johnstone on the “No Kings” Protests
Butch Ware and the Gatekeepers Within the Democratic Party
Butch Ware on Efforts by the Democratic Party to Block His Green Party Run for California Governor
Butch Ware on the Democrats’ “Lawfare” to Keep Greens Off the Ballot


THE GREEN PARTY
Dayvon Love: “You Actually Don’t Care Where Jill Stein Is”
“Green Wave 2026 is Global”
Butch Ware on the Hard Knock Radio Show
Butch Ware: “I’m Trying to Take Care of People”
Third Parties and the Historical Record
Hey, Liberals! We Need to Talk
How the Green Party Gained Power in the U.K.
Butch Ware on Why Third Parties Are Crucial


RESISTING THE RISE OF WHITE NATIONALISM IN THE U.S.
Rep. Justin J. Pearson: Quote of the Day – May 8, 2026
Rep. Justin Jones: Quote of the Day – May 7, 2026
Compelling Similarities


SIGNS OF HOPE
What Does It Really Take to Build a Rebellion?
For Rep. Ilhan Omar, Silence Is Never an Option
It Begins With Us
Derek Penwell’s Message to the Ones Who Are Scared
Marianne Williamson on Staying Grounded Amidst the Chaos
No Kings 3.0


See also:
Memes of the Times – February 11, 2026
Memes of the Times – November 23, 2025
Memes of the Times – September 21, 2025
Memes of the Times – July 27, 2024
Memes of the Times – May 21, 2020
Signs of the Times – April 25, 2017
At the Minnesota Capitol, Signs of the Times (May 16, 2011)


Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Compelling Similarities


Writes Qasim Rashid . . .

I cannot help but see the compelling similarities from these two pictures, exactly 70 years apart.

On the left, in 1956, a white male police officer fingerprints and arrests Rosa Parks for violating an anti-boycott law, blocking access to justice and equal access under the law.

On the right, in 2026, a white male police officer blocks Tennessee Representative Justin Pearson from accessing a committing meeting that guts the district he represents.

70 years later, fragile racist white male agents of the state with lethal force, hide behind a badge to deny racial justice. This is what we mean when we say the system isn't broken, it was built this way. And a system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect. Our country will not advance to a place of meaningful justice unless we dismantle these systems of injustice and replace them with systems of absolute justice.

History vindicated Rosa Parks. History will vindicate Justin Pearson. And that history begins now.

Qasim Rashid
via social media
May 12, 2026


Related Off-site Links:
Tennessee Passes New Congressional Map That Splits State's Only Majority-Black District – Hannah Demissie, Juhi Doshi, and Oren Oppenheim (ABC News, May 7, 2026).
Video Shows Tense Moment Between Rep. Pearson and State Troopers as Brother Detained at TN Capitol – Lydian Coombs (Action News 5, May 7, 2026).
“An Abomination:” TN House Expels Two Dems Over Gun Protest, Despite Removal Looking Temporary – Adam Friedman (Tennessee Lookout, April 3, 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Rep. Justin J. Pearson: Quote of the Day – May 8, 2026
Rep. Justin Jones: Quote of the Day – May 7, 2026
“We Are Still Here, and We Will Never Quit”


Photo of the Day


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Gifts of Abundance
Let the Greening Begin
New Spring Green
Green Destiny
Welcoming the Return of Spring
Celebrating the “Color of Spring” and a Cosmic Notion of the Christ
Spring: “Truly the Season for Joy and Hope”
Spring Awakens!
A Visiting Spring Breeze
May Vignettes
Spring Rain
Spring Skies
Spring . . . Within and Beyond (2022)
Spring . . . Within and Beyond (2021)
In the Footsteps of Spring: Introduction | Part I | II | III | IV | V

Image: Michael J. Bayly.


Monday, May 11, 2026

How the Green Party Gained Power in the U.K.

Earlier today Ash Sarkar, British journalist and Senior Editor at Novara Media, discussed with Briahna Joy Gray of the Bad Faith podcast the U.K. Green Party’s recent (and significant) electoral gains under the new leadership of Zack Polanski (pictured at right).

