Click here for the latest compilation of every other week updates.

NYC ABC, along with several other individuals and prisoner support crews, now send hard copies to all political prisoners and prisoners of war we support.

If you consistently mail the latest updates to a specific prisoner, please let us know so we can insure there’s no overlap. The goal is to have copies sent to all of the prisoners we list.

We’ve also been told that some prisoners are not receiving the copies sent in, yet we aren’t getting rejection notices. If you are in steady contact with a prisoner, please ask them whether or not they are
receiving the updates and let us know.

Free ’em all,
NYC ABC

One part of NYC ABC‘s every-other-week Political Prisoner Letter-Writing event is presenting updates and announcements. These typically relate to or are written by PPs and/or POWs. Since February 2011, they’ve been printing and mailing hard copies of the updates and announcements to about a dozen imprisoned comrades.

In April 2013, along with other collectives and individuals, they expanded printing and mailing to include all U.S. held political prisoners and prisoners of war. As of September, 2014, that work has diffused over several support crews, collectives, and individuals.

Please download and mail the current edition to prisoners with whom you correspond and share links with those who might be interested in doing the same.

NYC ABC is an anarchist collective focused on supporting US-held political prisoners and prisoners of war and opposing state repression against revolutionary social justice movements. NYC ABC is a Support Group of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. More information available at nycabc.wordpress.com

[This article was originally posted to ThreeWayFight.org on March 20, 2026.]

by Matthew N Lyons

Fourteen months into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, the political situation in the United States of America looks both more horrifying and more hopeful than it did, say, last summer. Since returning to the White House, Trump has pursued a drive toward dictatorship with a speed, scope, and effectiveness arguably beyond anything in U.S. history. His regime has sharply intensified repression—kidnapping hundreds of thousands of people in the name of immigration enforcement and using a host of measures to stifle political dissent—and has seized unprecedented powers for the federal government and particularly for the president. Since gaining its footing, the regime has also launched an escalating series of military attacks against other countries, culminating in the 2026 U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which has already killed thousands of people and is still unfolding.

But Trump’s actions and broken promises have cost him popular support. Significant fractions of the MAGA movement have publicly clashed with Trump over his military adventures and over his regime’s complicity in protecting rich and powerful sexual predators implicated in the Epstein files. At the same time, popular resistance to the regime’s anti-immigrant repression has mounted. In January 2026, the Battle of Minneapolis showed the whole country what militant, mass-based community defense looks like. It drove further cracks into Trump’s support base and forced the regime to retreat. And it was a reminder that trying to rule through naked repression, violence, and fear isn’t a sign of strength; it’s an expression of weakness.

In this context, many leftists are grappling with the question, how do we combat the Trump regime in ways that promote systemic radical change? Two months ago, as one contribution to this discussion, Three Way Fight published Dandy Andy’s “What the F**k is to Be Done?” Following on that, I’d like to discuss two other pieces that I believe offer useful perspectives on revolutionary analysis and strategy in this time: “At the Turning of the Tide: How to Fight Our Way out of the Trump Era” (published by CrimethInc. in December 2025) and “Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility” (attributed to the Mr. Burns Collective and published by Ill Will in November 2025).

To help frame the discussion, I offer a few starting premises:

• The Trump regime’s authoritarian power drive represents a dramatic worsening of the U.S. political order, not just more of the same.
• Elections and court battles are wholly inadequate for stopping the Trump regime. Its defeat will require direct, organized, broad-based resistance.
• Although Trump’s political project reflects his personal idiosyncrasies, it grows out of long-term political trends and dynamics of U.S. society, and should also be seen in the context of related developments in a number of other countries.
• Liberal efforts to restore the status quo ante are fundamentally inadequate, because (a) many of the changes the regime has wrought are structural and can’t simply be undone by electing new officials, and (b) support for Trump has been fueled by broad popular anger at the failures of the U.S. political and economic system to address human needs, so just turning back the clock would likely result in another, possibly worse far right resurgence.
• The Democratic Party’s claims to be an opposition force are fundamentally compromised, because the party has been actively complicit in helping to lay the groundwork for much of what Trump has done, and because its structural role is to mobilize popular support for U.S. capitalism.
• The far right’s rise and Trump’s project largely reflects the left’s failure to offer a credible radical vision and strategy that speak to more than a few people. Leftists need to approach this struggle with a willingness to rethink old ideas, principled engagement with popular struggles, and a recognition that nobody has all the answers.

“At the Turning of the Tide”

“A year into the second Trump era,” CrimethInc.’s “At the Turning of the Tide” declares, “authoritarians are in control of the federal government, but they have yet to gain control of society at large. They have done tremendous harm, but their assault has hit a plateau, if not yet an impasse.” The situation was still profoundly dangerous, but it presented new opportunities for hope. “It is finally possible to imagine how we might not only defeat them but take advantage of the situation to make more profound changes than were thinkable before.”

