Dear Beloved,
I write to you from a cloud of dust, propelled by torrential winds.
Like a typical Midwesterner, I went to my porch to inspect the weather. The Great Plains’ endless horizon was obscured by dust, and for the first time, I saw a small piece of what the Dust Bowl must have been like. It’s settled a bit now, but dust still itches in my throat.
Further east of where I am, there was a wildfire that has thankfully been contained, but a nursing home was lost. There is an air advisory warning for dust and smoke in southeast Kansas. I wish that was all there was for our neighbors in Oklahoma, where a state of emergency was announced after over 130 reported wildfires across 44 counties.
This is after just one week of unseasonably high temperatures stretching into the early 80s and, just a few weeks prior, two back-to-back snowstorms. These images from Oklahoma are harrowing reflections of the January Los Angeles fires.
We are in a climate crisis, and the ruling class wants us to carry on with our jobs and shopping. Our governments are actively choosing billionaires over sustainable life on our planet. Said billionaires are building private luxury bunkers or racing each other to ditch us and hide away in space. Meanwhile, they hoard our land, medicines, housing, seeds, and water.
“Our speech, water, land, housing and healthcare are controlled by a billionaire class who is hell bent on annihilating the people in Palestine and who also controls the political machinery in the US to prevent us from having the things we need that are necessary for human thriving,” wrote
in As the World Burns: The Concrete Class Connections from California to Gaza.To maintain their control, the ruling class pumps money into our media to gaslight, advertise, and propagandize. They have convinced populations of working bodies - primarily those assimilated into white supremacy culture - that they are merely temporarily embarrassed millionaires and they, too, will be exempt from climate collapse because their “whiteness” makes them superior to nature and people.
“The delusions they [white people] tell themselves that they are somehow so separate from the natural world, that they can destroy the world, each other, and us and - still survive,” Mai’a Williams wrote in her book This Is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in The 21st Century. “They have, decade after decade, century after century, become so morally and rationally weak that they have convinced themselves that two minus two equals infinity, not zero. That greed is good. That the earth is flat. That the heart doesn’t break at death. That love is slave work, roses, and complacency. That heaven is what we gain once they make hell on earth. These are not people we can rely on to save us from themselves. They are still burning the earth away.”
Meanwhile, the ruling class hoards our water, seeds, land, medicines, and housing, and they hoard working bodies to enforce their “law and order.” Now they are escalating their violence because the ruling class knows that its days are numbered and its control more fragile than ever.
The twin disasters of the Covid-19 pandemic and increasing climate are an awakening. They have removed the mask and left oligarchal tyranny naked to the public eye. Now we are witness to the acceleration of fascist policy and the rollback of progress: Increased ICE raids, the regime’s mockery and intimidation through social media, escalation of the US prison industrial complex, attacks on remote work, public market AI models used to doxx resisters and create target lists, demonization of educators and students, and pointed targeting of mutual aid groups and grassroots organizers.
Our oppressions are intertwined, and we must collectively unbraid them to unravel a better future.
“And here, in this country, it seems absurd that we should knuckle to a leadership of lies, treachery, misbegotten self-righteousness, wanton butchery committed in our name, our national self-interest, and a brutal, stupid willingness to define issues, first and finally, in terms of money - not human life, but money. This seems to me an implicitly untenable state of affairs.”
- June Jordan, Notes of a Barnard Dropout (1975)
A week ago, on Saturday, March 8, 2025, student activist, negotiator, and Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped by plains-clothed ICE agents by order of the State Department.
Mahmoud is no stranger to displacement: His parents are from the ancient Palestinian city Tiberias, made refugees by the occupier. They fled to Syria where in a Damascus refugee camp, Mahmoud was born. His family was displaced again in 2012 when the Arab Spring came to Syria and the Assadi regime escalated its tyranny, pushing the Khalil family to Lebanon. This made Mahmoud a “double refugee, ” as he described himself.
“So that's his [Mahmoud’s] life experience. He has been the oppressed person. He believes that, as an oppressed person, he doesn't only have a duty to liberate himself from the oppressor, but also to liberate the oppressors from their hatred and tyranny,” Noor Abadalla, Mahmoud’s wife, said in an interview. “I think that's something he firmly believes in because of his personal experiences, but also because he knows right from wrong.”
While in Lebanon, Mahmoud studied computer science at the University of Beirut and taught himself English while working with Syrian refugees. He worked hard and came to the US to attend grad school at Columbia University. He and Noor got married, and they are now expecting their first child. In 2024, Mahmoud got his green card and completed his master’s program.
Then he was kidnapped by the state and trafficked to a Louisiana detention center.
Let’s be clear: Mahmoud committed no crime. He is a permanent resident. The ICE agents did not even have a warrant. Because he is Palestinian organizing for the liberation of his people, the regime targeted Mahmoud - and Columbia University helped. In fact, the professor linked to Mahmoud’s kidnapping - Keren Yarhi-Milo - is a former Israeli intelligence agent.