Notes Gray in introducing her interview with Sarkar:

After winning big, Polanski declared that Britain’s two party politics are “dead and buried,” and that Green vs [the far-right] Reform has replaced the old Labor vs Conservatives dynamic. What techniques might translate into lessons for the U.S. Green Party which hopes to displace Democrats in our two party system, and what obstacles are unique to the U.S.? Will Polanski succeed where Corbyn failed? How should the left handle bad faith attacks from establishment media?





Related Off-site Links:
“Two Party Politics Is Dead” in U.K. Says Green Party Leader After Labour Thrashed – Brad Reed (Common Dreams, May 8, 2026).
Green Party Wins Its First Mayor in London – Novara Media (May 8, 2026).
On-Air Meltdown: Green Surge Is Driving British Media Insane – David Doel (The Rational National, April 28, 2026).
Green Party Scores Upset Win in U.K. Election in Blow to Labour and Far-Right Reform Party – Brad Reed (Common Dreams, February 27, 2026).
Green Party Wins U.K. By-election in Blow to Labour and Prime Minister Starmer – David Broder (Al Jazeera, February 27, 2026).
Keir Starmer Richly Deserves This Defeat – David Broder (Jacobin, February 27, 2026).
Labour "Safe Seat" Taken by Greens' Hannah Spencer in Stunning Result That Brings Back HopeCouncil Estate Media (February 27, 2026).
Hannah Spencer: The Green MP Speaking to Everyday People’s Frustrations – Josh Halliday and Alexandra Topping (The Guardian, February 27, 2026).
From Plumber to Parliament: The Green Party’s New MP – Richard Wheeler and Joe Pike (BBC News, February 27, 2026).
Spencer’s Victory Speech an Object Lesson in Grace While Reform’s Man Rages – John Crace (The Guardian, February 27, 2026).
Celebrations, Selfies and Crowdsurfing: Greens Relish Seismic Night in British Politics – Hannah Al-Othman (The Guardian, February 27, 2026).
The Green Party Has Been Accused of Sectarianism. This Is Why That’s Wrong – Imran Mulla (Middle East Eye, February 27, 2026).
What Does the Greens’ Victory in Gorton and Denton Mean for the Future of British Politics? – Polly Toynbee, Adam Ramsay, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Diane Abbott, Henry Hill and John McTernan (The Guardian, February 27, 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

ZACK POLANSKI AND THE GREEN PARTY OF THE U.K.
“Green Wave 2026 is Global”
The Rational National’s Take on U.K. Green Party’s “Brilliant” New Ad
Zack Polanski’s Christmas Message
Zack Polanski’s Message of Hope
“The Answer, Actually, Is Hope”


GREEN PARTY OF THE U.S.A.
Meet Some of the “People-Powered” Green Party Candidates for 2026
Jill Stein on the Importance of the Green Party
Dayvon Love: “You Actually Don’t Care Where Jill Stein Is”
An Opportunity for Organizing Against Duopoly
“It Is Our Responsibility to Make a Third Party Viable”
Something to Think About – December 8, 2024
The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
“We Give Reasons for People to Come Out and Vote”
We’re Witnessing a Liberal Meltdown Over Jill Stein
The “Green Smoothie” Option
Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
Butch Ware: “I’m Not Here as a Spoiler”
Jill Stein: “Americans Deserve Choices”
Elise Labott on How Third Parties Can Revitalize Democracy
Something to Think About – August 15, 2024
Howie Hawkins: “The Democrats Are Not the Answer to the Trump/Fascism Problem”
Demolishing the False Narrative About Jill Stein and the 2016 Election
Cornel West: “The Next Step Is a Green Step, a Progressive Step”
Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein: Is a “Historic Collaboration” in the Making? (2016)
Voting Green: Hope Over Fear


Chris Hedges: “The Genocide in Gaza Is the Beginning. Welcome to the New World Order”


Following (with added links) is the transcript of a speech delivered this past March by award-winning journalist Chris Hedges.

In his speech, Hedges makes a compelling case for understanding the Israeli government's genocide in Gaza as being the beginning of a new world order where international law has collapsed, Western moral authority is finished, and the same forces destroying Palestinians abroad are dismantling democracy at home – in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and other Western countries.

This reality, says Hedges, leaves us with only two choices: obstruct or surrender.

________________

The genocide in Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs. We watch this madness daily with the war on Iran, the saturation bombing of southern Lebanon and the suffering in Gaza.

International bodies such as the United Nations have been neutered, transformed into useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most psychopathic rulers of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance, opening up a vast moral abyss.