“At the Turning of the Tide” (which I’ll call ATT for short) frames Trump’s rise as the result of structural processes in US capitalism, notably the massive growth in wealth inequality and the militarization of policing brought by neoliberalism. This background section is short and abbreviated but makes some good points, for example arguing that pillaging the state, which has become one of the Trump regime’s defining features, isn’t just about greed—it’s a necessary capitalist response to declining rates of profit.

The bulk of the essay details the Trump regime’s first year, including its drive toward dictatorship, the incipient rifts in the Republican Party, and the growing popular resistance. By late 2025, the essay argues, the regime had mostly achieved its initial objectives, from packing the federal bureaucracy and military with Trump loyalists to cracking down on dissent in universities and the media, and from realigning foreign policy with white supremacism and the far right to normalizing corruption. “Above all, the goal is to accustom the general population to suffering—both to others’ suffering and to their own…. This explains why they commit their worst atrocities not in secret, but as media stunts.”

Yet as ATT points out, authoritarianism poses serious risks for the rulers. “They are gambling that hard power is worth more than soft power,” or, as the authors put it elsewhere, instead of bribing his subjects with bread and circuses, Trump is “buying off his support base with entertainment alone” while destroying the social safety net and impoverishing what remains of the middle class. Here again, ATT argues, the choice isn’t arbitrary or determined by Trump’s ego; it reflects structural constraints on today’s rulers.

In this context, ATT saw the last few months of 2025 as a “turning of the tide,” a time when the regime lost momentum through a confluence of shifts: growing protests and anti-ICE resistance, setbacks in the courts and in the November elections (especially Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City), widening fissures in the Republican Party, and rising fears that Trump’s policies could be leading to an economic crisis. All this made it harder in some ways for the regime to intensify repression, but, the authors warned, a weakened Trump was still dangerous and could become desperate. “Like Benjamin Netanyahu, he may instigate wars—or worse—as a means of evading his day of reckoning.” A few months on, the double-edged reality of that moment has only sharpened. Anti-ICE resistance, dissension within MAGA, and other setbacks to the regime have increased, but Trump has launched increasingly devastating military attacks on other countries, with increasingly risky and unpredictable consequences.

While recognizing that electoral politics is part of the mix in the struggle against Trump, ATT emphasizes that “the elections will only matter if the balance of power shifts against Trump both in the streets and inside the state”—especially given that “Trump has made it crystal clear that he will not leave power voluntarily.” And whether elections go forward or not, Trump has made the state structurally more authoritarian, a legacy that future office holders whether Republican or Democrat will leave in place. So now more than ever, we need “a strategy that outflanks and delegitimizes party politics along with capitalism and the violence that sustains it.” The essay also squarely rejects warnings by some liberals that it’s dangerous to resist in ways that are too militant, on the specious grounds that doing so gives the regime an excuse to intensify repression. “[T]here is no route to a better future that does not begin with building the capacity to resist the violence of the state.”

ATT advocates a divide-and-conquer strategy to defeat Trump, focusing not on his die-hard followers but rather on “segments of his support base that are not permanently committed to his reign, but whose backing is essential to keep him in power.” We should analyze these groups’ interests and priorities, and find ways to pressure them into withdrawing their support. As an example, ATT argues that in the summer of 2020, protesters in Portland, Oregon staved off a Trump coup attempt by defeating the federal agents Trump sent there to impose order, thereby “convinc[ing] elements of the ruling class that Trump’s efforts to remain in power would only endanger them.” As a further example, ATT cites the spring 2025 protests at Tesla dealerships, which successfully hurt the company’s reputation and stock price and arguably helped pressure Elon Musk’s to leave the Trump administration.

“Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility”

A related but different take on radical analysis and strategy comes from the “Mr. Burns Collective,” which in November 2025 published “Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility” on the insurrectionist web journal Ill Will. Although this document follows a more compressed format than “At the Turning of the Tide,” its scope is wider, addressing revolutionary possibility not just in the United States, but globally. Developments in the United States implicitly loom large here, but the wider framing allows the authors to focus on issues that transcend the Trump regime’s peculiarities. In addition, most of their analysis extrapolates from the present into the near future. This makes “Ten Theses” to some extent a speculative document, but it’s speculation that we need to take seriously.

The context for any revolutionary motion today, “Ten Theses” argues, is that neoliberalism, colonialism, and the fossil fuel economy—three pillars of the global order all of us have known—are on their way out. “The highly complex world of global supply chains and just-in-time delivery, of ever-increasing per capita resource consumption, of continual economic growth, and of commercial and communicative hyper-connectivity is coming to an end.” This transformation will vary from place to place but will be destructive and disruptive for most of the world’s population, as the rulers retreat behind walls and intensify state repression and warfare in order to hold onto power, and as ecological and economic breakdowns bring “significant food, energy, housing, and social shocks.” Automation and AI will decrease reliance on human labor in the construction of wealth, and capitalism will shift from a focus on economic growth toward “new modes of enclosure that include significant long-term destruction of value (i.e., not just periodic market crises).” We will also see a decline of US dominance and “a move away from globalized systems of trade to more regional networks of autarky, and the end of liberal norms of human rights, as we have already seen with the genocide in Gaza.”

