Tomás Ó Flatharta

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“No Kings” Protests in the USA – “over 10,000 people protesting in Pittsburgh, and millions of people throughout the country: a massive outpouring of anger and rage and ridicule of Trump’s pretensions of being popular and powerful” – Interview with Paul Le Blanc

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Overview of “No Kings” Protests

This is a conversation between John Meehan and Paul LeBlanc in Dublin on Friday, the 20th of June, 2025.

Paul Le Blanc has for many years been a teacher and activist in Pittsburgh. His writings include “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party” [1990; new ed. 2015]

Link : Lenin and the Revolutionary Party

and

“A Short History of the US Working Class”. [1999; new ed. 2016]

Link : A Short History of the US Working Class

Paul Le Blanc, Wikipedia

Last weekend (Saturday June 14 2025) a large number of “No Kings” protests occurred in many parts of the United States. One participant was Paul LeBlanc. Would you like to give us an overview of the No Kings protests, describe the one you attended?

Paul Le Blanc: Sure I can speak especially about my own experience in Pittsburgh and in other cities and towns across the country.

The “No Kings” demonstrations were part of a wave of demonstrations that have developed over the past few months. The first big one was the April 5 demonstration, under the slogan of “Hands Off.” Hands Off the health care system, education system, various other things that are being dismantled or attacked by the Trump regime. In Pittsburgh, there was a massive demonstration. It was the largest that I had seen in the city up to that time, 8000 people minimum.

This was followed by May Day demonstrations. And Pittsburgh is not and hasn’t for decades been a centre of May Day demonstrations. But this was massive, the biggest May Day demonstration that I’ve seen. It wasn’t quite as big as April 5, but there were several thousand people participating. Again, it was focused especially on social issues and economic issues in the United States.  There was also some reference to foreign policy stuff — Palestine, Ukraine, so forth. 

The biggest demonstration of all was the most recent, the “No Kings” demonstration.  There were over 10,000 people protesting in Pittsburgh, and millions of people throughout the country: a massive outpouring of anger and rage and ridicule of Trump’s pretensions of being popular and powerful and so forth. People said “No Kings,” with many accusing him of being a fascist, a totalitarian, a dictator. Certainly, he’s authoritarian. There was general agreement on a defence of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and even of the US Constitution, which he’s walking all over.

So, this was massive, and pro Trump elements have not come close to mobilising anything on this scale. There’s a lot of anti-Trump sentiment. Trump claims that he has an overwhelming mandate from the American people, and that’s a lie. He tells all kinds of lies, makes all kinds of distorted claims. He did not get a majority, certainly not a landslide majority. He was able to rack up more votes than his competitors. But his mandate is razor thin, and I think the number of people who support him is dropping. I believe that he is eroding his own base of support with policies that are hurting all of us. It’s an interesting development, for sure.

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‘Do you like being shackled?’ Data shows ‘Trump slump’ of foreign tourists avoiding the US – Alternet.org

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P:olitical Poison is spreading – across the globe police state practices are mushrooming. The articles below paint a frightening picture of Donald Trump’s USA.

‘Do you like being shackled?’ Data shows ‘Trump slump’ of foreign tourists avoiding the US

Link :


Do You Like Being Shackled? Data shows ‘Trump slump’ of foreign tourists avoiding the US

A tourist takes a group selfie on the ?Big Bus? at Times Square in New York City, U.S., August 27, 2024. REUTERS/Kent J Edwards

According to preliminary government data released on Tuesday, visits to the United States from abroad declined by 11.6 percent in March compared to the same month last year, with international arrivals from China seeing a decrease of nearly 1 percent.

Wolfgang Georg Arlt, the CEO of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, told ABC that the number of leisure trips taken by Chinese citizens to destinations such as Disneyland, Hawaii and New York is significantly declining and is unlikely to rebound until after President Donald Trump has left office. He referred to this trend as the “Trump Slump.”

The U.S. tourism sector anticipated a strong year in 2025 for foreign visitors. After a significant increase in international arrivals in 2024, some predictions suggested that this year’s numbers could match those seen before the COVID pandemic.

However, just three months into the year, there has been a sharp decline in international arrivals. Amid reports of tourists being detained at the border, many travelers from other countries are opting to avoid the U.S. in favor of other destinations. Reacting to the administration’s harsh immigration policies, several nations have updated their travel recommendations regarding the U.S. Recently, Germany amended its advisory to stress that having a visa or entry waiver does not ensure admission into the country. The UK Foreign Office also updated its guidance to highlight the importance of adhering to all regulations, noting that U.S. authorities strictly enforce entry rules and violations may lead to arrest or detention.

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Antisemitism in the Oval Office (The Trump-Vance Assault on Volodymyr Zelensky) – Timothy Snyder

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Antisemitism in the Oval Office

A confrontation seen with a historian’s eye

There are many ways to analyse the Donald Trump / JD Vance ignorant thuggish assault on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House’s Oval Office on Friday February 28 2025.

