Caitlin Murphy

This piece addresses the reactionary threads and narratives of blame, spoken and unspoken, that exploded in the direct wake of the CK assassination. It argues that the marginalized parties that fascists dishonestly blame (for a wide variety of social effects) can find solidarity with one another’s struggles through a critical examination of the rhetorical moves this blame employs. 

In the wake of the events of September 10, much has been said about the identities of the two people directly involved. Here I want to situate the event and its consequences in a broader political discourse, based on threads of narratives and events that seem to be revitalized in the week now since the event. On the one hand, the narrative of blame which is explicitly formulated has had an extremely gendered component. As Judith Butler (a queer Jewish scholar of gender who is themself presently under attack from the administration) points out, gender is an overdetermined site, which many social anxieties both cluster around and find articulation through. The language of gender is used, hegemonically, to voice anxiety, and people pushing on the boundaries of normative gender are used as screens upon which to project this anxiety. We can certainly see how many existential anxieties have attached to trans people, which fascists “justify” by invoking the “deviance” of transness: anxieties about things like social order, demographic futurity, normative sexuality, the multivalenced term “safety”, children & their development, the body and its permeability… indeed we have seen many of these anxieties intersecting and amplifying one another in transantagonistic narratives. 

Even if we abstract away the question of the perpetrator, the assassination itself represents a severe rupture in hierarchy, and in the ordering of who is supposed to be safe and why. Any violence Kirk incited was meant to play out on other bodies, other flesh. (Indeed, the outsized reaction seems to attest to how unthinkable his death was as a young white conservative man beloved by the regime.) Again regardless of the perpetrator, the intensity and spectacle of the event has offered an opportunity for power to consolidate itself around the production of an enemy who bears responsibility. This narrative production has been able to ground itself in both liberal elegies and in a reactionary constellation of ‘trans’ and ‘antifascist’. To this point, as of writing this, the terms have been fully elided into Project 2025’s recently released info sheet on “trantifa”. These have been the two threads of explicitly formulated narrative formation: 1) the posthumous praise and laundering of Kirk’s figure and 2) the triangulation and amplification of a political enemy. Maga accomplishes this latter move by reaping the already-sown seeds of anxieties projected onto and through gender, and by having rhetorically associated trans people with threat through many vectors.

At the same time that there is this narrative above the surface, I want to also suggest that there is a parallel narrative of blame. This parallel narrative is, as yet, running beneath the level of formulation– it is not explicitly spoken– and we instead have seen it play out in direct political actions that have as their basis racialized violence. I am thinking here about the bomb threats that targeted HBCUs immediately following the shooting, despite there being– and remaining– no connection of any suspects to HBCUs. I am thinking of the opinion writer who was fired for merely being a Black woman and quoting Kirk’s own words on Black women. I am thinking about the 18 year old Texas college student who was arrested and expelled, images of her arrest and mugshot rapidly populating the internet. I am also thinking of the early reports of mysterious hangings of black and homeless men in Mississippi, from the week following the shooting. Each of these stories, of course, become spectacles in themselves of racialized violence for the American appetite. Of course we know that the founding gesture of the formation of the United States is a program of racialized violence called genocide; we know, too, that the foundation of all the capital accumulated here is the brutality of slavery. Racialized violence is our national unaddressed symptom, recurring and recurring because we have not made real conditions to heal it.

What I want to suggest with this piece is that there is an (at least) double motion of gendered and racialized blame and reaction happening in the wake of September 10. I want to argue that this multiple articulation displays the intimate solidarity between all groups scapegoated and targeted, explicitly or implicitly, as threats to (white supremacist) order. This “threat to order” is both the basis of our targeting, and the potential strength of our solidarity. The specificities of the order that is being enforced are written over and over in this country’s history, and we continue to see its living edicts today in the racialized and gendered violence that unfolds in front of us – in the media, in hateful chats, in bomb threats to HBCUs, on the streets in traffic stops, at the detention center just down at the port. In light of that I want to invite us to think together about the question of how to frame and use this moment, and any coming moments like it, for the necessary project of solidarity. How can we build new relationships in principled rejection of what Kirk stood and advocated for, in principled rejection of the logics of gendered and racialized violence that his assassination has been recruited to justify, in principled rejection of the nationalism coalescing around his figure? This seems to be the task before us, and it is imperative we do not imitate the Democrats’ cowardly collapse into silence or forced honor for this man who wanted so many of us dead, and who is now, instead, himself dead. 

By Sean Arent

This August marks 80 years since the United States detonated two atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 

This gets a lot of attention in history books and the media, as it marks the end of World War II and the United States’ ascendance to nuclear superpower status.