The authors expect that the global order’s systemic transformation and multi-faceted collapse will disrupt current hierarchies and fuel “widespread rebelliousness and rejection of state legitimacy,” thus opening new revolutionary possibilities—but will also require new approaches to political analysis and strategy. In particular, they argue, the fragmentation of global systems and the uneven nature of the collapse mean that revolutionary organizing will need to focus on local conditions and should seek to gain power at the local and regional levels rather than the nation-state level. They envision translocal revolutionary organizations will “offer coordinating analyses…and a unifying collection of principles for pluralistic flourishing” while relying on local actors to determine their own courses of action.

Comments

There’s a lot I find useful in both “At the Turning of the Tide” and “Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility,” but both of them have significant limitations. For example, ATT can inform the vital project of building militant grassroots forces independent of the Democratic Party, but strategically it focuses narrowly on the goal of “toppling an autocrat,” not radical systemic change. And while its divide-and-conquer strategic recommendations are good as far as they go, they need to be combined with other pieces of a strategic picture, such as Dandy Andy’s discussion in “What the F**k Is to Be Done?” of the relationship between class analysis and intersectionality, guidelines for working in coalition with liberal forces, and the need to balance public organizing and movement security.

“Ten Theses,” in contrast, is concerned with systemic, liberatory change rather than “just” overthrowing a would-be dictator, but it is written in such broad terms that it offers a framework for developing revolutionary strategy rather than a strategy itself. In addition, the situation “Ten Theses” describes is not the present reality but rather a short- or medium-term future, and it’s not the only plausible future we can envision. We can see foreshadowings of the collapse the Mr. Burns Collective describes, but it hasn’t happened yet on anything approaching a global scale. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the scenario they outline—far from it—but as with ATT we should consider their argument in combination with other analyses and perspectives.

Image credit:

French Revolution, 1789 painting, artist unknown, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Click here for the latest compilation of every other week updates.

NYC ABC, along with several other individuals and prisoner support crews, now send hard copies to all political prisoners and prisoners of war we support.

If you consistently mail the latest updates to a specific prisoner, please let us know so we can insure there’s no overlap. The goal is to have copies sent to all of the prisoners we list.

We’ve also been told that some prisoners are not receiving the copies sent in, yet we aren’t getting rejection notices. If you are in steady contact with a prisoner, please ask them whether or not they are
receiving the updates and let us know.

Free ’em all,
NYC ABC

One part of NYC ABC‘s every-other-week Political Prisoner Letter-Writing event is presenting updates and announcements. These typically relate to or are written by PPs and/or POWs. Since February 2011, they’ve been printing and mailing hard copies of the updates and announcements to about a dozen imprisoned comrades.

In April 2013, along with other collectives and individuals, they expanded printing and mailing to include all U.S. held political prisoners and prisoners of war. As of September, 2014, that work has diffused over several support crews, collectives, and individuals.

Please download and mail the current edition to prisoners with whom you correspond and share links with those who might be interested in doing the same.

NYC ABC is an anarchist collective focused on supporting US-held political prisoners and prisoners of war and opposing state repression against revolutionary social justice movements. NYC ABC is a Support Group of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. More information available at nycabc.wordpress.com

Join us to celebrate Loren’s recently published book The Long Sixties: Conversations with a Lifelong Revolutionary (Kersplebedeb 2025)

Featuring a panel of Loren’s comrades: Sean Broesler, John Garvey, Zhana Kurti, Jarrod Shanahan, Ross Wolfe, Arya Zahedi

Loren died in 2024 but his work lives on. The panelists will discuss their friendships with Loren, his distinctive ideas, and his legacies.

[This post is mirrored from ThreeWayFight.org, where it was originally posted on March 7, 2026.]

by Matthew N Lyons

Balancing war and peace has long been integral to Donald Trump’s popular image. Making America Great Again has always included making America militarily dominant and feared again, a longing that accords well with Trump’s fixation on winning, glorification of violence, and celebration of toxic masculinity. Yet Donald Trump’s absurd pretension to be the “peace president” isn’t just about narcissism and Obama envy, and it isn’t a sudden shift. In 2016, candidate Trump denounced “endless wars” and promised to bring US troops home from Afghanistan and the Middle East. This promise was part of his attack on the political establishment of both major parties, and he renewed it repeatedly in years following. As Brandan P. Buck of the Cato Institute wrote a year ago in an article about MAGA and Ukraine,

“[T]housands of future American populists fought, bled, and grew disillusioned [in the Iraq war]. Many of them were the latest to serve in a generational caste of American soldiers that is disproportionately rural, Southern, and conservative. These geographic and ideological contours mapped neatly onto Trump’s political base. The anguish of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies that led to and sustained them, and a service gap between the ranks and the political leadership class soured the populist right on the foreign policy orthodoxies that sent them to war. This dissent served as an essential plank of the then-emerging populist perspective on modern American politics. In his 2016 electoral win, Trump benefited significantly from the issue of war and peace, specifically in the Midwest, and did so again in 2024.”

