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Some of the groups targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO.
This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971--while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold--a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.
Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:
I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.
Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy--known as COINTELPRO--to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in and the government treachery it revealed is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students--and all the rest of us--should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.
In recent years, current events discussions in my high school history and government classes have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. In looking at the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to these injustices, my class came across a 2015 Oregonian article, "Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags." The article detailed the department's digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. My students debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable. Most thought it was not. But what the Oregonian did not note in the article, and what my students had no way of knowing, was the history of this story--the ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during the COINTELPRO era.
My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO. Though COINTELPRO offers teachers a trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, it is entirely absent from my school's government book, Magruder's American Government (Pearson).
One district textbook for U.S. history teachers investigating Black activism of the 1950s and 1960s is American Odyssey (McGraw Hill). In a section titled "The Movement Appraised," the book sums up the end of the Civil Rights Movement:
Without strong leadership in the years following King's death, the civil rights movement floundered. Middle-class Americans, both African American and white, tired of the violence and the struggle. The war in Vietnam and crime in the streets at home became the new issue at the forefront of the nation's consciousness.
Here we find a slew of problematic assertions about the era, plus a notable absence. Nowhere does American Odyssey indicate that, in addition to King's death and Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement also had to contend with a declaration of war made against it by its own government.
American Odyssey is not alone in its omission. American Journey (Pearson), another textbook used in my school, similarly makes no mention of the program.
The only textbook in my district to mention COINTELPRO is America: A Concise History (St. Martin's), a college-level Advanced Placement history text. Limited to a single sentence, its summary and analysis is wholly incomplete: "In the late 1960s SDS and other antiwar groups fell victim to police harassment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CIA agents infiltrated and disrupted radical organizations."
Why do textbook writers and publishers leave out this crucial episode in U.S. history? Perhaps they take their cues from the FBI itself. According to the FBI website:
The FBI began COINTELPRO--short for Counterintelligence Program--in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of 1 percent of the FBI's workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging First Amendment rights and for other reasons.
Apparently, mainstream textbooks have accepted--hook, line, and sinker--the FBI's whitewash of COINTELPRO as "limited in scope" and applying to only a few organizations. But COINTELPRO was neither "limited in scope" nor applied only to the organizations listed in the FBI's description.
Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover describes the goal of one arm of COINTELPRO--against the Black liberation movement--in a now-declassified 1967 document:
The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.
The plan to "neutralize" Black activists included legal harassment, intimidation, wiretapping, infiltration, smear campaigns, and blackmail, and resulted in countless prison sentences and, in the case of Black Panther Fred Hampton and others, murder. This scope of operations can hardly be described as "limited." Moreover, these tactics were employed not just against every national civil rights organization but also against the antiwar movement (particularly on college campuses), Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and others.
One way to appreciate the wide net cast by COINTELPRO is to look at the final report of the Church Committee. In the early 1970s, following a number of allegations in the press about over-reaching government intelligence operations, a Senate committee chaired by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho began an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Their 1976 report states: "The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau [FBI] has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order." In other words, anyone who challenged the status quo of racism, militarism, and capitalism in American society was fair game for surveillance and harassment. Rather than "limited," the FBI's scope potentially included all social and political activists, an alarming and outrageous revelation in a country purportedly governed by the protections of speech and assembly in the First Amendment.
Luckily, we do not need to rely on corporate textbook publishers and the FBI for our resources and curriculum. Thanks to the Media burglars, and their suitcases full of stolen documents, we now have access to memos from this FBI program of destruction. In my curriculum, I have pulled together documents from the FBI's website and from the book The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, edited by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. These documents reveal the FBI's attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Black Panthers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and others; they reveal an attempt to blackmail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. using illegally acquired recordings of purported marital infidelities, and a suggestion that he commit suicide. They reveal campaigns of misinformation, where FBI agents planted lies in newspaper and magazine coverage of activists.
I also use the fabulous episode "A Nation of Law?" from the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which details COINTELPRO's 1969 murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago. Hampton--a leader of Chicago's Black Panther Party--was a young and inspiring advocate of Black liberation attempting to build a "rainbow coalition" of groups across racial lines. After months of official harassment, he was shot and killed during an FBI-sponsored police raid on his home as he slept in his bed. He was 21 years old.
Together, these resources provide students an opportunity to understand the government-sponsored war against Black activists. And though the COINTELPRO documents have long been public, it is a story that history textbooks continue to ignore, leaving students to swallow the false assertion of books like American Odyssey that the movement simply "floundered" after King's death.
