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On Immigrants, Identity, and Who the Real Enemy Is
Richard Mellor Afscme Local 444, retired HEO/GED 5-22-26
A few years ago, my brother Roger Martinez and I were walking past a hookah bar on the Edgware Road in London when three young black women sitting at one of the outside tables, heard Roger’s accent and asked us if we were from America; we said we were.
"We can't go to America," one of them said.
"Why not?" Roger asked.
"We're Somalis, Muslims”, one of them replied, “Trump says we're terrorists and he's barred us from entering the US. There's only 12 million of us on the planet.", she added with a wry smile.
We had forgotten about that ban entirely. We stopped and talked for a while. They were warm, funny young women with strong London accents — they'd been born there. Roger asked about traditional dress and head coverings. They were all dressed as young western women typically dress. They explained that they wore traditional clothing when they wanted to show respect to their parents, at cultural events, or simply when they felt like it. It was part of who they are.
I feel no threat or anxiety about immigrants wearing traditional clothing. When I left London more than fifty years ago, Young Indian women almost always dressed in traditional clothing. That's largely changed now, and it changed on its own terms, over time, within families — not because anyone demanded it.
I'll be honest: when it comes to the full covering of a woman's face and body, as practiced by some Muslims, I find it difficult to look at its origins without seeing misogyny and patriarchy. Whether the Quran demands it or Allah commands it are questions I'll leave to those with more knowledge of the subject than me and to the women themselves. What I am certain of is this — no priest, no mullah, no religious authority, and no politician has the right to tell a woman how to dress. And we should stress that Madison Avenue and the fashion industry pressure women relentlessly too, shaming girls into a different kind of conformity. The coercion comes from many directions.
I’m writing this commentary after watching some of the coverage of the far-right rally in London last week and the disgusting spectacle in the video above, of the rabid crowd chanting "take them off" at three French women on a stage dressed as fully covered Muslim women. It accomplished nothing except cruelty, and if the fascist elements that are behind such events thought they might “shame” this section of the immigrant population in to “assimilation” as they see it, they are wrong.
When people feel attacked, they hold more tightly to the traditions they came from. That's human nature. The second and third generations — the children and grandchildren of immigrants — will negotiate their own relationship with their heritage, and that negotiation will happen within families, organically, in ways that no outsider can engineer or accelerate. Muslims make up roughly 6% of the UK population. And they are overwhelmingly working class. They are not a threat. They are neighbors and, more importantly from a workers’ perspective, they are our class allies.
There is also a breathtaking hypocrisy at the heart of the demand that immigrants abandon their cultural traditions. The British Empire once encompassed 23% of the world's population. British officers, colonial administrators, and settlers went to Africa, India, and across the globe and dressed, worshipped, and conducted themselves as British people. Any soldier who "went native" was considered an embarrassment. The Empire imposed itself on the world. It did not ask permission and it did not assimilate.
Finally, and most importantly: anyone who thinks this movement will stop at Muslims is not paying attention. Muslims are simply the most visible target right now. A Sikh friend told me with some horror that a few Sikhs had shown up alongside the racists at that rally. They would do well to reconsider. The turbans, the kippahs, the crosses that aren't the right kind of cross — all of it is on the list. So are atheists like me.
The crisis ordinary British people are living through is not caused by immigrants. It is a failure of a system that cannot provide basic necessities in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. The people at the top of that system need someone to blame, and immigrants are a convenient answer. Meanwhile, the wars, the drone strikes, the destabilization of entire regions of the Global South — these are what drive people northward in the first place. They are not invaders. They are the refugees of other people's wars
Watch Gary Chambers speak and understand something: this is what defiance looks like. Standing against the deliberate redrawing of electoral maps designed to dilute Black voting power in Louisiana, he is not intimidated and he will not be silenced. And he is not alone.
A few days ago I posted a TikTok video making a simple point that the corporate media works hard to obscure — the American working class is not the monolithic conservative bloc they want you to believe it is. When Black Lives Matter took to the streets, the cameras and the commentators worked to frame it as a Black movement, full stop. That was a lie of omission. It was a multiracial movement. BLM had many allies particularly among the youth mired in student debt and other members of the community confronting the state in the streets. That truth matters because it points toward something they fear more than any single protest — the possibility of a united working class that knows its own power.