MAGA speaks to anti-war sentiment in the way that right-wing populism so often speaks: by rejecting a liberatory impulse in favor of a caricature that challenges the established order but bolsters oppression, violence, and human suffering. In this case, more specifically, MAGA’s “America First” outlook has challenged the structured order of imperialism established after World War II, which long provided a useful framework for U.S. military aggression. But in its place MAGA’s leader has promoted not principled internationalism or disarmament but rather unilateralist attacks and naked demands to seize territory and resources. And even MAGA critics of Trump’s military actions, such as Tucker Carlson, combine progressive-sounding antiwar sentiments with conspiracist scapegoating and a racist, anti-egalitarian vision of American nationhood.

“MAGA speaks to anti-war sentiment in the way that right-wing populism so often speaks: by rejecting a liberatory impulse in favor of a caricature that challenges the established order but bolsters oppression, violence, and human suffering.”

A number of factors have contributed to this shift, from the crisis of neoliberalism to Trump’s transactional approach to everything, but it’s helpful to look at the shift in the context of America First’s own history. Before Trump, the slogan was most prominently identified with the America First Committee of 1940-1941, one of the leading organizations that opposed U.S. entry into World War II. Like MAGA, the AFC was an autonomous mass movement misportrayed by some liberal critics as puppets of a foreign power (in this case Nazi Germany rather than Putin’s Russia)—a mass movement that wasn’t entirely fascist, but in which fascists gained credibility and influence by joining forces with nonfascist collaborators. The AFC appealed to a range of people against joining the world war, but its leadership centered on Midwestern businessmen who opposed the New Deal and the Eastern Establishment that had spawned Franklin Roosevelt, and who wanted the U.S. to focus on domestic markets rather than ally with the globalist, free-trading British Empire.

The America First Committee and the larger anti-interventionist movement collapsed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the slogan was revived half a century later. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended, paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan argued that the United States should rethink its international alliances such as NATO, withdraw overseas military forces, and use economic protectionism to rebuild struggling industries. In 1992, Buchanan challenged incumbent president George H. W. Bush for the Republican nomination and won about a quarter of the vote. Buchanan criticized Bush as a member of the Eastern elite and declared “He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the Old Republic. He would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first.” Rewrite that at a 4th-grade level with repetition and more insults, and it starts to sound like Trump.

“In Schurmann’s sketch of [the 1940s America First] current we find many familiar themes, including conspiracist anti-elitism, hostility to international institutions and outlook, an emphasis on military power to ensure unilateral expansion of American free enterprise, and even an affinity with evangelical Christianity.”

A particularly helpful sketch of World War Two-era America Firstism can be found in The Logic of World Power by sociologist and historian Franz Schurmann, published in 1974. In a chapter tracing the major political currents that affected US foreign policy in the 1930s and 40s, Schurmann argues that the “isolationists” (as they’ve often been called) were in fact only isolationist with regard to Europe and were “the true heirs of ‘manifest destiny’ [who] looked westward to East Asia and southward to Latin America.” In Schurmann’s sketch of this current we find many familiar themes, including conspiracist anti-elitism, hostility to international institutions and outlook, an emphasis on military power to ensure unilateral expansion of American free enterprise, and even an affinity with evangelical Christianity. Here is an extended excerpt (from pages 56-60):

“The isolationist current was opposed to universalism. On the surface, it seemed to imply doctrines that the United States should not get involved in the war of other nations unless directly attacked…. In fact, isolationism was a form of American nationalism clearly expressed in its favorite slogan: America first.

“…The isolationists, except for their transient left-wing fringe, believed in American military power. Their congressional representatives voted eagerly for defense build-ups and displayed a typically nationalist admiration for the flag propped up by guns. They believed fervently that America should defend its interests by military force where threatened. Since those interests were obvious in Asia and Latin America, they were more prepared to challenge Japanese expansionism than that of Germany in Europe, and Mexico’s nationalization of United States-owned oil companies aroused an angry furor….

“The isolationists were anti-imperialist, which, in the 1930s and 1940s, meant being against the only world imperialism of the time, the British Empire. They regarded it as a global conspiracy on the part of vast financial interests centered in London abetted by similar interests in New York to dominate the world economy. The ultimate aim of Britain, they believed, was to create a world economic and political monopoly which would stifle the natural expansionist desire of late-comer powers, such as America. The isolationists were indeed expansionists, the true heirs of ‘manifest destiny.’ They saw a glorious future for America beyond its borders, but not particularly in Europe or Africa or Western Asia. They looked westward to East Asia and southward to Latin America. They believed in laissez-faire capitalism and were hostile to big government, whose only result could be to suppress freedom, the natural right of every individual to deploy his enterprise in the pursuit of his own interests. They believed in the individual, particularly the individual who decided to rise above the masses by acquiring wealth. They had a classical commitment to freedom, to a society subject only to minimal governance. Above all, they saw themselves as Americans, a definite, distinct, and proud nationality with a mission in the world. American, in the understanding of the day, meant white, Protestant, and male.*          *          *

“…The expansionists saw the crash of the stock market and the subsequent breakdown of the international monetary system as conspiracies aimed at destroying them. When unions began to organize with the active support of the patrician Roosevelt, the expansionists saw an even greater conspiracy between the mighty of the Eastern Establishment and the communist-inspired labor unions to crush them in the middle. They saw themselves as the real driving force in America, the people who created enterprise and made the wealth which others, bankers and organized labor, then usurped. Expansionism and nationalism were identical in the minds of those who took the isolationist stance prior to 1941; the history of America in the Pacific had forged that identity.