Textbook publishers' disregard for the history of COINTELPRO is one more example of the crucial importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that lays bare the systemic dangers faced by Black people in America while simultaneously affirming and celebrating Black life. What I attempt in my classroom is a Black Lives Matter treatment of COINTELPRO, where we reveal the injustice of the program while affirming and celebrating the promise of the activists it sought to silence. Just as Black Lives Matter activists use video footage to convince a wider public of what African Americans have long known about police brutality, teachers can use our classrooms to shine a light on history that has long been available but systematically ignored by our textbooks. We need a curriculum that emphatically communicates: Black history matters.
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This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971--while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold--a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.
Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:
I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.
Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy--known as COINTELPRO--to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in and the government treachery it revealed is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students--and all the rest of us--should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.
In recent years, current events discussions in my high school history and government classes have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. In looking at the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to these injustices, my class came across a 2015 Oregonian article, "Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags." The article detailed the department's digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. My students debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable. Most thought it was not. But what the Oregonian did not note in the article, and what my students had no way of knowing, was the history of this story--the ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during the COINTELPRO era.
My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO. Though COINTELPRO offers teachers a trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, it is entirely absent from my school's government book, Magruder's American Government (Pearson).
One district textbook for U.S. history teachers investigating Black activism of the 1950s and 1960s is American Odyssey (McGraw Hill). In a section titled "The Movement Appraised," the book sums up the end of the Civil Rights Movement:
Without strong leadership in the years following King's death, the civil rights movement floundered. Middle-class Americans, both African American and white, tired of the violence and the struggle. The war in Vietnam and crime in the streets at home became the new issue at the forefront of the nation's consciousness.
Here we find a slew of problematic assertions about the era, plus a notable absence. Nowhere does American Odyssey indicate that, in addition to King's death and Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement also had to contend with a declaration of war made against it by its own government.
American Odyssey is not alone in its omission. American Journey (Pearson), another textbook used in my school, similarly makes no mention of the program.
The only textbook in my district to mention COINTELPRO is America: A Concise History (St. Martin's), a college-level Advanced Placement history text. Limited to a single sentence, its summary and analysis is wholly incomplete: "In the late 1960s SDS and other antiwar groups fell victim to police harassment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CIA agents infiltrated and disrupted radical organizations."
Why do textbook writers and publishers leave out this crucial episode in U.S. history? Perhaps they take their cues from the FBI itself. According to the FBI website:
The FBI began COINTELPRO--short for Counterintelligence Program--in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of 1 percent of the FBI's workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging First Amendment rights and for other reasons.
Apparently, mainstream textbooks have accepted--hook, line, and sinker--the FBI's whitewash of COINTELPRO as "limited in scope" and applying to only a few organizations. But COINTELPRO was neither "limited in scope" nor applied only to the organizations listed in the FBI's description.
Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover describes the goal of one arm of COINTELPRO--against the Black liberation movement--in a now-declassified 1967 document:
The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.
The plan to "neutralize" Black activists included legal harassment, intimidation, wiretapping, infiltration, smear campaigns, and blackmail, and resulted in countless prison sentences and, in the case of Black Panther Fred Hampton and others, murder. This scope of operations can hardly be described as "limited." Moreover, these tactics were employed not just against every national civil rights organization but also against the antiwar movement (particularly on college campuses), Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and others.
One way to appreciate the wide net cast by COINTELPRO is to look at the final report of the Church Committee. In the early 1970s, following a number of allegations in the press about over-reaching government intelligence operations, a Senate committee chaired by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho began an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Their 1976 report states: "The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau [FBI] has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order." In other words, anyone who challenged the status quo of racism, militarism, and capitalism in American society was fair game for surveillance and harassment. Rather than "limited," the FBI's scope potentially included all social and political activists, an alarming and outrageous revelation in a country purportedly governed by the protections of speech and assembly in the First Amendment.
Luckily, we do not need to rely on corporate textbook publishers and the FBI for our resources and curriculum. Thanks to the Media burglars, and their suitcases full of stolen documents, we now have access to memos from this FBI program of destruction. In my curriculum, I have pulled together documents from the FBI's website and from the book The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, edited by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. These documents reveal the FBI's attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Black Panthers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and others; they reveal an attempt to blackmail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. using illegally acquired recordings of purported marital infidelities, and a suggestion that he commit suicide. They reveal campaigns of misinformation, where FBI agents planted lies in newspaper and magazine coverage of activists.
