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student protests
In the Fight Against Trump and Vance for Free Speech and the Truth, Be Like Mary Lupien
Lupien's viral interruption of JD Vance's speech falsely blaming immigrants for the U.S. housing crisis wasn't just important because it corrected a falsehood; she was defending the fundamental right to challenge power.
Mar 14, 2025
What happens when free speech is only free for those in power? JD Vance and the Trump administration claim to champion the First Amendment, but in practice, their version of free speech comes with a condition: It protects those who uphold their agenda and punishes those who challenge it.
This was on full display at the National League of Cities conference when Vance, now vice president, blamed the housing crisis on undocumented immigrants. "You see a very consistent relationship between a massive increase in immigration and a massive increase in housing prices," Vance argued. According to him, the rising cost of housing wasn't due to corporate greed or predatory real estate practices, but to migrants. It was a textbook case of scapegoating—shifting blame onto the powerless to distract from the true culprits.
Enter Mary Lupien, a Rochester, New York city councilmember and mayoral candidate, who wasn't having it. In a moment of raw defiance, she interrupted Vance's speech, cutting through the lies with a simple truth:
Vance and his allies claim to be warriors for free expression, yet their administration is actively working to silence those who challenge their narrative.
"We're competing against corporations, not immigrants. Give us back our funding!"
It was a flash of courage in a political landscape where too many sit silently while bad-faith actors rewrite reality.
Lupien, a progressive leader and longtime advocate for social justice, has represented Rochester's East District on City Council since January 2020. A resident of the Beechwood neighborhood, she has built her career around economic justice, housing rights, and community empowerment. Even those who don't align with her politically cannot deny her commitment, bravery, and willingness to challenge power.
Her advocacy has consistently centered on issues of housing insecurity, systemic inequality, and corporate accountability. And while some might dismiss her tactics as disruptive, history favors those who refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice.
Scapegoating is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Governments throughout history have blamed the most vulnerable groups—immigrants, minorities, the poor—to divert attention from systemic failures. It's a strategy designed to stoke fear, deepen divisions, and deflect accountability.
Vance's rhetoric is a classic example. Instead of addressing the real causes of America's housing crisis—corporate landlords, speculative real estate, stagnant wages, and decades of underinvestment in affordable housing—he chose to point the finger at immigrants.
Lupien's response was a direct rejection of this deceitful narrative. She reminded the room, and the nation, that the real enemies of affordable housing are not desperate families seeking a better life but corporations and policies designed to prioritize profit over people.
JD Vance and the Trump administration love to talk about free speech—until it's used against them. Their version of free speech is selective: It defends those who reinforce their ideology while crushing those who dissent.
Look no further than the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and legal U.S. resident, who was detained by federal immigration officials after helping lead student protests at Columbia University against the war in Gaza. President Donald Trump called Khalil's apprehension the "first arrest of many" in his administration's crackdown on campus opposition. Though a federal judge has temporarily blocked his deportation, the message was clear: Speak out against power, and you will pay the price.
The hypocrisy is glaring. Vance and his allies claim to be warriors for free expression, yet their administration is actively working to silence those who challenge their narrative. Khalil's arrest wasn't about enforcing immigration laws—it was about punishing dissent.
This is what makes Lupien's defiance so important. She wasn't just correcting a falsehood; she was defending the fundamental right to challenge power. In an era where dissent is increasingly met with retaliation, her voice was an act of resistance.
George Orwell once wrote:
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
Lupien exercised that right—not for personal gain, not for applause, but because someone had to.
There will be those who call Lupien's interruption disrespectful. There will be cynics who claim she was chasing a viral moment to boost her mayoral campaign. But both arguments ignore the stakes.
Trump's agenda isn't just about silencing opposition—it's about annihilating it. His administration has worked tirelessly to discredit institutions, suppress dissent, and consolidate power. Any act of civil disobedience that disrupts this effort—no matter how small—is an essential defense of democracy.
Moments like this come and go in the 24-hour news cycle. In a few days, most people will forget. But the slow erosion of democracy doesn't happen overnight—it happens in the moments when people choose to stay silent instead of speaking out.
Lupien made her choice. Will the rest of us?
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Knowledge Is Power. Gaza War Supporters Don’t Want Students to Have Either
Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it.
Sep 05, 2024
With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.
In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.
The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnachtper day—for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC Newsreported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.”
Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.
The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?
What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?
A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what—while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.
But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option—or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities.
Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweissarticle by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.
“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”
Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power—and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”
The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it.
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Nobel Laureate Yunus Accepts Call to Lead Bangladesh's Interim Government
"The courage of this youth is boundless," said the microcredit pioneer known as the banker to the poor. "They have made Bangladesh proud and shown the world our nation's determination against injustice."
Aug 06, 2024
The leader of student protests over jobs and economic injustice in Bangladesh in recent weeks said Tuesday that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus had accepted the students' call for him to take over the country's interim government, following the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
A spokesperson for the country's president, Mohammed Shahabuddin, told the Associated Press that Yunus would lead the interim government and that other political leaders would be decided soon.
Yunus, an economist who won the Nobel prize in 2006 for establishing the microcredit institution Grameen Bank, has been called the "banker to the poor" for helping to lift millions of people in Bangladesh out of poverty through small loans.
Nahid Islam, who led the protest movement last month over quotas in government jobs and unemployment, said Tuesday that the movement would not accept a government led by General Waker-uz-Zaman, the chief of army staff who announced on Monday that Hasina had fled the country and stepped down, and who took temporary control of the country.
"We have given our blood, been martyred, and we have to fulfill our pledge to build a new Bangladesh," Islam said. "No government other than the one proposed by the students will be accepted. As we have said, no military government, or one backed by the military, or a government of fascists, will be accepted."
"No government other than the one proposed by the students will be accepted. As we have said, no military government, or one backed by the military, or a government of fascists, will be accepted."
Yunus said he was "honored by the trust of the protesters who wish for me to lead the interim government."
"If action is needed in Bangladesh, for my country and for the courage of my people, then I will take it. The interim government is only the beginning. Lasting peace will only come with free elections. Without elections, there will be no change," said Yunus.
Shahabuddin announced on Tuesday that Parliament had been dissolved and said new elections would soon be held.
The protests began in July in Dhaka, with students outraged over the reinstatement of a job quota policy that reserved 30% of government jobs for descendants of military veterans of Bangladesh's 1971 war for independence from Pakistan—most of whom had ties to Hasina's Awami League party.
About a quarter of jobs were reserved for women, people with disabilities, and ethic minorities, leaving about 3,000 jobs open for 400,000 graduates to compete over.
Bangladesh has a high unemployment rate, with about a fifth of the population of 170 million people out of work, exacerbating anger over the job scheme and economic distress.
Hasina was elected to her fourth term as prime minister in January, but was accused of rigging the election, clamping down on opposition politicians and dissent, and arranging extrajudicial killings. She denied the accusations.
Student protesters took to the streets, chanting, "One, two, three, four, Sheikh Hasina is a dictator."
Police responded by cracking down violently, with more than 180 people killed and hundreds of people hit in the eyes by pellets that security forces deployed—potentially blinding them permanently.
The country's Supreme Court rescinded the job quota policy on July 21, opening jobs to 93% of applicants, but students continued to rally, demanding that Hasina step down.
Yunus expressed pride in the student protesters who led the movement.
"Youth have voiced their need for change in our country," the 84-year-old banker said. "The prime minister heard them by leaving the country. This was a very important first step taken yesterday. The courage of this youth is boundless. They have made Bangladesh proud and shown the world our nation's determination against injustice."
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