“If the nationalists saw expansionism and nationalism as identical, they pretended to see a similar identity between internationalism, communism, and imperialism. The big bankers of Wall Street were internationalist—so were the communists with their Marxist doctrines, and so were the British with their empire. Moreover, the growing alliance between the Roosevelt-led administration and the unions seemed to indicate a real alliance between the forces of international capital and their ostensible enemies, the revolutionary proletarians. All this could only be aimed at capitalism, as the nationalists saw it. The expansionist image of capitalism was that of the National Association of Manufacturers, which saw the corporation, producing and marketing things, and not the banks as the core of free enterprise capitalism. Socialism to them meant monopoly domination of the economy whether by immense finance capital, big government, or communist revolutionaries. When Hitler began to preach that an international conspiracy of capitalists, Jews, and Bolsheviks was trying to crush the expansionist drive of the German nation, many in the United States understood and sympathized. By the late 1930s, the Roosevelt-labor union alliance had expanded to include an emerging British-American alliance to oppose Germany. And after June 22, 1941, the archenemy of mankind, Bolshevik Russia, had joined….

“American nationalism remained isolationist until December 7, 1941. When Japan attacked America, militant nationalism immediately joined the fray. Japan was a welcome enemy for the nationalists. It was a non-white power threatening American interests in the Pacific. It was already at war with America’s special responsibility in the Far East, China. It was not at war with Bolshevik Russia, thus precluding Russian-American collaboration in the Far East, and, above all, the Japanese had the effrontery to attack their most admired symbol of American military power, the Navy. Hitler’s declaration of war against America completed the picture of an attack on two fronts, and war against both German and Japan was accepted by all American nationalists.

“…The war in the Pacific was run along nationalist lines on the American side…. The nationalism of the war against Japan was evident, for example, in the racism that accompanied it. While there was deep ideological revulsion against the Germans, there was little anti-German feeling in a racial sense, as in World War I. But the Japanese were hated as an upstart race. Japanese, but not Germans and Italians, were interned in concentration camps in the United States. Japanese captives in the Pacific were much more cruelly treated than German captives.

“Whereas the core belief of the internationalist current was the need for international systems, particularly economic, that of the nationalist current was the need for pre-eminent American military power. In a dangerous world, this was the only guarantee of American safety, for the defense of America’s interests, and, in particular, for the assurance of the ever-continuing outward expansion of American enterprise. America must have a powerful navy and develop new technologies, such as air power, to the hilt. It must have a powerful army, although the nationalists were always suspicious of universal military service. Above all, the nationalists advocated permanent American military bases throughout the world, particularly in the Pacific…. The American military presence would assure an ‘open door’ policy for American business to invest and do as it pleased in those countries. It would also assure the safety of American nationals there, notably missionaries, engaged in their own form of activity….”

I first became aware of Schurmann’s work through that of historian Bruce Cumings. In Volume 2 of his The Origins of the Korean War, Cumings carries forward Schurmann’s sketch of isolationism/expansionism to look at its Cold War successor, the right-wing current that advocated “rollback” of communism (as opposed to containment). Cumings doesn’t use the label “America first,” but it’s the same: here again we see an approach to US imperialism that is oriented toward Asia (and Latin America) rather than Europe and that is “territorial instead of nonterritorial, resting on expansion by agglomeration and direct controls rather than indirect, economic levers; exclusive grasp of raw materials and markets (because of inability to compete in world markets)…” Here again we see advocacy of “[s]trong military departments but weak regulation of the economy; a heroic executive, a gutted State Department; strong FBI and covert action capability” and that “hatred of taxes and communists leads to fascination with cheap, high-tech weaponry for obliterating the enemy…; allies dominated and if recalcitrant, abandoned for fortress America” (page 30).

Cumings also argued that 1950s rollbackers shared with 1930s/40s isolationists

“a general lack of real interest in or connectedness with the rest of the world. Rollbackers are thus true ‘red-blooded’ Americans, the provincial residue of America’s ‘late’ enmeshment in the world. This lack of real connectedness explains the habitual propensity of rollbackers toward a self-protective withdrawal in the face of a recalcitrant world, or in the view of the hegemonic containment-liberal dominance of foreign policy after 1952. The utter unrealism of rollback policies…expresses the typical lack of interest in or knowledge of the world at large for these quintessential American nationalists” (page 31).