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges – who will soon be purged – domestically and in international bodies such as the International Court of Justice is contemptuously violated. Savagery abroad. Savagery at home.

The BBC’s Lucy Williamson reports that Israel is destroying south Lebanon “using Gaza as a model – a blueprint for destruction used again as a path to peace.”

Over 1 million people have already been displaced in Lebanon – one-fifth of the entire population of a country that already hosts the world’s highest number of refugees per capita – in just a few weeks. Add to this 2 million displaced in Gaza and 3 million displaced in Iran. 6 million people rendered homeless.

For four decades Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for the U.S. to go to war with Iran. Previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, have refused, in no small part because of fierce opposition within the Pentagon, which did not view Iran as an existential threat and did not project a positive outcome for the U.S. or its regional allies.

But Donald Trump, encouraged by his inept negotiating team of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner Steve Witkoff, each fervent Zionists, took Israel’s bait. Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who attended the final talks between the U.S. and Iran, dismissed Kushner and Witkoff as “Israeli assets.”

Joseph Kent, who resigned from his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center to protest the war, wrote in his resignation letter that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The public rationale for the war on Iran since it began on February 28 has been protean. Is it to shut down Iran’s nuclear program? Is it to thwart Iran’s ballistic missile program? Is it because the U.S. carried out pre-emptive attacks on Iran, as Marco Rubio said, to ensure the safety of U.S. assets once Israel decided to strike? Is it because the Iranian government carried out lethal repression, killing hundreds of anti-government protestors during massive street protests? Is it regime change? Is it an attempt to shut down Iran’s so-called state sponsored terrorism? Or are these subterfuges for something else?

Certainly, Israel and the U.S. seek regime change. But here it appears the U.S. and Israel diverge. Israel also apparently seeks, as in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Lebanon, the physical disintegration of Iran, the breaking apart of the country into warring ethnic and religious enclaves, the transformation of Iran into a failed state.

Persians in Iran constitute roughly 61 percent of the population with various minority groups, who often suffer state repression, making up the remaining 39 percent. These ethnic groups include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Lurs, Balochs, Arabs and Turkmens, along with religious minorities such as Sunnis, Christians, Baha’i, Zoroastrians, and Jews. The shattering of Iran into antagonistic ethnic and religious enclaves would leave Israel as the dominant power in the region, giving it the ability to, if not occupy its neighbors directly, control and subjugate them through proxies, part of a long-held desire for a Greater Israel. It would also make it possible for foreign states to control Iranian gas reserves, the second largest in the world, and its oil reserves, 12 percent of the global total.

Israel’s crusade against the Palestinians, the Lebanese and now the Iranians is justified by the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. But it is not lost on the Global South, especially Palestinians, that nearly all Holocaust scholars have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter.

Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature and the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of its crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate the present.

Any tepid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive property of Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles deleted an Instagram post that read: “NEVER AGAIN CAN’T ONLY MEAN NEVER AGAIN FOR JEWS” after a backlash. In the hands of Zionists, “never again” means precisely that, never again, only for Jews.

Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the nègres d’Afrique.”

The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 – then British prime minister Winston Churchill referred to Hindus as “a beastly people with a beastly religion” – along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrates something fundamental about “Western civilization.”

Genocide is not an anomaly, it is coded in the DNA of Western “civilization.”

“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modelled them on laws designed to disenfranchise Blacks. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos – although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories — was emulated by the German fascists who stripped citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, were the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans. American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry – the so-called “one drop rule” – as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.

The millions of indigenous victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They too suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their Western perpetrators.

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state our Christian fascists and the far-right dream of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by the far right because it has turned its back on humanitarian law and uses indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants.

It was this distortion of the Holocaust as unique that troubled Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and who wrote Survival in Auschwitz. Levi was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as “an inexhaustible source of evil” that “is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

Levi deplored the Manichaeanism of those who “shun nuance and complexity.” He condemned those who “reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duels, us and them.” He warned that the “network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: It could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors.” The enemy, he knew, “was outside but also inside.”

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” ruled the in the Łódź ghetto on Poland on behalf of the Nazi occupiers. The ghetto became a slave labor camp that enriched Rumkowski and his Nazi masters. Rumkowski deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience. He embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming.

“[W]e are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved. “His fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.”