We cannot manufacture that movement from the top down. It will be built from below, as it always has been, and it will come. What is happening right now in Minneapolis, where communities are organizing direct resistance to ICE operations, is not an isolated incident. It is a glimpse of what is coming. Real political education happens in struggle, not in lecture halls.
Gary Chambers comes from a community that has fought one of the longest and most brutal battles in American history, against a system of racial oppression that stretches back centuries. That community is not going backwards. Not now. Not ever.
There are times when those in power get a little too cocky, when confidence becomes arrogance and they underestimate the anger their policies generate in society. We are living in such times. The American working class currently lacks the organized leadership and political party it needs and the movement against the capitalist offensive has not yet raised its head above the parapet. And as I was reminded more than once in my political education, consciousness tends to lag behind events and this is more so when it has been decades since a major mass movement has taken to the streets.
But what we are seeing with Gary Chambers, what we saw in Minneapolis, will multiply a hundredfold. A ruling class that is losing its grip on the global stage, that failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, and is flailing across the Middle East, is forced to turns its aggression inward, against its own workers.
Trump's rise was not inevitable. It was made possible by the dismal failures of the Democratic Party to offer a serious alternative but in in large part, by the absence of an organized, united working class movement and a party of our own. That vacuum was filled by the ugliest currents in American life — white supremacists, Christian nationalists, the settler mentality dressed up in electoral politics, fascist mobs given permission to come out into the open. That is the honest account of how we got here.
But here is what is equally true. American history is a history of resistance. The Native peoples were never fully defeated. Enslaved Africans broke their chains and remade this country in the process. The millions of Europe's poor, shipped here to work the mines and textile mills, built a labor movement from nothing. Racism has been the ruling class's most effective weapon in its long war against working class unity — but it has never been a permanent solution, only a postponement.
It will not be easy for them up ahead. They have reason to be worried. We have reason to keep going.
Many sources document the horrific consequences of the Bengal famine of 1943 in greater detail, and I encourage readers to explore them. I chose this particular account because it connects that famine to the broader issue of British colonialism. It doesn't frame capitalism as the root cause, nor does it advocate for democratic socialism as the remedy — partly because it originates from within the BRICS group. Still, given that each BRICS country has been a victim of western colonialism brings a different historical perspective than that of western European capitalism.
Winston Churchill's alleged statement — "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like Rabbits." — echoes what British establishment figures routinely said of the Irish. Churchill similarly expressed contempt for the Chinese. This was not a personal flaw of his, he was expressing British policy toward the people it colonized.
British colonial attitudes toward India and Africa were tested first in Ireland. A Parliamentary inquiry into Irish immigration described it as "an example of a less civilised population spreading itself as a substratum beneath a more civilised community." The novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, visiting Ireland in the mid-19th century, wrote to his wife that he was "haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country."
The same world view was exported to the Americas. In a letter to a Swiss mercenary, the British military official Jeffrey Amherst — later Governor of Quebec and Virginia — wrote, "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." It's worth noting that the deliberate distribution of infected blankets was not a widespread documented practice; what the letter reveals is the attitude — the casual willingness to contemplate genocide.
That attitude persists. Today, members of the US Congress and the current administration deploy similar language when speaking about Palestinians and Iranians, even as the US and its western allies support what many are calling a genocide in Gaza and a war of aggression against Iran.
The pattern is consistent: to colonize or subjugate a people, the aggressor must first dehumanize them — both to justify the assault and to secure the loyalty of its own working class. The bitter irony is that the contempt the British ruling class directed at the Irish or Indians was the same contempt it held for its own workers at home.
That fact alone reveals something important: the most reliable allies of working people in any country are the working people of other countries. We share the same enemy. Wars fought over disputes between competing ruling classes are not fought in our interests.
It's why Marx's simple slogan — Workers of the World Unite — remains so threatening to the global capitalist elite. It names the one coalition that could actually end the arrangement.
On the first day of talks during US President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to China, his host China’s Xi Jinping invoked the so-called “Thucydides trap” to warn against any war beween the two superpowers that now dominate the world economic and political landscape.
Xi was referring to the fifth-century BC Greek historian Thucydides who (it is claimed) argued that the threat posed by the then rising power of the Athens maritime city state so frightened the longstanding land-based hegemonic power, Sparta, that the latter went to war to crush Athens. Xi warned that if the US had any such ambitions with China, it would be a trap for the US.