I also use the fabulous episode "A Nation of Law?" from the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which details COINTELPRO's 1969 murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago. Hampton--a leader of Chicago's Black Panther Party--was a young and inspiring advocate of Black liberation attempting to build a "rainbow coalition" of groups across racial lines. After months of official harassment, he was shot and killed during an FBI-sponsored police raid on his home as he slept in his bed. He was 21 years old.
Together, these resources provide students an opportunity to understand the government-sponsored war against Black activists. And though the COINTELPRO documents have long been public, it is a story that history textbooks continue to ignore, leaving students to swallow the false assertion of books like American Odyssey that the movement simply "floundered" after King's death.
Textbook publishers' disregard for the history of COINTELPRO is one more example of the crucial importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that lays bare the systemic dangers faced by Black people in America while simultaneously affirming and celebrating Black life. What I attempt in my classroom is a Black Lives Matter treatment of COINTELPRO, where we reveal the injustice of the program while affirming and celebrating the promise of the activists it sought to silence. Just as Black Lives Matter activists use video footage to convince a wider public of what African Americans have long known about police brutality, teachers can use our classrooms to shine a light on history that has long been available but systematically ignored by our textbooks. We need a curriculum that emphatically communicates: Black history matters.
This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971--while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold--a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.
Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:
I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.
Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy--known as COINTELPRO--to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in and the government treachery it revealed is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students--and all the rest of us--should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.
In recent years, current events discussions in my high school history and government classes have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. In looking at the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to these injustices, my class came across a 2015 Oregonian article, "Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags." The article detailed the department's digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. My students debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable. Most thought it was not. But what the Oregonian did not note in the article, and what my students had no way of knowing, was the history of this story--the ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during the COINTELPRO era.
My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO. Though COINTELPRO offers teachers a trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, it is entirely absent from my school's government book, Magruder's American Government (Pearson).
One district textbook for U.S. history teachers investigating Black activism of the 1950s and 1960s is American Odyssey (McGraw Hill). In a section titled "The Movement Appraised," the book sums up the end of the Civil Rights Movement:
Without strong leadership in the years following King's death, the civil rights movement floundered. Middle-class Americans, both African American and white, tired of the violence and the struggle. The war in Vietnam and crime in the streets at home became the new issue at the forefront of the nation's consciousness.
Here we find a slew of problematic assertions about the era, plus a notable absence. Nowhere does American Odyssey indicate that, in addition to King's death and Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement also had to contend with a declaration of war made against it by its own government.
American Odyssey is not alone in its omission. American Journey (Pearson), another textbook used in my school, similarly makes no mention of the program.
The only textbook in my district to mention COINTELPRO is America: A Concise History (St. Martin's), a college-level Advanced Placement history text. Limited to a single sentence, its summary and analysis is wholly incomplete: "In the late 1960s SDS and other antiwar groups fell victim to police harassment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CIA agents infiltrated and disrupted radical organizations."
Why do textbook writers and publishers leave out this crucial episode in U.S. history? Perhaps they take their cues from the FBI itself. According to the FBI website:
The FBI began COINTELPRO--short for Counterintelligence Program--in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of 1 percent of the FBI's workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging First Amendment rights and for other reasons.
Apparently, mainstream textbooks have accepted--hook, line, and sinker--the FBI's whitewash of COINTELPRO as "limited in scope" and applying to only a few organizations. But COINTELPRO was neither "limited in scope" nor applied only to the organizations listed in the FBI's description.
Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover describes the goal of one arm of COINTELPRO--against the Black liberation movement--in a now-declassified 1967 document:
The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.
The plan to "neutralize" Black activists included legal harassment, intimidation, wiretapping, infiltration, smear campaigns, and blackmail, and resulted in countless prison sentences and, in the case of Black Panther Fred Hampton and others, murder. This scope of operations can hardly be described as "limited." Moreover, these tactics were employed not just against every national civil rights organization but also against the antiwar movement (particularly on college campuses), Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and others.
One way to appreciate the wide net cast by COINTELPRO is to look at the final report of the Church Committee. In the early 1970s, following a number of allegations in the press about over-reaching government intelligence operations, a Senate committee chaired by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho began an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Their 1976 report states: "The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau [FBI] has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order." In other words, anyone who challenged the status quo of racism, militarism, and capitalism in American society was fair game for surveillance and harassment. Rather than "limited," the FBI's scope potentially included all social and political activists, an alarming and outrageous revelation in a country purportedly governed by the protections of speech and assembly in the First Amendment.