“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility,” Levi continued. “Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”

Levi understood that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin. We can all become willing executioners. There is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust. Levi, for this reason, was persona non grata in Israel.

Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war, when Israel seized Gaza the West Bank including East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Israel, as American sociologist Nathan Glazer approvingly observed, became “the religion of the American Jews.” The Holocaust became their “moral capital.”

“Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always to be proclaimed,” writes the European historian Charles S. Maier, in The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity:

It is intensely private, not to be diluted, but simultaneously public so that gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be enshrined in public sites: Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation sites, dedicated not as Jewish but civic memorials. But what is the role of a museum in a country, such as the United States, far from the site of the Holocaust? Is it to rally the people who suffered or to instruct non-Jews? Is it supposed to serve as a reminder that “it can happen here?” Or is it a statement that some special consideration is deserved? Under what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as a public grief? And if genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other particular sorrows too? An American historian of Polish ancestry argues that, with the German invasion of 1939, the Poles became the first people in Europe to experience the Holocaust and that historians have so far “chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivistic terms – namely as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora.”


If Polish Americans claim their own “forgotten Holocaust,” what recognition should they enjoy? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to Seventh-Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third Reich?

Unique suffering confers unique entitlement.

Any crime Israel carries out in the name of its survival – its “right to exist” – is justified in the name of this uniqueness. There are no limits. The world is black and white, a never-ending battle against Nazism, which is protean, depending on who Israel targets. To challenge this bloodlust is to be an antisemite, facilitating another genocide of Jews.

This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel, but also the interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides, ones they also seek to obscure.

The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro quo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, blocking U.N. resolutions and sanctions that would condemn its crimes and demonizing Palestinians, and their supporters becomes proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel, in return, absolves the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and Germany for perpetrating it. Germany uses this unholy alliance to separate Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide German colonists carried out against the Nama and Herero in German South-West Africa, now Namibia.

“[S]uch magic,” Israeli historian and genocide scholar, Raz Segal, writes, “legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust.”

Professor Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article about the war on Gaza on October 13, 2023, titled: “A Textbook Case of Genocide.”

This denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar, whose family members perished in the Holocaust, was a very lonely stance.

Professor Segal saw in the Israeli government’s immediate demand that Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza and the blood-curdling demonization of the Palestinians by Israeli officials – the defense minister said Israel was “fighting human animals” – the stench of genocide.

“The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that – as we teach our students – there are red flags, that once we notice them, we’re supposed to work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide,” Professor Segal told me, “even if it’s not genocidal yet.”

Professor Segal paid for his honesty. The offer to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which has issued no condemnation of the genocide, was revoked.

When professor Segal and I testified at the state capital in Trenton in opposition to the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) bill, which equates criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism, we were jeered by Zionists and our microphones were cut by the committee chairman. There we were, arguing that this bill would curtail free speech while we were in real time being denied free speech.

Genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations, as it carries out genocide, has effectively imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West can no longer lecture anyone about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization. The ruse, that somehow we as a nation promote democracy, equality and human rights, is finished.

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century – just as the First World War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes.

None of us who reported from Israel and Palestine, where I worked as a reporter for seven years, predicted this genocide. And yet, we were acutely aware of the genocidal impulse that lay at the heart of the Zionist project – the desire by large segments of Israeli society to eradicate and expel all Palestinians. This genocidal impulse was there from the inception of Zionism.

Victor Klemperer, a professor of linguistics and the son of a Berlin rabbi living under Nazi rule, noted in his diary, “To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus), are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient ‘cultural roots,’ their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists.”

I covered the extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane, who claimed that violence was a Jewish virtue and revenge, a divine commandment. He was, when I was based in Israel, barred by the Israeli government from running for office.

Kahane was assassinated on November 5, 1990, in New York City. His Kach Party in Israel was outlawed four years later after Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born doctor and Kach member, entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on worshippers, killing 29 Palestinians. Goldstein, dressed in his army captain’s uniform, was overpowered by worshippers and beaten to death. I was sent by my editors in New York to interview the survivors. When they received the copy, they insisted I do more interviews with Jewish colonists who justified Goldstein’s grievances with Palestinians, part of the game of balance, but really part of the effort to obscure the truth.

Kach, following its statements of support for the massacre, was declared a terrorist organization by the United States.