The concept of the Thucydides Trap was first developed by Herman Wouk, the novelist and WW2 veteran in 1980. Wouk then compared the U.S.-Soviet cold war to the “cold war” that developed between Athens and Sparta once they had defeated Persia, their common enemy in the middle of 5th century BC. In 2015, American political scientistGraham Allison took up the lessons of the Peloponnesian (a mainland Greek peninsular) war between Athens and Sparta as an analogy for the rising conflict between the US and China. Allison claimed that, among a sample of 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivalling a ruling power, 12 had ended in war. He cited the First World War, where the rising European power, Germany, went to war against the declining hegemonic powers of Britain and France. Then there was the rising economic power of Japan in WW2 that launched an attack on the US in 1940. Allison reckoned that Thucydides showed that when a rising power (such as Athens) challenges the status of a ruling power (such as Sparta), war would be difficult to avoid. This was the ‘trap’ that the US should avoid, said Xi, not surprisingly. Ironically, in the Peloponnesian war it was the emergent power (Athens) that lost and the dominant power that won (Sparta) and it was the same for the world wars of 20th century. So the Thucydides Trap is not really a good analogy for Xi to use.
But anyway, is the Thucydides Trap of ancient Greece relevant to the increased rivalry between the US and China in the 21st century? The examples that Allison cites are hardly convincing. For example, the US was no declining power in the 1930s – on the contrary. And WW1 kicked off because a much weaker power, Austria-Hungary, launched an attack on the Balkan states that brought Russia into the conflict and which then spiralled to involve the world.
Moreover, the core lesson of the Peloponnesian war, according to Thucydides himself, was not the inevitability of war between rival powers, but the decisions made by the ruling elites in the two states. In the case of Athens, its rising economic strength led to hubris on the part of Athens’ leaders. They thought they could invade Sicily, which was supported by Sparta at the time, and so gain huge new prosperous lands. But Athens was heavily defeated in their invasion, which weakened it so much that eventually Sparta triumphed. US historians and military strategists naturally like to raise this angle on the Thucydides Trap to argue that if China decides to invade Taiwan it will suffer the same fate as Athens did in Sicily. They are happy to conclude that it was the ‘declining’ power, Sparta, that eventually crushed the ‘rising power, Athens. So the US will win its battle for hegemony if China attempts to occupy Taiwan.
But China is not so foolhardy. Yes, Taiwan is seen as part of China and must be returned to the mainland, but Taiwan is not 5th century BC Sicily. The US cannot really defend the Taiwanese statelet from China short of outright war, which it is probably not capable of sustaining, unlike Sparta could with Sicily. Moreover, in the 21st century, the rival powers have nuclear weapons of mass destruction that pose the possibility of annihilation for both (and the rest of us) in any war. Behind Xi’s comment is that China seeks to play the waiting game. His warning about the ‘trap’ is to push back against any ideas that the US may have about military conflict with China over Taiwan.
In my view, the T-trap analogy is not very applicable to the 21st century global power struggle. A better analogy is not the Peloponnesian Wars, but the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage some 200 years later. By 250 BC, the Roman Republic had come to dominate most parts of the Mediterranean through military prowess and a developing slave economy. But there was one major rival power that stood in the way of Rome’s total domination, the north African city state of Carthage. Carthage controlled Sicily just as Sparta had done. Rome launched an invasion of Sicily, which it eventually captured from the Carthaginians after 25 years of conflict. Carthage was not finished, however, and it took a series of wars (including the famous invasion of Rome by Carthage’s military leader Hannibal) before Rome was able to defeat its rival and completely destroy the city and its people. Rome then became the sole hegemonic power in the Med and it expanded its empire further through military conquest that provided millions of slaves for its domestic economy. But this did not last. Rome’s slave supply dried up and the Roman state eventually lost any form of civic democracy and slipped into a corrupt military dictatorship under a succession of (sometimes insane) emperors.
This analogy fits better to the rise of the US as the dominant power in the 20th century faced with only one rival, the Soviet Uinion. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the US achieved complete dominance, as Rome did in 200 BC. But as in Rome then, the internal economic contradictions within the US capitalist economy have now begun to eat into its power from within. The ‘globalists’ at the head of the US state machine are still trying to control the world with financial repression and military adventures, just as Rome did under its emperors; but US political institutions under Trump have taken an increasingly corrupt and autocratic (kinglike) form.