But a little-known fact, not featured in textbooks and media, is the sheer number of unnamed, unacknowledged people who suffered the consequences of the Atomic Age.

One example: 70,000 Koreans were victims of the bombings. After the Japanese Empire colonized Korea, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to work in mines and factories in places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki during wartime. Estimates state that about 30,000 Koreans in those cities survived the initial blast.

The U.S. government has never offered acknowledgment, apology or recompense. Survivors and their descendants continue to press the U.S. and Japan for justice and recognition.

I recently visited Hapcheon, South Korea, to attend events commemorating these victims. Because of the many bomb survivors and descendants living there, Hapcheon is called the “Hiroshima of Korea.”

While the bombings happened long ago, the residents of Hapcheon continue to live with the fallout. Exposure to acute radiation breaks apart strands of human DNA, literally shredding the building blocks of life. Atomic bomb survivors, and as many believe, their children are many times more likely to develop cancers, specifically thyroid cancer and leukemia, than the general population.

I first learned of the plight of the Korean A-bomb victims after a delegation visited Seattle in 2023. Early this year, another delegation, including first-generation survivor Park Jeong-soon, 92, shared their pain and desire for a formal U.S. apology. Park will be a plaintiff in the 2026 International Peoples Tribunal on the 1945 Atomic Bombings, in New York City.

During my time in South Korea, I heard testimony at the Korean National Assembly from nuclear-impacted communities from around the world, including the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah), the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Representatives spoke of the intergenerational effects of radiation exposure and “nuclear colonialism.”

The testimony highlighted yet another untold story — that of the Congolese. The Manhattan Project, the huge undertaking to build the world’s first nuclear weapons — which enriched uranium and produced plutonium at facilities in Hanford and in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — was supplied with uranium from the Belgian-colonized Congo in central Africa. The Belgians were notoriously brutal overlords. In a mine called Shinkolobwe, Congolese people were forced to mine some of the purest radioactive uranium ore by hand, with no safety protection. Birth defects and severe illness are still recorded in the communities near the mine.

Under a campaign of secrecy, Shinkolobwe claimed the first victims of the nuclear arms race. Miners and residents died of radiation exposure. The United States attempted to distance itself from the atrocities committed there by claiming that the uranium from the Manhattan Project came from Canada, but the vast majority came from Shinkolobwe. There are more victims of nuclear weapons than we can possibly imagine.

Meanwhile, the NewSTART nuclear arms control treaty, which caps the deployment of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals, expires in February 2026. The Trump administration has yet to appoint a negotiator or enter formal negotiations, and despite Washington state being home to over 1,000 deployed nuclear weapons, only two lawmakers from our state — U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith — have signed on to H.Res 100, expressing alarm at the impending expiration. The U.S. has said it plans to spend over $1.7 trillion on new nuclear weapons in the next three decades. Nuclear weapons, nuclear production and nuclear testing are a war waged in the bodies of its victims through generations, and in the environment at places like Hanford and Chernobyl. Our leaders must do more to prevent another Hiroshima, another Hapcheon and another Shinkolobwe. 

Sean Arent: is the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program manager for Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and coordinates the regional Northwest Against Nuclear Weapons coalition. He lives in Tacoma.

Charlotte Metro DSA will not endorse the one-cent sales tax increase as we do not believe the framework created under the PAVE Act will adequately reflect the concerns of working families dependent upon public transit. As written, lower-income communities will face the highest cost burden given the regressive nature of sales taxes while Mecklenburg's capitalist class and political outsiders will be overly represented under the newly created 27-member Metropoitan Public Transit Authority (MPTA). Given this, we believe that any future projects will prioritize public transit not as a vehicle for connecting people but rather to enrich developers. In addition, the 60-40 allocation, 40% for roads, 40% for rail, and 20% for buses, intentionally divides communities by limiting where investment will go. Eastern Charlotte in particular loses out the most while North Charlotte will receive much of the immediate benefit under the planned Red Line. Charlotte Metro DSA believes that public transit investment should serve the working class without strings attached. The PAVE Act represents the deeply cynical nature of North Carolina state politics, in which politically-aligned business interests pollute legislation with obvious poison pills aimed at burdening workers and dividing communities.

Charlotte Metro DSA believes that public transit investment should serve the working class without strings attached. We are building a mass organization of the working class to fight and win key reforms like a fast and reliable mass public transit.

Sound good to you? Then join DSA Today!

In Solidarity,

Charlotte Metro DSA

You can view our Resolution from the 10/2025 General Meeting Here which authorized this post.