But Kahanism did not die. It was nurtured by Jewish extremists and colonists.

Kach’s racial intolerance and calls for mass violence against Palestinians infected larger and larger segments of Israeli society. It found near universal acceptance after the attacks of October 7.

I saw this intolerance at political rallies held by Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from right-wing Americans associated with AIPAC, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted Kahane-inspired slogans such as “Death to Arabs” and “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic on November 4, 1995.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing these Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, who hung a portrait of Goldstein on the wall of his living room, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett.

Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, who worked as an assistant to the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was referred to by Benito Mussolini as “a good fascist,” was a leader in the Herut Party that called on Israel to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a party “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a virulent strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us and the Palestinians, these fascistic strains are ascendant.

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazis’ blood-and-soil ideology. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Amalekites who were massacred by the Israelites. Europeans and Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify their genocide against Native Americans.

Enemies – usually Muslims – who are slated for extinction are subhumans who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.

Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of three of the most sacred sites for Muslims, supposedly built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple which was destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Roman army, to be demolished. These extremists call for it to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which zealots refer to as “Judea and Samaria,” is being annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by religious laws imposed by the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will soon mirror the despotic theocracy in Iran.

James Baldwin presciently saw this regression to our innate barbarism. He warned that there was a “terrible probability” that “Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.”

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Erich Fromm writes in The Sane Society.

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Iran. We watch it in Lebanon. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media. The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza.

Those who name and denounce this evil, including the heroic students who set up encampments on campuses here and abroad, are smeared, blacklisted and purged. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. We know where this ends. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, speak out against the crime of genocide, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as Trump’s Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

Chris Hedges
March 2026


Related Off-site Links:
Gaza Faces Public Health Collapse Amid Rat Infestation and Disease as Israel Blocks ReconstructionDemocracy Now! (May 7, 2026).
“Scorched-Earth Campaign”: Israel Uses “Gaza Playbook” to Turn Southern Lebanon into RubbleDemocracy Now! (April 15, 2026).
“A Campaign of Genocide”: Noura Erakat Speaks to Ta-Nehisi Coates About Israel’s War on GazaDemocracy Now! (November 11, 2024).

UPDATES: Nakba Day: Muhammad Shehada on Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza and Ongoing Palestinian ResilienceDemocracy Now! (May 15, 2026).
“Designed to Break You”: Gaza Flotilla Activists Faced Violence, Sexual Abuse in Israeli DetentionDemocracy Now! (May 26, 2026).
“Free Palestine!”: 200 Stanford Grads Walk Out on Google CEO’s Keynote Speech – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, June 15, 2026).
British Appeals Court Upholds Government Ban on Palestine Action Under Terrorism ActDemocracy Now! (June 16, 2026).
Israeli Attacks on Gaza Have Killed Over 1,000 Palestinians Since October “Ceasefire”Democracy Now! (June 18, 2026).
Fatalities From Israel’s Vast Gaza Genocide Deliberately Undercounted – Ralph Nader (Common Dreams, June 20, 2026).
Two More Israeli Soldiers Kill Themselves Amid Crisis Driven by Horrors of Genocide – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, July 29, 2026).
Gaza Holds Mass Funeral for 112 Palestinians Slaughtered by Israel in 2023 – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, August 4, 2026).
What Kind of Ceasefire Is This? UNICEF Says 300 Children Killed in Gaza Over 300 Days – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, August 6, 2026).
Scholar Who Accused Israel of Genocide Wins $250K Settlement from University of MinnesotaDemocracy Now! (August 7, 2026).
Genocide Deniers Call Gaza Starvation a “Hoax” by Citing UNICEF – Which Reported Famine – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, August 7, 2026).