The US empire is now in decline. This is starkly indicated by the rising net liabilities of the US economy to the rest of the world ie. foreigners own more US assets that US investors own of foreign assets. It is significant that the US net international investment position went negative just as the US became the sole hegemonic power in the early 1990s.
US imperialism had managed to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was losing relatively in trade and output to other major economies, particularly China. Europe had integrated further into the Eurozone and widened towards eastern Europe using the cheap labour supply available there. And the Asian tigers leapt forward with new technologies. But particularly China took over as the manufacturing and trading global power (partly driven by US multi-nationals which had located there in the 1990s).
The negative investment position of the US reflects the inability of US industry to compete in world goods markets. The reaction of the Trump administration to the high US trade deficit has been to impose tariffs and other measures to ‘protect’ American industry and reduce imports, but with no discernable success. So increasingly, the US has relied on foreigners buying more US companies and stocks (‘the kindness of strangers’) to finance its trade deficit.
There is still a long way to go before the mighty US economy will be on its knees. It may have the largest net liabilities globally, but it can manage that because it is also the only country that can issue dollars – and the dollar is still the international currency for trade, investment and reserves. Trade surplus nations like Germany, Japan and China must use most of their dollar earnings to buy dollar assets in the US economy. So the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the dollar keeps the US empire ticking over.
From its peak of economic and military power in the Med in 200 BC, Rome took several centuries to decline and fall. It won’t be so long in the modern capitalist world. Maybe down the road, the US leaders will become more desperate and try to provoke China into a conflict. But China is unlikely to give Trump and the US globalists an excuse for outright war. As Xi says, China will not fall into the T-trap.
Politician whose background is secret challenges one who released Epstein files
Ken Klippenstein May 17, 2026
Thomas Massie attends debate alone that challenger Ed Gallrein skipped
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There’s a heated primary election for Congress this Tuesday that is nothing short of a referendum on “national security” — and fittingly, one of the candidate’s background is almost entirely unknown because, he claims, it’s classified.
His name is Ed Gallrein, a Trump-backed retired Navy captain challenging incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The focus of Gallrein’s campaign (and one of the few things he seems willing to talk about) is his claim of having served in SEAL Team 6, the secretive commando group most famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden. He certainly knows how to operate in the shadows: I can count on one hand the number of interviews Gallrein has sat down for, and he’s skipped literally every debate, each attended alone by Massie. Gallrein’s campaign touts endorsements from unnamed military officers, their identities and other supposedly sensitive details redacted to burnish the security theater. He’s even called civilians “sheep.”
The strategy seems to be to let Trump's endorsement and the SEAL mystique do the work — and to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. In the few appearances Gallrein has made, his message to voters is consistent: the most important things about him are classified, the president has seen the file, and that should be enough.
“The president is playing five-dimensional chess,” Gallrein told a local NBC affiliate, in response to a question about the Iran War’s effect on gas prices last week. By the next day, the game had mushroomed to “nine-dimensional chess,” as Gallrein later described Trump’s handling of the war to commentator Mark Levin.
See the trident?
By contrast, Thomas Massie is a vocal critic of the national security state — and it has cost him. He voted against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill,” pushed for release of the Epstein files alongside Democrat Ro Khanna of California, and has been one of the most vocal congressional opponents of the Iran War. Whatever you think of his views, he's one of the few members of our pathetic Congress who is willing to defy his own party's leadership. For that, he's been buried in out-of-state spending and made a personal target of the president.
"We'll get a 100% vote except for this guy named Thomas Massie," Trump said while promoting the Big Beautiful Bill. "There's something wrong with him." Now he has escalated to calling Massie "the worst Republican Congressman in History” and demanding his ouster.
Into this fight steps Gallrein, whose pitch beyond Trump loyalty is a story he tells repeatedly about his first visit to the Oval Office. By his account, when he arrived, Trump had a leather binder containing his complete, classified “top secret” career file sitting on the resolute desk. The lesson, Gallrein told the Maywood Country Club:
“He [Trump] knows everything about me. He knows what I did for you in uniform. He knows what I’ll do for you in Washington. I’ll be your champion.”
The message here is as insulting as it is creepy: Trump has seen the classified record, the classified record establishes fitness, therefore voters need only ratify the commander-in-chief’s decision. Voters’ job isn’t to evaluate; it’s to trust the officials who have.