Such historical precedents don’t fully define MAGA or Trumpism, which are also shaped by major political, cultural, and economic changes of the past half century. But these sketches by Schurmann and Cumings indicate some of the deep ideological wells that today’s America First approach to foreign policy draws on.

Photo Credits

1. Charles Lindbergh addresses an America First Committee rally, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, 5 October 1941. Photo is free for public use, courtesy of CharlesLindbergh.com, via Wikimedia Commons.

2. America First Committee, March-April 1941. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

3. U.S. Department of Homeland Security photo by Tia Dufour. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

NOTE:
If you regularly send packets to Peppy, he has been released to halfway
house!

Click here for the latest compilation of every other week updates.

NYC ABC, along with several other individuals and prisoner support crews, now send hard copies to all political prisoners and prisoners of war we support.

If you consistently mail the latest updates to a specific prisoner, please let us know so we can insure there’s no overlap. The goal is to have copies sent to all of the prisoners we list.

We’ve also been told that some prisoners are not receiving the copies sent in, yet we aren’t getting rejection notices. If you are in steady contact with a prisoner, please ask them whether or not they are
receiving the updates and let us know.

Free ’em all,
NYC ABC

One part of NYC ABC‘s every-other-week Political Prisoner Letter-Writing event is presenting updates and announcements. These typically relate to or are written by PPs and/or POWs. Since February 2011, they’ve been printing and mailing hard copies of the updates and announcements to about a dozen imprisoned comrades.

In April 2013, along with other collectives and individuals, they expanded printing and mailing to include all U.S. held political prisoners and prisoners of war. As of September, 2014, that work has diffused over several support crews, collectives, and individuals.

Please download and mail the current edition to prisoners with whom you correspond and share links with those who might be interested in doing the same.

NYC ABC is an anarchist collective focused on supporting US-held political prisoners and prisoners of war and opposing state repression against revolutionary social justice movements. NYC ABC is a Support Group of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. More information available at nycabc.wordpress.com

NOTE:
If you regularly send packets to Muhammad Burton, Casey Goonan, Hridindu
Roychowdhury, or Alex Stokes, they have been transferred:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Muhammad Burton* AF3896
SCI Chester
Post Office Box 33028
St Petersburg, Florida 33733
*Address envelope to Fred Burton.

Casey Goonan #24611-511
FCI Allenwood Medium
Post Office Box 2000
White Deer, Pennsylvania

Hridindu Roychowdhury #51111-510
FCI Thomson
Post Office Box 1002
Thomson, Illinois 61285

Alexander Contompasis 22-B-5028
Sing Sing Correctional Facility
354 Hunter Street
Ossining, New York 105628

Click here for the latest compilation of every other week updates.

NYC ABC, along with several other individuals and prisoner support crews, now send hard copies to all political prisoners and prisoners of war we support.

If you consistently mail the latest updates to a specific prisoner, please let us know so we can insure there’s no overlap. The goal is to have copies sent to all of the prisoners we list.

We’ve also been told that some prisoners are not receiving the copies sent in, yet we aren’t getting rejection notices. If you are in steady contact with a prisoner, please ask them whether or not they are
receiving the updates and let us know.

Free ’em all,
NYC ABC

One part of NYC ABC‘s every-other-week Political Prisoner Letter-Writing event is presenting updates and announcements. These typically relate to or are written by PPs and/or POWs. Since February 2011, they’ve been printing and mailing hard copies of the updates and announcements to about a dozen imprisoned comrades.

In April 2013, along with other collectives and individuals, they expanded printing and mailing to include all U.S. held political prisoners and prisoners of war. As of September, 2014, that work has diffused over several support crews, collectives, and individuals.

Please download and mail the current edition to prisoners with whom you correspond and share links with those who might be interested in doing the same.

NYC ABC is an anarchist collective focused on supporting US-held political prisoners and prisoners of war and opposing state repression against revolutionary social justice movements. NYC ABC is a Support Group of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. More information available at nycabc.wordpress.com

[This post is mirrored from ThreeWayFight.org, where it was originally posted 2026-02-15.]

Three Way Fight mourns antifascist researcher, writer, and organizer Chip Berlet, who died on January 30th. For some fifty years, Chip was a dedicated opponent of both far right politics and state repression. As a paralegal with the National Lawyers Guild in the 1970s, he helped force the U.S. government to release 300,000 pages of documents about the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) against leftists. In 1987, Chip Berlet and Jean Hardisty cofounded Political Research Associates, which quickly became one of the best sources of information and analysis on the U.S. right, thanks in large part to the 23 years that Chip spent there as senior research analyst.

Chip Berlet helped lay the foundations for much of today’s antifascist work, including Three Way Fight. We remember Chip for his commitment to liberatory principles, his groundbreaking exposés and insights on far right politics, and the comradely spirit with which he supported the work of other activists and researchers.

An obituary to Chip Berlet by Spencer Sunshine and Daryle Lamont Jenkins can be found on the antifascist website Idavox here.