And Mahmoud is not the last.
Just a week after Mahmoud’s kidnapping, another Palestinian student at Columbia who was involved with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment was kidnapped by the US Gestapo (ICE). Leqaa Kordia was taken from New Jersey and is now detained at a Texas detention center. While ICE agents said it was because her visa was expired, the regime’s Secretary of Homeland “Security” Kristi Noem - who by the way, has been banned by multiple Lakota tribes’ lands when she was governor of South Dakota for her racism - made the following statement that underlines the real reasoning: “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.”
On Sunday, March 16, the regime’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the regime’s double standards and racism, “We don’t want terrorists in America.”
This news comes out in the same week that Rubio retweeted his new best friend and Trumpist regime enablist, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele’s post - a chilling video of deported migrants arriving from the United States where they will be incarcerated in one of the world’s worst prison systems. It is publicized human trafficking. The deportation - or rather, shipment - is in direct opposition to a judge’s ruling.
Already the Trump regime is defying court orders to uphold the US empire’s agenda of dehumanization. While Trump has not yet outright responded, the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt brushes it off. “It was approximately $6 million, to El Salvador, for the detention of these foreign terrorists. And I would point out that is pennies on the dollar in comparison to the cost of life, and the cost it would impose on the American taxpayer to house these terrorists in maximum security prisons here in the United States of America."
It’s not a coincidence that these high-profile detainments happened right before the Zionist occupier resumed its genocide in Palestine on Monday, March 17. It’s a threat from the regime to us: Those who oppose will be labeled terrorists and criminals. Those who oppose the fascist regime will be kidnapped from their homes. Those who oppose the empire will disappear.
Again, Beloved: Our oppressions are intertwined, and we must collectively unbraid them to unravel a better future.
We knew this was coming. The Biden administration laid the foundation for much of this, and the Trump administration picked up the baton to America’s imperial legacy. This is an expected apocalypse.
But there is a beginning after ending. I dare you, Beloved, to imagine the possibilities after this ending.
“To be honest, I expect apocalypse, or I look for and work for the defeat of international evil, indifference, and suffering, only when I am not otherwise stunned by the odds, temporarily paralyzed by revulsion and grieving despair.”
- June Jordan, Notes of a Barnard Dropout (1975)
The ending is near, Beloved. Empire’s tightening chains are evidence enough of that. The cruelty is the point. There is a reason why our oppressors seek to divide us. As shown just 10 years ago during the Arab Spring, liberation is contagious. It began in Tunisia and spread like pollen to her sisters, and authoritarian figures fell one after another. Regimes everywhere are crumbling before our eyes.
This ending is long overdue. Generations before us fought this old beast to give us a better fighting chance and if we do this well, our descendants will inherit a better world than the one given to us. If we do this well, if we hold on to one another and collectively rise to meet these challenges, our children’s children will have the opportunity to build the world of our dreams.
This is an expected apocalypse, and empire must be pulled from the earth - our lives - by the very root so our descendants have a chance at life.
Liberation is within our reach.
Seeds for Change
How to create a mutual aid network by Mary Zerkel
Watch this video essay about anarchist calisthenics by grassroots organizer, writer, and Black anarchist
From Despair to Revolution: The Bronx’s Path to Defeating Addiction
The Struggle for Food Sovereignty: Liberating the Land + Ourselves
Global Landless Speakout - Saturday, March 29, 6 AM PST
The International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS) Commission 6 will host the Global Landless Speakout that brings together movements and organizations from Asia, Latin America, and Africa to highlight the pressing peasant struggles and campaigns currently unfolding in these regions. These movements will share their on-the-ground experiences, detailing the challenges faced by peasants and rural communities as they confront issues such as land dispossession, economic inequality, and environmental destruction. These powerful testimonies will shed light on the collective action of rural populations fighting for justice and self-determination.Collective Bargaining & Strikes Under Fascism: Lessons from the Labor Movement in Turkey - Sunday, March 23, 10 AM - 12 PM PST
Join NYC-based labor organizers to hear from workers and independent unions as well as members of parliament from the Labor Party & Workers Party of Turkey on how workers are organizing under repressive conditions in Turkey, while the president of Birtek-sen, which organizes textile, weaving and leather worker unions, remains under arrest since a collective bargaining & strike wave push in February.The Art of Protest - Wednesday, March 26, 12:30 - 2 PM PST
Hosted by the Minority Veterans of America with Community Building Artworks and facilitated by Army veteran and writer Kevin Basl, The Art of Protest is a virtual workshop that will dive into our rich history of protest art and veterans as artivists. Participants will explore what makes artwork an act of protest and how art functions within people’s movements as a tool for promoting personal and societal change.Interrupting Criminalization’s Self-Directed Abolitionist Curriculum
🌱 Questions? Email aleksanderaleksander@substack.com
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🌱 Have any seeds for change or opportunities to root ourselves in community? Share them in the comments below!