This opinion piece is part of an ongoing debate in Maine DSA about candidates in 2026. Pine and Roses welcomes contributions. 

Recent events in the race of Graham Platner for Senate has rustled up much debate among centrists, progressives, and leftists in Maine. And for good reason, it was brought to light that the candidate had posted some cringey stuff online in the early and mid oughts, and got a skull and crossbones tattoo in 2007 while in the Marines which turned out to be a symbol used by Nazis in the past (he claims he was unaware of its meaning until recently, and has gotten it covered up). This has forced many of his supporters and those considering support to take a hard look in the mirror. Are we able to forgive these past wrongs and bad decisions, and see the man for what he represents now, or do those past deeds automatically disqualify him as an acceptable leftist candidate?

Questioning candidates’ motives isn’t new for the left. It has become necessary for many to be skeptical of politicians running on progressive platforms. Notably, these candidates often do one of two things: sell out to monied or centrist interests in order to get elected, or they lose. As a result, some leftists give up on electoral politics, others batten down the hatches and become purity testers, forgiving no blemish they consider a step too far. 

By no means is skepticism an incomprehensible stance, given the socialist left’s history dealing with both centrist and right-wing capitalists who seemingly win every time despite broad growing discontent. But, with the explosive advent of the internet and social media, with its long memory of posts and pictures kept in archives; coupled with the immediate need for radical change, it is time to consider a careful strategy of revolutionary forgiveness when regarding not only leftist candidates, but also each other.

Revolutionary forgiveness is a tricky thing. It requires an understanding of time, context, human fallibility, coupled with a deep belief in the ability for one to change, and most of all in hope. These are things any leftist ought to understand and believe in. This isn’t to argue for some naive sense of forgiveness. We all must weigh the wrongs done by others and ourselves with varying degrees and consider it in light of the promise they show to improve and make amends moving forward. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting past wrongs, but forgiveness paired with remembering breeds a stronger sense of accountability. 

For a while now, the left has been very sensitive to activists’ and candidates’ pasts, and an expectation of purity has grown within many leftist circles over the last two generations. Partly, this is due to the broad coalition of different peoples the left rightly works to include. To keep that coalition together, it surely necessitates some sense of honest accountability. But, at what point is it taken so far that it goes from accountability to hatred and abandonment, especially when it’s about someone’s former words or deeds that they’ve come to regret, apologize for, and shown that they’ve grown beyond? At what point is it cutting off the nose to spite the face?

One of the things a socialist vision is founded on is the radical belief that people can change. That’s why we meet people where they are and hold honest conversations. It’s why we work tirelessly to engage with all people and hold public meetings. It’s why we believe in restorative justice and hold out hope that a better world is possible. We understand our current power and the pressures of the world. We understand why some folks may disagree with some of our ideas, but we don’t stop trying. We know that today’s skeptic or opponent might become tomorrow’s supporter. And, if or when they do come around earnestly, who are we to then look down at them and judge them for bad decisions or ideas they held 10 or 20 years ago? We move forward, together.

This question becomes more important as younger generations, raised up under the panopticon of the internet and social media, grow older, mature in their views, and some start running for political office or leadership in community organizations. Their teens and early 20’s, spent figuring things out, making mistakes, and trying to find their place, are captured and archived online for people fifteen or twenty years later to throw back in their face.

This phenomenon will continue to compound for the left, as that same online landscape is now being used by the conservative right to its advantage. Conservative influencers and communities are willing to accept confused youths and people who’ve made mistakes into their social media circles, and encourage them to solidify and amplify these hateful views. Meanwhile, many online leftist circles are defined, accurately or not, as judgemental spaces where people call each other out for having problematic pasts or misdeeds and perceived imperfections, sometimes ostracizing them completely. If you were a confused teenager or college student looking for an online community, which sounds more attractive to you?

If the left hopes to advance in our current “very online” culture, it needs to develop a radical sense of revolutionary forgiveness. This goes back to Graham Platner’s run for Senate. Here is a candidate who sincerely espouses a left-populist vision that puts working people above billionaires, supports our LGBTQ siblings, and puts healthcare reform at the top of his agenda. He is also a fallible person who said some disgusting things online in the past and got a hateful tattoo when he was 22 in the Marines. Is the left able to see him for who he is now and what he represents, exercising a sense of revolutionary forgiveness, or will it be doomed to continue its path of purity testing and ostracize someone who may show promise, but stepped over the line a few times as a young, confused man? Only time will tell, but I hope for the sake of Maine and working people, we find a way to forgive this time.

The post Revolutionary Forgiveness: Why it’s needed now more than ever appeared first on Pine & Roses.