Below is Matthew N. Lyons’s essay from the book Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy: Celebrating Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar, edited by Pam Chamberlain, Matthew N. Lyons, Abby Scher, and Spencer Sunshine (Routledge, 2021). The essay has been lightly adapted for online publication.

Chip Berlet, Co-author

By Matthew N. Lyons

Chip Berlet and I spent eight years working together on what became the book Right-Wing Populism in America (Guilford Press, 2000). That project had a big effect on my life and, I believe, Chip’s as well.

I first became aware of Chip’s work in the late 1980s, after Political Research Associates and Radical America published his exposé of the New Alliance Party and its affiliated groups. The party presented itself as a multi-racial, women of color-led, pro-gay organization supporting progressive popular movements, and it made a splash in 1988 when its presidential candidate, Lenora Fulani, got on the ballot in all fifty states. But behind the facade, the New Alliance Party was an authoritarian political cult run by former Lyndon LaRouche associate Fred Newman, whose operations were based on deception, opportunism, financial shell games, and using psychotherapy to coerce members. Chip was one of the first people to write about this, and as someone who had initially been taken in by the Newmanites’ phony radicalism, I appreciated his careful reporting and principled analysis.

Chip’s work touched my life even more closely in 1990, during the lead-up to the first U.S.-Iraq war, when he was one of very few journalists to warn against systematic efforts by the LaRouche network to infiltrate the antiwar movement. I had experienced this personally some weeks earlier, when one of the founders of the small-town antiwar group that I gravitated to admitted being a LaRouche supporter. The group voted to expel her (the LaRouchites’ history of spying on and physically attacking leftists overrode people’s desire to be open and inclusive), but it was a revelation to us to learn—from Chip’s reports that circulated on activist listservs, in those days of the pre-Web internet—that this wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a coordinated, nationwide effort. It seemed bizarre that a fascist organization would try to join leftist-led coalitions against U.S. military expansionism and accuse then-President George H.W. Bush of genocide, and trying to make sense of this was one of the main things that drew me into studying and writing about far right politics myself.

In 1992, Chip published a report that put the LaRouchites’ antiwar activism in larger context. Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchian and Other Neo-fascist Overtures To Progressives, and Why They Must Be Rejected examined efforts by a variety of U.S. far rightists to build alliances with leftists against the U.S. government. Even more disturbing, the report showed that many leftists were willing, even eager, to embrace right-wing conspiracy theories, many of which were rooted in antisemitism, because they offered simple, radical-sounding critiques of the state and elite. As I learned later, Chip took a lot of heat for Right Woos Left, and several left-leaning magazines refused to run an article by him on the subject. The Progressive decided to run the article because their editor was tired of subscribers urging him to republish articles from The Spotlight, organ of the fascist Liberty Lobby. (A 1999 updated version of Right Woos Left is available on the PRA website.)

Right Woos Left inspired me to try to put the problem of right-wing, anti-elite conspiracism in historical context, in a draft article that I titled “Tracing the Roots of Conspiracy Thinking.” Its analysis was an eclectic mix, which tied anti-elite conspiracy theories to everything from antisemitism as a distorted form of anti-capitalism, to factional conflicts within the U.S. business community, to the recurrence of movements throughout U.S. history that have combined anti-elitism with a drive to expand and deepen white supremacy. Being new to publishing and not knowing quite what to do with the piece, I sent it to Chip with a letter introducing myself and thanking him for his work.

Chip’s reply to my letter said a lot about his intellectual generosity, and it proved to be a turning point for both of us. He offered to help me get the article published, but suggested that I might need to reduce the article’s focus on his own work in order to do so. He graciously accepted my one criticism of Right Woos Left—for endorsing Richard Hofstadter’s description of conspiracism as a “paranoid” feature of the political fringes, which I argued was overly psychological and obscured its roots in mainstream political assumptions. And although we had never met, he invited me to join forces with him to turn our analyses into a book. “If you have nothing better to do with the next six months,” is how he put it. That timetable proved to be a tad over-optimistic.

Writing any book is hard, and writing one with another person presents its own set of challenges. Chip and I have different backgrounds, different ways of working, different writing styles, and to a significant extent different politics. He was a dozen years older than me, worked full time at PRA as a researcher and analyst, was interviewed on NPR and published in the New York Times. I worked a series of day jobs, and my political outlets tended to be local rallies and teach-ins, photocopied pamphlets and newsletters. The situation could easily have lent itself to a mentor-mentee relationship, but Chip never even hinted that his greater experience should give him pride of place. He treated our collaboration as a partnership of equals—except he insisted I should get all of the publisher’s advance on the grounds that he was already getting paid for this work.

Chip recognized from the beginning that our differences could be a source of strength. His background as a journalist and my historical orientation complemented each other, and we ended up dividing the book evenly between us: I was lead author on the more historical first half, he on the second half covering developments of the past few decades. Only the introduction and conclusion were fully co-written. At the same time, each of us reviewed, commented on, and added to the other person’s chapters, and each of us made crucial contributions to the book’s analytic framework. For example, Chip brought in the concept of populism mid-way through the project based on the work of political theorist Margaret Canovan, while I borrowed the concept of producerism from the historian Alexander Saxton. The result of this back and forth was a work with a consistent, unified analysis that both of us felt fully comfortable with as representing our views.