Luckily, we do not need to rely on corporate textbook publishers and the FBI for our resources and curriculum. Thanks to the Media burglars, and their suitcases full of stolen documents, we now have access to memos from this FBI program of destruction. In my curriculum, I have pulled together documents from the FBI's website and from the book The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, edited by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. These documents reveal the FBI's attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Black Panthers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and others; they reveal an attempt to blackmail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. using illegally acquired recordings of purported marital infidelities, and a suggestion that he commit suicide. They reveal campaigns of misinformation, where FBI agents planted lies in newspaper and magazine coverage of activists.
I also use the fabulous episode "A Nation of Law?" from the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which details COINTELPRO's 1969 murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago. Hampton--a leader of Chicago's Black Panther Party--was a young and inspiring advocate of Black liberation attempting to build a "rainbow coalition" of groups across racial lines. After months of official harassment, he was shot and killed during an FBI-sponsored police raid on his home as he slept in his bed. He was 21 years old.
Together, these resources provide students an opportunity to understand the government-sponsored war against Black activists. And though the COINTELPRO documents have long been public, it is a story that history textbooks continue to ignore, leaving students to swallow the false assertion of books like American Odyssey that the movement simply "floundered" after King's death.
Textbook publishers' disregard for the history of COINTELPRO is one more example of the crucial importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that lays bare the systemic dangers faced by Black people in America while simultaneously affirming and celebrating Black life. What I attempt in my classroom is a Black Lives Matter treatment of COINTELPRO, where we reveal the injustice of the program while affirming and celebrating the promise of the activists it sought to silence. Just as Black Lives Matter activists use video footage to convince a wider public of what African Americans have long known about police brutality, teachers can use our classrooms to shine a light on history that has long been available but systematically ignored by our textbooks. We need a curriculum that emphatically communicates: Black history matters.
"Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires," said one critic. "It is as malicious as it is absurd."
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration faced an onslaught of criticism on Tuesday for starting the process of repealing the 2009 legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people—which has enabled federal regulations aimed at the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency over the past 15 years.
Confirming reports from last week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled the rule to rescind the 2009 "endangerment finding" at a truck dealership in Indiana. According to The New York Times, he said that "the proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States."
If the administration succeeds in repealing the legal finding, the EPA would lack authority under the Clean Air Act to impose standards for greenhouse gas emissions—meaning the move would kill vehicle regulations. As with the reporting last week, the formal announcement was sharply condemned by climate and health advocates and experts.
"Greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and are the root cause of the climate crisis," said Deanna Noël with Public Citizen's Climate Program, ripping the administration's effort as "grossly misguided and exceptionally dangerous."
"This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
"Stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases is like throwing away the fire extinguisher while the house is already burning," she warned. "The administration is shamelessly handing Big Oil a hall pass to pollute unchecked and dodge accountability, leaving working families to bear the costs through worsening health outcomes, rising energy bills, more climate-fueled extreme weather, and an increasingly unstable future. This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
Noël was far from alone in accusing the administration's leaders of serving the polluters who helped Trump return to power.
"Zeldin and Trump are concerned only with maximizing short-term profits for polluting corporations and the CEOs funneling millions of dollars to their campaign coffers," said Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch. "Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires. It is as malicious as it is absurd."
Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, similarly said that the proposal is "purely a political bow to the oil industry" and "Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people's health."
Earthworks policy director Lauren Pagel also called the rule "a perverse gift to the fossil fuel industry that rejects yearslong efforts by the agency, scientists, NGOs, frontline communities, and industry to protect public health and our environment."
"Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are playing with fire—and with floods and droughts and public health risks, too," she stressed, as about 168 million Americans on Tuesday faced advisories for extreme heat made more likely by the climate crisis.
🚨 The Trump administration just took its most extreme step yet in rolling back climate protections.
[image or embed]
— Sierra Club (@sierraclub.org) July 29, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents over 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said that the repeal plan "is reckless and will have far-reaching, disastrous consequences for the USA."
"EPA career professionals have worked for decades on the development of the science and policy of greenhouse gases to protect the American public," he continued, "and this policy decision completely disregards all of their work in service to the public."
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) highlighted that Chris Wright, head of the Department of Energy, joined Zeldin at the Tuesday press conference and "announced a DOE 'climate science study' alongside remarks that were rife with climate denial talking points and disinformation."