The historian Timothy Snyder carefully shows us that the presidential rapist from New York orchestrated an antisemitic assault


Link :
Antisemitism in the Oval Office

The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.

I am historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. He talked to me about antisemitism for decades, from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union until his death in 2018. The way that I reacted to the scene in the Oval Office, and how I have pondered and considered it since, have to do with my research, but also with him.

Jerzy survived the Holocaust because his mother Wanda, a literary translator, refused to go with her children to the Warsaw ghetto. Thanks to her courage and ingenuity, and to others who helped her, he and his brother survived. Jerzy’s father was murdered, like more than three million other Jews in Poland. The family history emerged bit by bit, as we became friends, as some of his own colleagues wrote memoirs of childhood survival, as my own interests turned towards the war. During my research, I found a recollection, by his mother, of their time in hiding in Warsaw. It turned out that he had helped her to write it.

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Well Educated People and the Profoundly Ignorant – The Team Opposing Anti-Imperialist Solidarity With Ukraine

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James Doyle responds to this post :

Correcting Mandel – Why Arming Ukraine is the Road to Peace

Source :

Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace

It’s amazing how Amerocentric Campism enables some extremely well educated people in the west – as well as many of the profoundly ignorant – to declare their positions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine (part 2) without knowing even the basics of the socio-political realities which precipitated the invasion.

Someone like Mandel has to ignore everything which has happened from Kazakhstan to Moldova, and from 1999 to 2023 – as well as Putin’s rule over the Russian people itself and how it has affected civic, minority, and labour rights – in favour of narrowing his narrative on the “causes” of the Russian invasion to what happened in the Donbas and Crimea between February 2014 and February 2022… and even then he cannot make this argument in good faith, instead following an epistemology based on ignoring easily provable factual events in favour of bald reductio-ad-NATO absurdism.

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Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace

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This is a very good polemical article, written by the Canadian author David Gutnick, examining Professor David Mandel’s calls for Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and negotiate with Russia immediately.

The source is :

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières

David Gutnick’s article was originally published in :

Canadian Dimension

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/correcting-mandel-why-arming-ukraine-is-the-road-to-peace

Monday 14 August 2023, by GUTNICK David

Correcting Mandel: Why arming Ukraine is the road to peace

“Pacifism has its place, but not here and not now,” writes David Gutnick

Street art in support of Ukraine on the side of a pub in Belfast, March 1, 2022. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

David Mandel and I share much more in common than our given name. We’re both French-speaking Anglophones who live in Montréal. Like professor Mandel, I worked for decades at a publicly funded institution: he taught at universities, while I produced documentaries for CBC Radio. We both consider ourselves humanists who want to help build a kinder, more democratic and socialist world.

But while reading Mandel’s August 2 piece in this publication, it became clear that we profoundly disagree on how to get there.

In a nutshell, Mandel calls for Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and negotiate with Russia immediately, while I—following the lead of Ukrainians—believe the country needs more arms: the deadlier the better, unfortunately.

Mandel—like Vladimir Putin—says his position is the humanist one, as it will save lives.

I think that is wrongheaded. A wealth of evidence proves Volodymyr Zelensky’s position is right: Russia’s present leadership is bloodthirsty, intent on building an untrustworthy imperialist power. Putin slaughtered Chechens and Georgians when they would not submit to Russian domination, and now he is slaughtering Ukrainians. He will not hesitate to slaughter whoever is next to get in his way.

Humanists think of peace-building in the long term, and that means standing up to aggression now, not turning the other cheek.

Pacifism has its place, but not here and not now.

Unless Putin pulls back his army, Ukrainians have no choice but to fight.

Mandel writes that over the decades he has been “opposed to the policies of the regimes of these states, which were and remain deeply hostile to workers’ interests.”

We share that view.

But since the first Russian tanks illegally crossed Ukraine’s border into Crimea on February 20, 2014, then again into Kyiv on February 24, 2022, it is not just “workers’ interests” which have suffered: tens of thousands of Ukrainian trade unionists, kindergarten monitors, university students, mothers and fathers and innocent children have been killed by Russian invaders.

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Ernie Tate’s “Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s”

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Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s, Volume One, Canada 1955-1965By Ernie Tate268 pages. Resistance Books. $15.00 Revolutionary Activism in …

Ernie Tate’s “Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s”

Ernest (Ernie) Tate was born in 1934 in the Shankill Road, heart of Protestant Belfast. In 1955 at the age of 21 he migrated to Canada and within a year had become a member of the Canadian Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist Educational League.

Louis Proyect writes a wonderful tribute to Tate, one of the founders of the British International Marxist Group and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the 1960s, who has died from cancer at the age of 86 at his home in Toronto. He played a vital role in a campaign that would re-shape the British far left.

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