See also the following chronologically-ordered Wild Reed posts:
October 7, 2023: “Nothing About Today Is ‘Unprovoked’”
Phyllis Bennis: “If We Are Serious About Ending This Spiraling Violence, We Need to Look at Root Causes”
In the Midst of the “Great Unraveling,” a Visit to the Prayer Tree
Eric Levitz: Quote of the Day – October 11, 2023
Something to Think About – October 12, 2023
Prayer of the Week – October 16, 2023
Voices of Reason and Compassion on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza
More Voices of Reason and Compassion on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Quote of the Day – November 2, 2023
Jehad Abusalim: Quote of the Day – December 8, 2023
Christmas 2023 – Reflections, Activism, Art, and Celebrations
Sabrina Salvati: Quote of the Day – January 2, 2024
Michael Fakhri: Quote of the Day – February 27, 2024
Phyllis Bennis: Quote of the Day – March 28, 2024
Josh Paul: Quote of the Day – March 28, 2024
“A Genocide Has Been Normalized”
“This Is a Genocidal Project”
Outrage and Despair
Naomi Klein’s Powerful Words on Israel’s and the West’s Ongoing Gaza Genocide
Judith Butler on the Ongoing Student Protests Against the Gaza Genocide
Kyle Kulinski: Quote of the Day – May 23, 2024
Something to Think About – June 28, 2024
Nina Turner: Quote of the Day – July 24, 2024
Phyllis Bennis: “We Can Never Give Up Hope”
John Cusack: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2024
Progressive Perspectives on the Presidential Nomination of Kamala Harris
Breaking Down Kamala Harris’s DNC Speech on Gaza
Yousef Munayyer: Quote of the Day – August 30, 2024
“It’s a Systematic Slaughter That We’re Funding”
Protesting Weapons Manufacturer and Genocide Enabler General Dynamics
Something to Think About – September 26, 2024
“A Year of War Against Children”
Anti-Genocide Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Reflects on the First Anniversary of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
Liam Cosgrove Confronts U.S. State Department Spin Doctor Matthew Miller: “People Are Sick of the Bullshit”
“This Is a Tragic, Heartbreaking Moment in the History of Humanity”
Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’ Faltering Presidential Campaign
Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in the 2024 Presidential Election
Hope and Courage – Christmas 2024
Chris Hedges: “Israel Has No Intention of Halting Its Merry-Go-Round of Death”
The Lamentable Legacy of the Biden Administration
Caitlin Johnstone: Quote of the Day – January 22, 2025
Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – January 30, 2025
The Only Difference
Progressive Perspectives on Cory Booker’s Marathon Speech
Silence on Gaza Genocide Is “More Than a Mere Moral Abdication; It Is Lethal”
The Theft of One’s Soul: Omar El Akkad on the “Lesser of Two Evils” Argument
How Genocide Becomes Ordinary
Thomas Friedman: Quote of the Day – May 27, 2025
“A Holocaust, Live-streamed”
Why What’s Happening in Palestine – and Our Response to It – Is So Important
“Life Comes First”: An Interview with Thiago Ávila
Truth-telling in the Face of Systemic Power That Is Silent on Genocide
Caitlin Johnstone: Quote of the Day – July 23, 2025
U.S. Labor Leader Chris Smalls Joins the Crew of the Handala
Israel’s Actions in Gaza: “A Clear and Present Moral Collapse”
Protesting Israel’s “Starvation Campaign” in Gaza
Chris Smalls: Quote of the Day – August 5, 2025
Anas al-Sharif, 1996-2025
A Call to Divest from Israel
Idrees Ahmad: Quote of the Day – August 25, 2025
Michael Sala: Quote of the Day – August 29, 2025
A Poem That Remains Painfully Relevant
Memes of the Times
An “Illusion of Action”
Two Years of “Indescribable Horror”
No Justice, No Peace
Progressive Perspectives on Hillary Clinton’s Comments on Pro-Palestine “Propaganda” and TikTok
Phil Rockstroh: Quote of the Day – December 14, 2025
Qasim Rashid: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2025
“It Is Up to Us”
The Architecture of Settler Colonialism
Kym Staton: Quote of the Day – March 3, 2026
Omid Safi: Quote of the Day – March 7, 2026
Do Nation States Have the “Right” to Exist?


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
“The Mistreatment and Discrimination Against Palestinians Is Not Unprecedented. It’s Baked Into the Foundation of the Political System in Israel”
“Essential Viewing for All Who Care to Understand the Plight of the People of Palestine”
Progressive Perspectives on the Ongoing Israeli-Palestinian “Nightmare” (2021)
Something to Think About – July 29, 2018
Noura Erakat: Quote of the Day – May 15, 2018
For Some Jews, Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians is Yet Another Jewish Tragedy
Remembering the Six-Day War and Its Ongoing Aftermath
David Norris: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2014


Sunday, May 10, 2026

Butch Ware on the Democrats’ “Lawfare” to Keep Greens Off the Ballot

Earlier today Butch Ware, Green Party candidate for California Governor, was a guest on the Due Dissidence podcast.

