Activists in Houston, Texas designing signs for Inauguration Day protests. Photo: Vivek Venkatraman
Demonstrators mobilizing in over 40 US states to launch movement pledging to oppose “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”
Demonstrations have been called in more than 80 US cities, in over 40 states, on the day of incoming President Donald Trump’s inauguration. These cities include Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte, Montgomery, Chicago, Houston, and New Orleans.
These demonstrations, intended to mark the start of a movement against Trump’s “ultra-right, billionaire agenda”, have been endorsed by a variety of working class and grassroots organizations. These include the Party for Socialism and Liberation, United Auto Workers Local 4811, the Palestinian Youth Movement, United Educators of San Francisco, Black Men Build, the Democratic Socialists of America, the People’s Forum, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, the US Palestinian Community Network, UNITE HERE Local 2, Artists Against Apartheid, CODEPINK, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and Dream Defenders.
Conveners of the demonstrations have spoken to the variety of Trump’s promised attacks on working people. “Trump is planning to wage war on immigrant families through a brutal mass deportation campaign,” said Claudia De La Cruz, who ran on a socialist platform in her campaign for president against both Harris and Trump, on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. “We will stand up and say NO to these attacks. Trump is a billionaire, was elected with the help of other billionaires, and runs the government on behalf of the billionaire class. All working people, no matter where you were born, should stand together in solidarity against the billionaire class that wants to rob and exploit us all.”
Brian Becker, the national director of the ANSWER Coalition, does not believe Trump’s promises to “put American Workers first.” According to Becker, Trump “ran a con game during the election.”
“His real agenda is to destroy worker’s rights, deport millions of immigrant families,” Becker said. Trump plans to “pave the way for a complete corporate takeover by ending regulations to protect the environment, firing thousands of public sector workers, and transferring ever-larger parts of the national treasury to the military industrial complex.”
Manolo De Los Santos, Executive Director of The People’s Forum, said, “The Trump victory in the 2024 election represents the complete failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of the ultra-right.”
“We can defeat the Trump program not by following the Democratic Party establishment, but by building a massive movement against the ruling class and the political system that gives everything to billionaires while impoverishing an ever larger section of the population.”
Majority describe UK’s Labour government as sleazy. Source: YouGov.Keir Starmer justifies why he has to travel abroad so muchKeir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefiting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity.Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner calls for police to kill and harass innocent people.
Across the 2000s, a series of child sex exploitation cases affected British towns, including Telford, Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham, scarring the lives of hundreds of children. In 2011, Times journalist Andrew Norfolk reported that networks – so-called “grooming gangs” – of largely British Asian men of Pakistani heritage had trafficked and raped hundreds of mainly girls and young women.
These are facts that are widely known in the UK and have been the subject of multiple investigations. The 2014 Jay report found that authorities had been slow to act, sometimes for fear of being accused of racism.
Police had in some cases blamed victims, criminalising children as prostitutes. Alexis Jay, who also led the 2022 independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, has noted the “appalling and lifelong effects” of abuse on victims.
Elon Musk – the billionaire owner of social media platform X and incoming lead on US government efficiency – has, it seems, just found out about this devastating national scandal.
In a series of posts on X, Musk politicised these crimes to denounce Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “evil”, and to call for a new general election in the UK. He also reposted the anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, calling for his release from prison where he is serving 18 months for contempt of court.
Musk portrayed Robinson as campaigning to expose the “truth” about grooming, as though the story had not been subject to widespread investigation, media coverage and public debate.
Of course, women’s rights within our criminal justice and political systems desperately need to be improved. But, Musk is no cheerleader for women and there is no evidence that he is “genuinely incensed” by child sexual exploitation.
Musk has not shown an interest in women’s rights or sexual abuse before. If he had, he might not have accepted a job in the administration of Donald Trump, a man found liable for sexual abuse.
Musk’s newfound interest evidently isn’t in all sex offences – apparently just those perpetrated by “Muslim men” against white women. He has not shown any obvious interest in cases where Muslim women were also abused, nor does he have much if anything to say about abuse perpetrated by white men.