Ed Gallrein poses next to Donald Trump
Gallrein is pro-Iran War (and as far as I can tell, any other war) pro-Trump, and pro-“national security,” but that’s about all we’re allowed to know. If you’d like to know more about this figure that could well be representing the country next year, too bad. The campaign slogan might as well be Shut The Fuck Up and Salute.
He also rails against "politicians" who burned SEAL Team Six's cover by talking publicly about the bin Laden raid — but those politicians include the president and other democratically elected leaders who represent the only real check on the secret world that exists (at least in theory.)
His contempt for the public’s right to know presents itself almost like a verbal tic.
"Foreign policy and national security are inseparable,” Gallrein told a podcast called USA Cares. “You can't talk about one without talking about the other. If you are, you're an amateur."
In other words: what your government does overseas, from Gaza to Venezuela, isn’t any of the public’s business. Your only job is to perform gratitude. As Gallrein told the Optimist Club:
“You should be proud to know as Americans there’s units like Delta Force, our Army sister unit, and SEAL Team Six, that the kind of operation you saw to get Maduro, they’re standing ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for you and your family. Mercifully and fortunately, all the things they do don’t hit the press. I’m sorry to disappoint the media, but that’s what I can share with you.”
Note the framing: they work for “you and your family.” Constitutionally and legally, they work for the elected president. Gallrein knows this (or should).
If you think I'm reading too much into his paternalism toward the civilian world, he literally calling civilians “sheep” and SEALS “sheep dogs.” Per his USA Cares interview:
“I don't know if you've heard this, the famous theory there's three kinds of people in the world. There are sheep, there are sheep dogs, and there's wolves. SEALs are sheep dogs. We don't care what letter jacket the adversary wears. If they're bad people and they mean, mean harm to our sheeps, we're on it.”
Civilians are the sheep. The special operators are the sheepdog, their self-appointed protectors. The sheep don't give the sheepdog orders. This is the worldview of someone running for an elected position in which he would oversee the sheepdogs!
And as for sheepdogs, it’s not even clear how much he really was one. Military sources tell me that Gallrein not only went to the Naval Postgraduate School as a young Lieutenant, but that he served in a number of educational and training positions, including the head of instruction at the Joint Special Operations University before he retired. He stresses in interviews that SEAL Team 6 isn’t just the combat operators but support staff as well.
I wonder what his job was!
Whatever the case, he sure loves to talk like some kind of shadow warrior. In fact, in just the few interviews he’s even done, I counted at least a dozen references to secrets he claims he’s not at liberty to divulge, including:
“I can’t speak to any classified operations I may or may not have ever been involved in.” — The Mark Levin Show
“SEAL Team six is different, classified, won’t go into it...” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“Let’s talk about Seal Team Six for a minute. This is all I can tell you.” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“…SEAL Team Six; can’t talk much about that, but it was an honor to lead those great Americans...” — The Mark Levin Show
“The only reason you know about SEAL Team Six is ‘cause politicians ran their mouth about it after we got Osama Bin Laden and Captain Phillips, didn’t they?” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“I continued to be a senior advisor for what we would call s—uh, let’s just call them security activities and special operations, i.e., the black world...” — The Mark Levin Show
“Think pager bombs, black ops, and things that happen that don’t get divulged, mercifully, unless politicians talk about it.” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“It just manifests itself in some very interesting activities and operations. Of course, we can’t talk about that, ‘cause that’s TS/SCI, it’s SAP [Special Access Program] information.” — The Mark Levin Show
“And I could go into some detail about that, but- Yeah ... there’s a movie about it and so forth and so on. But I will not disclose anything classified, ‘cause I still have a- I appreciate that, yeah ... a clearance and I, I will abide by- Yes ... uh, the, uh, the agreements I have made with our US government as they pertain to such.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I’m very familiar with it. I’ll say no more.” — USA Cares Podcast
“...many times we would deploy in the dark in the night- Mm-hmm ... and we would come back in the dark at night- Yeah ... ‘cause our nation asked us to. Right. And I won’t go into any further details.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I won’t share the confidential private pieces that are classified or otherwise I shouldn’t divulge...” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
A few things here are worth flagging. Gallrein refers to "security activities" — that phrase does not exist in military or intelligence parlance; the correct terms are "special activities" or "sensitive activities." He also describes a classification level as "secret compartmented information" — it's sensitivecompartmented information.