In this 15-minute interview, Butch talks about his removal from the ballot in March by the Democratic establishment in California, and this establishment’s ongoing campaign to keep him off the ballot for the November election.

“[Democrats] spend more in [suing] to keep Greens off of the ballot than Greens usually spend to run,” Butch says. He calls such efforts on the part of the Democratic establishment, “lawfare.”






NEXT: Butch Ware on Why
Third Parties Are Crucial


Related Off-site Links:
The Green Party’s Butch Ware: “I Love a Good Fight” – Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs, April 22, 2026).
Butch Ware: The Green CandidateThe Latino Newsletter (April 6, 2026).
Democrats Panic Over Green Party Candidate: An Interview with Dr. Butch WareBad Faith (March 30, 2026).
Judge Rejects Green Party Candidate Butch Ware’s Bid to Appear on California Governor Ballots – Yue Stella Yu (CalMatters.org, March 26, 2026).
Green Party Candidate for California Governor Butch Ware Kicked Off the BallotThe Spiritual and Political Podcast (March 27, 2026).
Inside Butch Ware’s Vision for California: Healthcare, Housing, and a Political Shake-Up – Matthew Levitt (Fathom, March 2026).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

BUTCH WARE
Introducing California’s Gubernatorial Candidate Butch Ware
Butch Ware on Efforts by the Democratic Party to Block His Green Party Run for California Governor
Hey, Liberals! We Need to Talk
Butch Ware: “I’m Trying to Take Care of People”
“People Really Want New Options in Politics”
Butch Ware on “Red & Blue vs Green Politics”
“We Have the Power to Stop the Flow of Money and the False Legitimacy Upon Which Empire Depends”
Butch Ware on the Hard Knock Radio Show
Butch Ware and the Gatekeepers Within the Democratic Party
Photo of the Day – March 3, 2026
Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – November 26, 2025
Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – June 5, 2025
Butch Ware on His Run for California Governor and the Wider Goal of Disrupting the Duopoly
“The Moment Is Ripe”: Butch Ware on Building a “True Oppositional Alternative” to the Duopoly
Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – January 30, 2025
The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
“This Is a Tragic, Heartbreaking Moment in the History of Humanity”: Butch Ware on the Gaza Genocide
Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis (2024)
Butch Ware: “You Can Actually Vote Your Conscience”


GREEN PARTY
“Green Wave 2026 is Global”
Meet Some of the “People-Powered” Green Party Candidates for 2026
An Opportunity for Organizing Against Duopoly
“It Is Our Responsibility to Make a Third Party Viable”
Something to Think About – December 8, 2024
The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
“We Give Reasons for People to Come Out and Vote”
We’re Witnessing a Liberal Meltdown Over Jill Stein
The “Green Smoothie” Option
Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
Butch Ware: “I’m Not Here as a Spoiler”
Jill Stein: “Americans Deserve Choices”
Elise Labott on How Third Parties Can Revitalize Democracy
Third Parties and the Historical Record
Something to Think About – August 15, 2024
Howie Hawkins: “The Democrats Are Not the Answer to the Trump/Fascism Problem”
Demolishing the False Narrative About Jill Stein and the 2016 Election
Cornel West: “The Next Step Is a Green Step, a Progressive Step”
Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein: Is a “Historic Collaboration” in the Making? (2016)
Voting Green: Hope Over Fear


THE FAILURES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Authoritarianism With a Blue Sticker
The Time for Illusions Is Over: Henry Giroux on the Democratic Party
David Norton: “The Democratic Party Serves Capital, Not You”
Mike Figueredo: “Elected Democrats Have No Real Interest in Doing What the Base Wants”
Tony Pentimalli on the Fallacy of the “Safe Political Center”
Genny Harrison on Brian Tyler Cohen’s Interview with Obama
Progressives and Obama
Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’s Book, 107 Days
Adam Bates on the Team Blue / Kamala “I Told Ya So” Smugness Tour
The Lamentable Legacy of the Biden/Harris Administration
Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in 2024
Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
David Sirota: Quote of the Day – January 26, 2021
Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win”
Nick Cruse: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is the Privileged Position”
Centrist/Corporatist Democrats Have Just Launched “Left Punching” Season