SOUTH END, MA – Eighty people gathered outside of Boston Health Care for the Homeless’s (BHCHP) headquarters on Tuesday, October 28th after BHCHP Workers United, a subsidiary of 1199SEIU, sounded the alarm on stalling bargaining efforts and threatened cuts.

BHCHP is a community health center that provides medical care and specialized social work services for people experiencing homelessness. The union first won bargaining rights in March of 2024.

BHCHP emerged from a grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with a clear mandate: provide medical care, continuity, and compassion for Boston’s unhoused population. In 1985, founding physician Dr. Jim O’Connell joined the staff, working from a van to meet individuals experiencing homelessness and connect them with medical services. Staff were driven by an urgent need to address the then-record number of people freezing to death on the streets. In 1987, BHCHP’s HIV team launched as a pilot program. Its success was so remarkable that it became a national template for HIV care units across the country during a time when the disease carried heavy stigma.

The organization will retain most of its clinical services, though management closed one respite care center in Jamaica Plain in early October. Cost-cutting included 25 layoffs, starting with the departments in BHCHP that do not provide direct medical care, but the workers who maintain key infrastructure to support and uplift those who utilize BHCHP services. 

Remaining workers are faced with paltry insufficient increases and some with reduced benefits. A union worker shared with Working Mass that BHCHP was offering insultingly low yearly increases, cutting benefits in half for new employees, and raising healthcare premiums. These figures are lower than staff had received consistently for years, especially juxtaposed with the 10-13.5% raises offered to other, non-bargaining unit staff. Many of these roles pay $22/hour- simply not enough to meet the skills of the workforce nor the ballooning cost of living crisis in the Greater Boston area.

The union’s demands are not just for dignity and adequate compensation; they are demands for workers’ survival.

Organized Case Managers Speak Out

Despite the specialized, crucially important, and profoundly moral work the non-clinical staff at BHCHP provide; management has determined that Boston’s unhoused would be better served with those funds for wages and benefits redirected elsewhere. 

The afflicted workers are crucial boots on the ground support for Boston’s most vulnerable. Case managers and recovery workers assist patients navigating a mind-numbingly obtuse and confusing patchwork of social safety net programs, including sober houses, MassHealth, and rehabilitation centers. So dedicated are these staff that many will leave their work cells on and pick up calls from patients 24/7. 

Perhaps counter-intuitively, non-clinical staff provide crucial revenue-generating functions, making their mistreatment even more perplexing. Worker-organizer and case manager Astrid Mora spoke about the regarding and significant increase given to the agency’s caseload at previous rally in September: 

Let’s be clear, if the nurses and providers generate revenue, it is our labor – our case management, our outreach, our advocacy – that links and retains patients in care and allows that revenue to generate.

One patient who spoke at that rally underscored the vital need served when they shouted:

I spend more time here than I do at home! And now what do I do? Where do I go? I’ll be back out here in the streets.

Organizers argue that the cuts were avoidable, predicated on financial predications, and Boston’s most at-risk people will surely suffer. Staff at BHCHP have consciously chosen to work with housing insecure populations because the mission matters, with most turning down more lucrative roles elsewhere. Yet even the most righteous workers are facing a financial breaking point. The burden of losing key staff will certainly fall onto the unhoused population who needs them.

Leslie, a BHCHP non-clinical staff worker, said:

Rents are going up, public service is going up, a lot of us are going to be homeless if we don’t get this raise…the company claims to care about the people and the patients that they serve – but how can you say you care about the people when you don’t recognize the workers that bring those people in?

BHCHP management, however, contends that the layoffs and minimal wage increases are necessary given the murky funding environment from federal healthcare cuts. These have led to what management calls “one of the most difficult financial periods in our 40+ year history.”  According to management, offsetting those costs to impact the most vulnerable workers trying to make rent and groceries was a “painful decision.”

Bargaining committee member Pam Rivas disputes this: 

During a supposed hiring freeze, new management positions have been created, existing managers have received promotions, and clinical staff have received above market rate adjustments. Meanwhile, we are told no funding is available for essential patient programs.

And meanwhile, the company has money for its other projects. The company hired an external consultant for evaluation in early 2025.

The President and New Management

Some of the problems with BHCHP are downstream of the risks policymakers run when they outsource social work, typically understood to be the responsibility of local government, to charities and non-profits. No steady funding leaves Boston’s unhoused subject to the whims of the free market, or in this case, broadsided by the arbitrary fiscal whims of the U.S. Congress. 

