Lots of people, especially liberals, are having trouble wrapping their heads around why Trump won the election. Many argue that Trump’s racism and queerphobia have resonated with uneducated white people, getting him the votes he needed to win. While it's true that racists and bigots do love Trump, this doesn't account for most of the 77 million votes he received.

As we approach the end of what is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded (a record that, without fail, continues to be broken with each successive year), this question seems to have crossed most peoples’ minds at some point or another over the last few months. For the last several years now, one could replace ‘November’ in that question with any month and be correct that it was the hottest one in memory.

Despite right-wing theories depicting universities as threats to [capitalist] society, academia serves as the primary institution in the reproduction of bourgeois ways of thinking. Universities—many of which would consider themselves progressive—present themselves as schools of thought with no outside influence, biases, or ulterior motives. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Ohio Republican Party has recently pushed through a new bill which Governor Mike DeWine signed into law on Nov. 27, two days before Native American Heritage Day. House Bill 183, also known as the “Protect All Students Act,” denies LGBTQIA+ students of all ages the ability to use the restrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, and shower rooms of the gender they identify with.

While we must safeguard against abusers of the party, organization, and member’s trust, it is paramount that we maintain both our social character towards justice as well as consideration for the material realities of these abuses and the ability of an organization to take on the rehabilitation of the offender. This will affect comrades differently and will most certainly be unfair to either one party or another, or both. The priority here lies not in individual justice, but rather collective justice for the organization as a whole.

Ohio sends more taxpayer dollars to Israel’s military than almost any other state in the US. Every year, Ohio politicians send $108,326,244 in taxpayer money to fund Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. Over $5 million dollars annually comes from Cincinnati alone. Ohio is also one of the largest government holders of Israel bonds in the United States with a total of $262.5 million dollars owed by Israel to the state of Ohio.  

The 2024 US presidential election highlights the limits of electoral politics under capitalism. The working class must look beyond the ballot box and instead focus on building its own power to dismantle capitalism and fight for a socialist future. The only path to true liberation is through revolution, not reform.

Voting alone won’t save us; the fight against authoritarianism and exploitation doesn’t stop if we beat Trump in November. We can’t rely solely on electoral politics every 2-4 years to bring about the change we need. Change comes through mass action, political education, and general organization. In order to know what your community needs, you have to go out and be part of your community.

The goal is to get us back to work; the plan is to convince us that getting sick is normal.

Children are meant to learn, not earn. Free quality public education should be made available to every child no matter their race or socioeconomic status. Attacks on public schools serve to widen class divisions, limit access to quality education to a privileged few, and reduce public education to nothing more than job training for working class children.

Sonya Massey should still be alive. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Timothy Thomas, Sam Dubose, Tortuguita, Dexter Reed Jr., Elijah Hadley, and countless others should still be alive. We should honor all of them in the struggle against racist and classist state violence.

Our organization has come under fire recently from Rabbi Ari Jun, the Director of Cincinnati’s Jewish Community Relations Council and an outspoken Cincinnati Zionist. On June 17, CityBeat published an article on our informational picket outside US Representative Greg Landsman’s office in Walnut Hills. Journalist Lily Ogburn quoted Jun as calling us “tasteless” and “looking like an extremist or hate group.” Remarkably, Rabbi Jun does not deny that our organization has a democratic right to hold Rep. Landsman accountable for his actions; nor does he make any substantive criticism of any of our public claims. Jun’s objections to our political speech, like those of other local Zionist spokespeople, is vague and impressionistic; like them, when Jun cannot provide reasoned arguments, he offers a smokescreen of catchphrases, speculation, and buzzwords.