UCS president Gretchen Goldman said that "it's abundantly clear what's going on here. The Trump administration refuses to acknowledge robust climate science and is using the kitchen sink approach: making every specious argument it can to avoid complying with the law."
"But getting around the Clean Air Act won't be easy," she added. "The science establishing climate harms to human health was unequivocally clear back in 2009, and more than 15 years later, the evidence has only accumulated."
Today, Zeldin’s EPA plans to release a proposal to revoke the Endangerment Finding, which is the legal & scientific foundation of EPA’s responsibility to limit climate-heating greenhouse gas pollution from major sources.
[image or embed]
— Moms Clean Air Force (@momscleanairforce.org) July 29, 2025 at 12:58 PM
David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, was a lead attorney in the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts vs. EPA, which affirmed the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and ultimately led to the endangerment finding two years later.
Bookbinder said Tuesday that "because this approach has already been rejected by the courts—and doubtless will be again—this baseless effort to pretend that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not harmful pollutants is nothing more than a transparent attempt to delay and derail our efforts to control greenhouse pollution at the worst possible time, when deadly floods and heat waves are killing more people every day."
In a statement from the Environmental Protection Network, which is made up of ex-EPA staff, Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the agency's Office of Air and Radiation, also cited the 2007 ruling.
"This decision is both legally indefensible and morally bankrupt," Goffman said of the Tuesday proposal. "The Supreme Court made clear that EPA cannot ignore science or evade its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act. By walking away from the endangerment finding, EPA has not only broken with precedent; it has broken with reality."
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, responded to the EPA proposal with defiance, declaring that "Donald Trump and his Big Oil donors are lighting the world on fire and fueling their private jets with young people's lives. We refuse to be sacrifices for their greed. We're coming for them, and we're not backing down."
Israel has already summarily rejected the U.K. leader's ultimatum to take "substantive" steps to end the war on Gaza by September, agree to a two-state solution, and reject West Bank annexation.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer was accused of "political grandstanding" after he said Tuesday that his country would recognize Palestinian statehood if Israel did not take ambiguously defined steps to end its war on Gaza—conditions that were promptly dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the U.K. will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a cease-fire, and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution," Starmer said during a press conference.
"This includes allowing the U.N. to restart the supply of aid and making clear that there will be no annexations in the West Bank," the prime minister continued, adding that "the terrorists of Hamas... must immediately release all of the hostages, sign up to a cease-fire, disarm, and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza."
Member of Scottish Parliament Scott Greer (Scottish Greens-West Scotland) responded to Tuesday's announcement on social media, saying, "Starmer wouldn't threaten to withdraw U.K. recognition of Israel, but he's made recognition of Palestinian statehood conditional on the actions of their genocidal oppressor?"
"Another profoundly unjust act from a Labour government thoroughly complicit in Israel's crimes," Greer added.
British attorney and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu asserted that "Keir Starmer knows his time is up and pivots to save his career but it's too late."
"By placing a condition on recognizing Palestine this declaration is performative and disingenuous because before September he can claim Israel has substantively complied with the condition," she added.
Leftist politician and Accountability Archive co-founder Philip Proudfoot argued on social media that "decent" Members of Parliament "need to table a no-confidence motion in Starmer now."
"He has just used the recognition of Palestine as a bargaining chip in exchange for Israel following its BASIC LEGAL OBLIGATIONS," he added. "This is one of the lowest political acts in living memory."
Media critic Sana Saeed said on social media, "Using Palestinian life and future as a bargaining chip and threat to Israel—not a surprise from kid starver Keir Starmer."
Journalist Sangita Myska argued that "rather than threatening the gesture politics of recognizing a Palestinian state (that may never happen)," Starmer should expel Israel's ambassador to the U.K., impose "full trade sanctions" and a "full arms embargo," and end alleged Royal Air Force surveillance flights over Gaza.
Political analyst Bushra Shaikh accused Starmer of "political grandstanding" and "speaking from both sides of his mouth."
Starmer's announcement followed a Monday meeting in Turnberry, Scotland with U.S. President Donald Trump, who signaled that he would not object to U.K. recognition of Palestine.
However, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce called Starmer's announcement "a slap in the face for the victims of October 7," a reference to the Hamas-led attack of 2023.
While the United States remains Israel's staunchest supporter and enabler—providing billions of dollars in annual armed aid and diplomatic cover—Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have all expressed concerns over mounting starvation deaths in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the U.N.-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that a "worst-case" famine scenario is developing in Gaza, where health officials say at least 147 Palestinians, including at least 88 children, have died from malnutrition since Israel launched its obliteration and siege of the enclave following the October 2023 attack.