He appears to support women’s protections when they are politically useful to him in fanning division – a common far-right tactic.
Musk has supported far-right actors, reinstating Tommy Robinson to X in November 2023, just in time for him to organise a mass rally at the Cenotaph in London, stoking division and, as I noted at the time, threatening democracy. He has also recently written in support of Germany’s anti-Islam party the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and hosted its leader Alice Weidel in live discussion on X.
By publicising the UK’s “grooming gangs” scandal, Musk has aligned himself with a gendered narrative: it is men’s duty to protect women – even when it means breaking rules or using force. This gender binary – strong men must be ready to use force to protect weak women, especially from hostile alien men – is the core narrative of patriarchal, nationalist, ultra nationalist and also Nazi groups.
It is highly racialised – only vulnerable white women matter – and it relates to class, in that it regards white, liberal women as betraying working-class girls. Musk has singled out Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and “wicked witch”, thereby putting her at risk.
Exploiting women victims, protecting patriarchy
The recent attack on Phillips reveals Musk’s call to protect women for what it really is: a means to protect powerful men. Feminist women are understood as fair targets, because they challenge a gender order in which men have natural dominance.
Patriarchy protects (some) men by positioning men’s role as leaders and fighters, protectors and providers, for nation and family, wives and children. This is protection without care, which is gendered as feminine, and weak. It is protection as a means of control.
Musk is not in a position of moral authority regarding either protection or care. Before his takeover, social media platform Twitter appeared to care for workers, prioritising health and wellbeing.
The ethos of X is the opposite: Musk has gutted staff numbers, and transformed workplace practices aimed at safeguarding both employees and users. He now promises to do the same across the US government as head of efficiency in the Trump administration.
Social media has always been a space in which women are at risk of both personal and structural misogyny; these harms are amplified through Musk’s approach to X. Musk has sought to amplify the voices of influencers who decry women’s rights.
Musk has reposted Andrew Tate, who police in the UK have linked to an epidemic of misogyny and violence against women, and who has faced charges of rape and sex trafficking. He has allowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to use X to promote the phrase “your body, my choice”. There is no real protection here, no care – only white men’s control of women.
Race to the bottom
Where Musk leads, others follow. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has recently ceded fact-checking to the “community”, and noted the need for a more “masculine” and “aggressive” corporate culture. Zuckerberg also ended the company’s diversity equity and inclusion policy, which minorities rely upon for some degree of workplace protection.
In an age of strong-man politics, where young men are choosing role models from a marketplace of competing masculinities, hypermasculinity wins. Young men aged 18-29 voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the US elections, supported by men’s rights activists in the online “manosphere”. Musk knows this.
Musk has money and social media power, but he is a “tech bro” – a “nerd”. Exploiting the horror of British child sexual exploitation scandals has enabled him to attempt to assert himself as a protector of women – a hero of the forgotten.
He has amplified a far-right political position, and the voices of far-right actors he believes embody this, like Robinson. But Musk has no moral authority to speak on the protection of women, or on care more generally.
Those British politicians cynically lauding Musk’s apparently protective stance on women to attack the government – and the UK’s parliamentary democracy – should recognise this is nothing but hypocrisy. And, from that perspective, Musk has no authority to dictate the political agenda on girls’ and women’s rights in Britain, or anywhere else.
Then-U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on wildfires with local and federal fire and emergency officials in Sacramento, California on September 14, 2020. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
One observer blasted MAGA’s “conflagration of lies and disinformation.”
Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called “Newscum”—of refusing “to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water… to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”
Newsom’s office responded to Trump’s accusation by correctly noting that “there is no such document as the water restoration declaration.”
Trump also accused Newsom of wanting “to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water,” a red herring and false statement given that the state’s plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.
Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got “nothing right” in his post.
Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here’s what did happen… During Trump’s first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.
This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles’ fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA’s “conflagration of lies and disinformation.”
“Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we’re getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future,” Pahwa said.
“In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes,” Pahwa added. “Climate change doesn’t just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too.”
Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen’s Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that “a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”
“This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil’s conduct,” Regunberg asserted.
As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, “This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon’s own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels.”
According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.