Anonymous endorsement
As if the whole Chris Kyle cosplay isn’t enough, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is en route to Kentucky to campaign with Gallrein, according to the local press.
There is one episode in Gallrein’s post-military career that exists in full public record — and it cuts against his vaunted expertise.
After retiring, he took a job as a Safety and Security Specialist at the Department of Energy’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the country’s most sensitive nuclear facilities. He was fired in May 2013. He filed a whistleblower complaint alleging retaliation for raising concerns about deficiencies in security training programs.
The complaint was dismissed. Among the reasons: he had reported his concerns to a fellow subcontractor employee — not a DOE official or his own employer’s chain of command, as the regulations required. The man campaigning on mastery of the classified world filed his whistleblower complaint with the wrong person and lost his job at a nuclear security facility. He has not mentioned any of this on the campaign trail.
This hiding behind national security is not a partisan phenomenon. Last year I wrote about the Democrat national security moms, officials like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Elissa Slotkin. The political establishment loves these figures because national security is an official-sounding way to tell the public to shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle things.
Gallrein seems to think that “his country” or “the nation” is some disembodied entity that doesn’t have elected officials, that “national security” is what gives him orders, and that the secret world is an autonomous entity. Most important though, he believes that the people are sheep and that those in uniform (the pack of wolves) have some license to protect them regardless of pesky politicians, and that that license derives from some secret regulation rather than from laws and the Constitution.
What Gallrein represents is something both parties have been quietly building toward for twenty-five years: the national security state as its own source of political legitimacy, floating above democratic accountability, not answerable to the public it claims to serve.
The sheep vote Tuesday.
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The video above from The Officer Tatum channel, attempts to defend Charlie Kirk against accusations of racism, featuring Kirk arguing to a young man at the microphone that all human beings — regardless of race — share the same DNA. Tatum himself, believed to be the son of former Oakland Raider Art Tatum, likely comes from a position of relative privilege and, like many in his social circle, appears motivated by a desire to advance his standing within the existing capitalist hierarchy.
Tatum is also connected to Angel Studios, a religiously-driven media company with Mormon roots and a global reach, spreading content that promotes both faith and the virtues of capitalism and the free market. Kirk, meanwhile, was bankrolled by billionaires long championed the tired "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" myth.
The Closing Word: On Merit, Class, and the Myth of the Level Playing Field
A response to criticisms to a video I made saying Charlie Kirk was a racist. His line “Did You Earn It?”mentioned in this video is a profoundly racist comment and if you don’t understand that, I really urge you to re-think it and discuss with people why you’re wrong; if you are genuine, you’ll see why it’s wrong. If you’re not, be open about your racist views and defend them so we can see who you are.
I stress I am not a white liberal. I do not feel guilty because people that were the same color as me or the same nationality treated others as lesser beings. We are not responsible for the acts of ancestors or relatives from the past. We are obligated to learn from history, recognize that we don’t all have the same history as we stress in the best way we can that working class people have the same general oppression in society and that we all have the same enemy.
To those claiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past—or, more absurdly, that the "real" racism is now directed at white people—let’s get one thing straight:
When you argue that job opportunities should be about "merit" and "the best person for the job," you aren't saying anything new. It sounds fair on paper, but in practice, it’s a tired shield used to protect a status quo built on theft. We live in a capitalist, class-based society designed to exploit. While all workers are exploited, history shows us that some are targeted with "extra" layers of oppression—whether it’s Catholics in Northern Ireland, Muslims in India, or Black people in America and at all times women.
1. The Myth of "DNA Equality"
People like Charlie Kirk love to cite DNA to claim "we’re all the same." It’s an oft repeated claim. Society doesn’t interact with your double helix; it interacts with your class position, your skin color, your zip code, and your access to generational wealth. To use biology to deny the reality of social and economic exclusion doesn't fool anyone—least of all the people who have to live through that exclusion every day.
2. Two Centuries of Affirmative Action
It is a massive insult to preach "meritocracy" to people who were legally excluded from the very institutions that build "merit" (schools, home loans, stable jobs) for centuries. Let’s be honest: White workers in this country have benefited from a couple hundred years of their own version of affirmative action. To oppose efforts to rectify that history now by claiming you "only see qualifications" is, frankly, a joke.