Israel—which imposed a "complete siege" on Gaza following that attack—has severely limited the amount of humanitarian aid that can enter the strip. According to U.N. officials, Israel Defense Forces troops have killed more than 1,000 aid-seeking civilians at distribution points run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. IDF troops have said they were ordered to shoot live bullets and artillery shells at aid seekers.
Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and weaponized starvation—responded to the U.K. prime minister's ultimatum in a social media post stating, "Starmer rewards Hamas' monstrous terrorism and punishes its victims."
"A jihadist state on Israel's border TODAY will threaten Britain TOMORROW," Netanyahu said. "Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails. It will fail you too. It will not happen."
The U.K. played a critical role in the foundation of the modern state of Israel, allowing Jewish colonization of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine under condition that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," who made up more than 90% of the population.
Seeing that Jewish immigrants returning to their ancestral homeland were usurping the indigenous Arabs of Palestine, the British subsequently prohibited further Zionist colonization. This sparked a nearly decadelong wave of terrorism and other attacks against the British occupiers that ultimately resulted in the U.K. abandoning Palestine and the establishment of Israel under the authority of the United Nations—an outcome achieved by the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.
On the topic of annexing the West Bank, earlier this month, all 15 Israeli government ministers representing Netanyahu's Likud party recommended the move, citing support from Trump. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found last year that Israel's occupation of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, is an illegal form of apartheid.
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country would announce its formal recognition of Palestinian statehood during September's U.N. General Assembly in New York. France is set to become the first Group of Seven nation to recognize Palestine, which is currently officially acknowledged by approximately 150 of the 193 U.N. member states.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz subsequently threatened "severe consequences" for nations that recognize Palestine.
Starmer's announcement came on the same day that the Gaza Health Ministry said that the death toll from Israel's 662-day assault and siege on Gaza—which is the subject of a South Africa-led genocide case at the ICJ—topped 60,000. However, multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet have concluded that Gaza officials' casualty tallies are likely significant undercounts.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked a founding partner of pollster Zenith Research.
A new poll of the New York City mayoral race found that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is very well positioned to win later this year and that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is only competitive in the race if every other Mamdani opponent drops out.
The survey, which was conducted by polling firm Zenith Research, showed Mamdani holding what Zenith founding partner Adam Carlson described on X as a "commanding" lead of 28 points among likely voters in a five-way race featuring Cuomo, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and independent candidate Jim Walden. Even in other scenarios where other candidates drop out of the race, Mamdani would still garner more than 50% of likely votes in each instance.
However, Mamdani's lead becomes much smaller when the poll is expanded to all registered voters, among whom he only holds a three-point advantage over Cuomo in a head-to-head matchup. This suggests that Cuomo has room to grow as long as he can convince Adams, Sliwa, and Walden to exit the race.
Even so, commented Carlson, Cuomo faces significant headwinds that could block his path to victory even if he succeeds somehow in making it a one-on-one race.
"Another thing that’s extremely tough for Cuomo is that 60% of likely voters (as well as 52% of registered voters) would not even consider voting for him," he explained. "Only 32% say they wouldn't consider voting for Mamdani. Cuomo will need to go scorched earth to bring that number up."
New Yorkers who oppose Mamdani will have to place their hopes in the disgraced former governor, given the dismal standing held by incumbent Adams.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked Carlson. "He polls at 7% in the five-way race, 14% if Cuomo drops out, and 32% if Cuomo and Sliwa drop out. More than half of [likely voters] strongly disapprove of his performance and have a very unfavorable view of him. 68% won't consider voting for him."
The poll also found Mamdani with an overall lead among Jewish voters despite efforts by opponents to paint him as antisemitic given his opposition to Israel's war in Gaza and his past reluctance to criticize the slogan "globalize the intifada," which he told The Bulwark he viewed as "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights." New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive Jewish ally of Mamdani's who has endorsed his mayoral bid, acknowledged before the election that some Jewish people view the phrase as a threat of violence.
Among likely Jewish voters, Mamdani leads Cuomo by 17 points in a five-way race. Although Cuomo holds a double-digit lead over Mamdani among likely Jewish voters over the age of 45, Mamdani dominates among young Jewish voters by pulling in more than two-thirds of likely Jewish voters between the ages of 18 and 44.