Getting to that point wasn’t always smooth. The project had its ups and downs, difficulties and frustrations, but I don’t remember any actual arguments between us. Both of us made a point to be respectful and kind toward the other, but Chip showed more patience, as I tended to be harder on him than he was on me. A low point came after our original publisher dropped us for taking too long to deliver a manuscript, and it was Chip who went out and secured a new book deal with Guilford Press. He also used his contacts with sociologists and others in academia to help get our book onto course syllabi and into students’ book bags.

Throughout this time, Chip and I lived in different parts of the country, and our collaboration was carried out mostly via email, phone, and mail. But I started coming to the Boston area regularly and visited Chip many times at PRA’s old offices in Cambridge—first in Central Square, then on Beacon Street, just a couple of blocks from the house where I first lived as an infant. Having access to the PRA research library, which Chip had worked hard to build up over years, was tremendously helpful. And listening to Chip’s old stories was a treat, whether they were about protesting with the Zippies (an early 1970s breakaway from the Yippies), helping to uncover the FBI’s dirty tricks in COINTELPRO with the National Lawyers Guild, or confronting neo-Nazis in Chicago.

Since Right-Wing Populism in America was published, Chip and I have been in touch irregularly, as each of us has moved on to other projects. To a large extent our work has continued to run along related tracks but has not often converged. But despite how irregularly we are in contact now, and despite the fact that we sometimes disagree, the connection we formed through writing a book together over eight years feels permanent, like an extended family connection. And the graciousness, generosity, and respect that Chip consistently brought to our collaboration remains a model I try to emulate.

Note

Right-Wing Populism in America won the Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, and is still in print.

Photo Credit

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—New York Office, 6 March 2018, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr. The image has been cropped.

Click here for the latest compilation of every other week updates.

NYC ABC, along with several other individuals and prisoner support crews, now send hard copies to all political prisoners and prisoners of war we support.

If you consistently mail the latest updates to a specific prisoner, please let us know so we can insure there’s no overlap. The goal is to have copies sent to all of the prisoners we list.

We’ve also been told that some prisoners are not receiving the copies sent in, yet we aren’t getting rejection notices. If you are in steady contact with a prisoner, please ask them whether or not they are
receiving the updates and let us know.

Free ’em all,
NYC ABC

One part of NYC ABC‘s every-other-week Political Prisoner Letter-Writing event is presenting updates and announcements. These typically relate to or are written by PPs and/or POWs. Since February 2011, they’ve been printing and mailing hard copies of the updates and announcements to about a dozen imprisoned comrades.

In April 2013, along with other collectives and individuals, they expanded printing and mailing to include all U.S. held political prisoners and prisoners of war. As of September, 2014, that work has diffused over several support crews, collectives, and individuals.

Please download and mail the current edition to prisoners with whom you correspond and share links with those who might be interested in doing the same.

NYC ABC is an anarchist collective focused on supporting US-held political prisoners and prisoners of war and opposing state repression against revolutionary social justice movements. NYC ABC is a Support Group of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. More information available at nycabc.wordpress.com

NOTE: If you regularly send packets to Casey Brezik, please stop, as he has been RELEASED.
And if you send to Hridindu Roychowdhury, he is being transferred and is currently at a transfer facility, so he might move again soon:
Hridindu Roychowdhury #51111-510
FTC Oklahoma City
Post Office Box 898801
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73189

Click here for the latest compilation of every other week updates.

NYC ABC, along with several other individuals and prisoner support crews, now send hard copies to all political prisoners and prisoners of war we support.

If you consistently mail the latest updates to a specific prisoner, please let us know so we can insure there’s no overlap. The goal is to have copies sent to all of the prisoners we list.

We’ve also been told that some prisoners are not receiving the copies sent in, yet we aren’t getting rejection notices. If you are in steady contact with a prisoner, please ask them whether or not they are
receiving the updates and let us know.

Free ’em all,
NYC ABC

One part of NYC ABC‘s every-other-week Political Prisoner Letter-Writing event is presenting updates and announcements. These typically relate to or are written by PPs and/or POWs. Since February 2011, they’ve been printing and mailing hard copies of the updates and announcements to about a dozen imprisoned comrades.

In April 2013, along with other collectives and individuals, they expanded printing and mailing to include all U.S. held political prisoners and prisoners of war. As of September, 2014, that work has diffused over several support crews, collectives, and individuals.

Please download and mail the current edition to prisoners with whom you correspond and share links with those who might be interested in doing the same.

NYC ABC is an anarchist collective focused on supporting US-held political prisoners and prisoners of war and opposing state repression against revolutionary social justice movements. NYC ABC is a Support Group of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. More information available at nycabc.wordpress.com