3. The "Buffer Class" Strategy
I’ll be the first to admit that the ruling class will never teach history, that includes racism and why it exists, in a way that actually unites us. They don't want white workers and Black workers realizing they share an enemy. Instead, after the heroic Civil Rights movement forced the state’s hand, the system made just enough concessions to build a Black middle class—a "buffer layer" to stabilize the system and make it look like the "American Dream" was finally open for business.
The Bottom Line
Class oppression is real, and white workers are victims of it in a million ways. But Black workers face that plus the weight of a racial caste system. This isn't rocket science; it's history. If you want to talk about "merit," first you have to account for a head start that lasted three hundred years. Until then, your "color blindness" is nothing more than a blindfold.
Richard Mellor Afscme Local 444, retired HEO/GED 5-17-26
The System Is the Problem
Every political crisis produces its villains. Today, the dominant figure in that story is Donald Trump without doubt a distasteful, degenerate human being. The anger directed at him is understandable. But there is a danger in making any single individual the center of our analysis. When we do, we lose sight of something more important: the system that produced him, that accommodates him, and that will outlast him.
This is not an accident. In the political struggles between different factions of the ruling class, the focus on individuals is actively welcomed because it is a useful distraction from the root cause of the crises we face. That root cause is not a person. It is the system of production we call capitalism.
What capitalism actually is
In a capitalist system, the means of producing the necessities of life — factories, land, technology, financial institutions — are owned by a small group of private individuals. What sets those forces of production in motion is not the needs of society, but profit. The machine turns on when there is money to be made. It turns off when there isn't — regardless of what people need.
Marx explained it beautifully: "A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." *
The point is simple: under capitalism, what matters is not what is produced or who benefits — it is whether the owner of the operation turns a profit. Education, healthcare, housing, food — all of it is subordinated to profit and the accumulation of capital.
What exactly is the state?
In my youth, had someone asked me to describe the state I would have said simply that it is the government.; I had never given it much thought. We are accustomed to thinking of government as a neutral institution — a referee that stands above competing interests in society and serves the common good. This is a comforting idea. It is also wrong.
The modern state is not neutral. It is an organ of class rule and the ruling class in our situation are capitalists and we live in a capitalist or bourgeois democracy. Its laws, its institutions, its police, its courts, its military — all of these have been shaped over time to protect and reproduce the existing order: the order in which a small class of people own the productive wealth of society and the rest of us work for them.
This does not mean that every politician is consciously conspiring, or that nothing can be won through political struggle. It means that the state, as a structure, exists to manage the affairs of the class that owns and controls the economy; Marx wrote in 1848 that, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
When we watch the battles between the Republicans and Democrats (the two major capitalist parties) over which party gets to govern society for the next four years, we are witnessing different factions of the ruling class compete for control of the state apparatus, we are watching a fight over who manages the system, not a fight over whether the system should continue. When it comes to the working class, they are united against us.
Contradictions, not villains
This brings us back to the question of crisis. Capitalism is an exploitative system, and suffering, poverty, war, hunger etc. is integral to it. As capitalist crisis intensifies, we are told the cause is greed, incompetence, or the moral failings of particular leaders. If only we had better people at the top, the story goes, things would be different.
But greed is not a cause. It is a feature. Capitalism does not merely tolerate the single-minded pursuit of profit — it requires it. A business that fails to compete and accumulate will be swallowed by one that does. If individuals can’t pay for health care they don’t get it. If less developed nations, (the former colonies plundered by the advanced capitalist states) can’t afford the costs of infrastructure development, sewage, drinking water, etc.; they don’t get it.
In the global competition between nations, there is no such thing as fair trade. Trade disputes and tariffs are actual wars. When the competition becomes acute. When capitalist states cannot resolve disputes over trade and markets, they go to war. Both WW1 and WW2 were a product of the competition between nation states over resources, markets and global plunder.The system produces this scenario but the capitalist education system and mass media blames it on individuals.
The real causes of crisis are structural. Capitalism contains internal contradictions — built-in tensions between the drive to accumulate and the limits of what any society can absorb — that periodically produce exactly the kind of economic and political instability we are living through now. These crises will recur, under different leaders, with different villains, until the structure itself is changed.
Why this matters
None of this means that individuals don't matter, or that who holds power is irrelevant. It means that changing the individuals without changing the system is not a solution — it is a reset that leads back to the same place.
Understanding that the state is an instrument of class power, and that crises are produced by the system rather than by the moral character of its managers, is not pessimism. It is clarity. And clarity about the nature of the problem is the first condition for doing something about it.
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