Dear Progressive Reader,

Today is the fifty-fourth anniversary of the killing of four students at Kent State University in Ohio. On May 4, 1970, amid ongoing student protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam, National Guard troops, called in to quell the demonstrations, fired into the crowd using live ammunition. Four students were killed and nine others wounded. Eight of the Guard members were charged with violating the civil rights of the students, but acquitted by a judge later that year. The sixty-seven rounds fired at the unarmed, peaceful protesters truly became “shots heard ’round the world,” and still echo in our political memory today.

This week, as student protests against the war in Gaza, and the role of the United States government in funding and supporting it, continue on campuses across the country, a number of our writers look at these events through a historical and political lens. Samer Badawi visited Kent State this week and reports, “Centering Gaza . . . is a key theme of the campus protest movement, which now includes more than a hundred student encampments globally, most of them in the United States.” Students at Kent, Badawi reports, say “the anniversary should encourage administrators to listen to the students’ demands.” Those demands vary across the country as students at Columbia, CUNY, Northwestern, UW-Madison, UCLA, and so many other campuses form tent encampments and call for their institutions to divest from the corporations that are profiting from this war, and for administrators to pressure elected officials to call for an immediate ceasefire.

Stephen Zunes also makes the comparison to the 1980s student calls for universities and colleges to divest from companies that supported apartheid in South Africa. But, he notes, “Unlike apartheid-era South Africa, many universities aren’t even recognizing Israel’s human rights abuses.” The repression of these protests, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, represents a new interpretation of “free speech”—as speech that does not disrupt. As Hank Kalet and Sean T. Mitchell, both of whom teach at Rutgers University, point out, “The crackdowns on pro-Palestine protesters recast protected speech as harassment, and have little to do with protecting Jewish students from antisemitic threats.” They note that “Rutgers is the first public university to be targeted by Congress as part of this growing rightwing campaign, though it was not the first to feature student encampments.” Morgan Sanchez, an associate professor at San Jose State University, notes in an op-ed, “A disturbing trend is taking place on America’s most prestigious campuses: university presidents are wielding police as a violent threat against student protesters and the faculty who support them. This situation raises a critical question: Should the United States be a country where demonstrators can be arrested for protesting apartheid?” And, Sarah Gertler of the Institute for Policy Studies opines, “For young Jews like me, there’s nothing antisemitic about calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. . . . Instead of joining the powerful who are silencing our speech, we should join the students protecting it.”

Also this week, Brian Gilmore reviews a new book by Israeli-American journalist Asaf Elia-Shalev, Israel's Black Panthers, about a time when Jews and Arabs joined together in the 1970s in a social justice organization modeled on the Black Panther Party of the United States. Jeff Abbott reports from Guatemala on the first 100 days of the new presidency of progressive reformer Bernardo Arévalo. Plus, Harvard University student Suhanee Mitragotri discusses the new FDA-approved over-the-counter birth control pill. “Opill is on the shelves and available for purchase. Now, we need to make sure young people know about it,” she writes.

A new extensive interview with candidate Donald Trump in Time magazine (combined with another he gave to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel while visiting the swing state of Wisconsin in between New York court appearances), frighteningly illustrate the former President’s plans should he regain the White House this November. As I wrote in the February/March issue of The Progressive, “We ignore the GOP front-runner’s blatant dictatorial comments at our own peril.” The plans being formulated by the now well-known Project 2025 are only one part of the Trump team’s plans for authoritarian rule. As Time points out, at least three other “policy groups are [also working to create] a government-in-waiting full of true believers. . . . . The goal of these groups is to put Trump’s vision into action on day one.” These groups include the Center for Renewing America, the America First Policy Institute, and “America First Legal, led by Trump’s immigration adviser Stephen Miller.” As former Republican Congressmember Liz Cheney tweeted on X (formerly Twitter) in December 2022, “No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution."

Finally, yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, as proclaimed by the United Nations. Meanwhile, as reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least ninety-seven journalists and media workers have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza following the October 7 attacks by Hamas. I spoke with Sherif Mansour, the CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, for the February/March issue of The Progressive and he told me, “We say that press freedom is a firewall for democracy, but it’s also the antidote to the fog of war.” Additionally, on May 1, the CPJ issued a statement calling on “authorities to allow journalists [including student reporters] to safely cover U.S. campus protests.”

In recognition of World Press Freedom Day, please support all of us working to bring you critical, fact-based news reporting from zones of conflict and from the halls of power. As our magazine’s founder Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette quoted on the cover of our magazine’s first issue on January 9, 1909, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

 
Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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