BHCHP, like community health organizations and hospitals across the country, was asked to tighten belt loops after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill and respective cuts to Medicaid, grants, and other needed funding sources. Already reported are the over 300 rural hospitals set to close due to Medicaid cuts on funding that has been redirected to $50,000 sign-on bonuses with the U.S. secret police: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

Management justified the layoffs by citing internal funding projections. Given that BHCHP has admitted to having funds to pay people for at least another year using their own analysis, the decision to lay off key staff now – particularly with limited notice, is an active choice.

Out of the past ten years of BHCHP tax filings, only one indicated that the charity was losing money. As Rivas said during the recent rally:

Management would like you to believe that they have no money and that we, as workers, should shoulder the burden of their poor financial and strategic direction. But this is not true. They have money…They keep saying we need to just weather this storm and survive. But I and many of my coworkers believe; it matters if we morally debase ourselves while weathering said storm.

BHCHP spent $1,455,376 on executive compensation in fiscal year 2024. With compensation this lucrative, the reason cuts are necessary becomes clear: meeting the material needs of the unhoused is big business.

Commonwealth residents may recall the closures for three hospitals in Massachusetts owned by Steward Health Care, a vampiric private equity-owned firm affiliated with the Healey administration, as identified by Working Mass reporting. Before joining BHCHP as CEO earlier this year, Stan McLaren was formerly President of Carney Hospital in Dorchester. Carney was the only hospital in the Dorchester area and served populations who otherwise had limited access to care. 

Carney Hospital was closed by Steward Health after Steward went bankrupt in August of 2024.  This certainly cannot be blamed on McLaren, but it does demonstrate the private equity-friendly background with which he joined BHCHP. What McLaren can be blamed for, however, are the numerous Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) filed by Carney’s Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) local.

Mayor Michelle Wu appointed McLaren to be on Boston’s Board of Health in March.

When Non-Profits Act Like For-Profits

This mindset appears to have translated to the new management of BHCHP. They undoubtedly face financial headwinds – as do their workers. Management may have forgotten that BHCHP’s IRS designation is as a charity, not a for-profit machine that must cut costs and maximize shareholder value, with a requisite responsibility. Each worker facing cuts provides invaluable labor that not only sustains them as workers through an economy beset by misery, but provides essential and already-underfunded healthcare services to those experiencing homelessness. 

The layoffs at BHCHP are especially ironic given the incessant emphasis on public safety within the broader mainstream discourse in Boston, particularly around sites like Mass and Cass and Davis Square, where the state has waged its own one-sided class war on homeless people.  The suffering of the unhoused as a component of the homelessness epidemic, driven in part by private equity firms purchasing single family homes and apartment buildings, the lack of democratic control of the housing stock by tenants, and insufficient investment in solutions for the housing insecure  by state and local policy makers. These crises are set only to worsen as a result of BHCHP’s cuts.

BHCHP non-clinical workers are not the only non-medical staff suffering under executives using cuts to attack the stability of their jobs in the Greater Boston area. Other hospitals and medical institutions reportedly face similar conditions. While BHCHP is a union shop, there are even fewer protections at large medical facilities where non-clinical staff are not as organized to fight back for both their coworkers and patients.

According to 1199SEIU speakers at the rally, organizing is working. Since a previous rally in September, management conceded to providing severance packages for laid-off workers –  direct evidence that when workers fight, they win, and why continuing the public pressure campaign on BHCHP is critical for these workers. 

BHCHP is one of the most directly impactful organizations in Boston today for the most materially-oppressed tenants: the unhoused. This impact is due to the labor of its worker-organizers in non-clinical roles. Allies of the afflicted BHCHP staff should follow 1199SEIU communications for future rallies oon their Instagram.

Chris Brady is a public sector unionist and a member of the Working Mass Editorial Board.

The post Health Care For the Homeless: Non-Clinical Staff Demand Fair Treatment in Bargaining with BHCHP appeared first on Working Mass.

Monthly Newsletter of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America

Welcome to the November issue of Rochester Red Star. As usual, you’ll find a schedule of upcoming events and organizing group meetings, and coverage of chapter activities. This month, read essays on No Kings, COVID safety, anti-fascism, cuts to SNAP, and more.

Interested in contributing? Send submissions to bit.ly/SubmitRedStar, or get involved with our Communications Committee. Reach out to steering@rocdsa.org and join DSA today!

The post Rochester Red Star | November 2025 | (Issue 19) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Thursday, November 20 · 6:00pm (Online)

Wednesday, November 12·6:00 – 7:00pm (Online)

Thursday, November 6 at 5:30pm PST (Online)

Wednesday, November 5 at 6pm PST (Online)