I’ll continue hosting conversations with candidates for U.S. Congress and Senate in the weeks ahead because who we elect matters. We need leaders accountable to people, not corporate interests, who will fight for universal healthcare, confront endless war, demand an end to the genocide, and truly protect universal human rights.

Be sure to join Let’s Address Illinois and Let’s Address Texas if you live in either state. And if you haven’t joined Let’s Address This as a paid subscriber just yet, I welcome your support today.

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Content from This Week

1. Monday — INTERVIEW: Brad Lander for Congress in New York District 10

2. Monday — INTERVIEW: Rep. Chris Rabb for Congress in Pennsylvia's 3rd District

3. Tuesday — ARTICLE: Illinois Still Makes It Illegal to Boycott Israel , But That Could Change by Thursday

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4. Wednesday — ARTICLE: Is Trump The Most Anti-Christian President in American History?

5. Thursday — GUEST POST: What Minneapolis Can Teach Us About How Our Politics Are Changing

6. Friday — GUEST POST: The Dangerous Myth That Anti-Asian Hate Has Faded

What Is The Public Thinking?

I’ve always been fascinated by public consensus on critical issues that impact us all, so I’m adding a section to our weekly recap titled—what is the public thinking? This week, what is the American public thinking about the US Senate this November? And right now, there’s a 67% chance of flipping the Senate. That means we must continue to double down our efforts to make it happen and turn this prediction into a reality.

Dad Joke of the Week

Scientists have learned that when two melons grow near one another they form a close bond, just like an actual marriage—but they cantaloupe. :D #DadJokes

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This. Share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

The Dangerous Myth That Anti-Asian Hate Has Faded

by Cynthia Choi and Manjusha Kulkarni, Co-Founders of Stop AAPI Hate

When COVID-19 first swept across the United States, it forced a long-overdue national reckoning: anti-Asian hate was real, widespread, and escalating.

We saw the headlines. We saw the violence. Communities mobilized. Funding flowed. For a brief moment, the country paid attention at an unprecedented scale.

Then the attention faded. Today, it can be easy to assume anti-Asian hate was only a temporary surge tied to the pandemic – but that assumption is not just wrong. It’s dangerous.

Anti-Asian hate has not disappeared. It remains disturbingly widespread and is being increasingly normalized.

What The Data Tells Us

New survey data from Stop AAPI Hate reveals that a staggering half (49%) of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AA/PI) adults experienced a hate act in 2025 because of their race, ethnicity, or nationality – a level that has remained consistent across all three years since we began our national survey (2023-2025).

It may be tempting to downplay the issue when levels of hate remain steady – but we should be clear that a reality in which half of AA/PI adults experience hate is neither normal nor acceptable.

The data is clear: anti-Asian hate has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Stop AAPI Hate’s reporting center data plus years of research done by us and others show there was an initial surge of anti-Asian hate that began at the onset of the pandemic – and hate has remained alarmingly high ever since.

And yet public urgency has largely disappeared. Funding for nonprofits serving Asian communities has dried up, and media coverage has dwindled. But the absence of attention does not reflect the reality on the ground.

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What Is Causing Elevated Levels of Hate?

To understand why anti-Asian hate remains elevated, we need to look beyond pandemic-era interpersonal acts of violence and examine the broader system that sustains them.

This is where the “trifecta of hate” comes in: 1) harmful rhetoric, 2) discriminatory policies, and 3) the acts of interpersonal hate they enable. Harmful ideologies like racism and xenophobia manifest in racist rhetoric. This rhetoric justifies exclusionary and discriminatory policies. And both create the conditions for state actors and private citizens to commit acts of hate – whether it’s an individual hurling a slur in public, a student facing discrimination at school, or the government enabling racial profiling in ICE raids.

The trifecta of hate has only intensified since 2020, driven year after year by a relentless stream of xenophobic political rhetoric and racist policies. And across these years, there is a common denominator powering the trifecta: Donald Trump and his allies.

Early on in the pandemic, anti-Asian hate surged alongside bigoted rhetoric from Trump – including his repeated use of the racist phrase “kung flu” – which fueled the scapegoating of Asian people. He then launched his 2024 campaign marked by xenophobic rhetoric and policy proposals. Now, his administration is advancing a sweeping anti-immigrant agenda that is inspiring acts of interpersonal hate.

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Deliberate Political Weaponization

To make matters worse, Trump and other elected officials have long weaponized geopolitical conflict to justify anti-Asian hate. We have repeatedly seen politicians use flashpoints of tension between the U.S. and China to foment racialized suspicion and hostility toward people perceived as Chinese.

South Asian communities have also faced targeted attacks, as politicians – including Trump and J.D. Vance – continue to normalize anti-Indian hate, amplify racist rhetoric, and support policies that unfairly punish South Asian immigrants. This has brought devastating consequences. For example, Stop AAPI Hate found that spikes in Islamophobic and anti-South Asian posts online coincided with the recent debates over H-1B visas as well as moments when prominent Indian American political figures such as Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, and Zohran Mamdani were thrust into the national spotlight.

Anti-South Asian Slurs in Online Spaces Associated with Targeted Violence (January 2023-July 2025)

Source: Moonshot, Chart: Stop AAPI Hate

This intensely xenophobic political climate has created a hostile environment in which waves of racism can be easily sparked, causing frequent and deep harm. In fact, our latest survey found that 53% of AA/PI adults say either they or another AA/PI individual they personally know has felt the harms of anti-immigrant policies and sentiment under Trump – a finding that applies to both those with and without U.S. citizenship.

Our years of research paint a clear pattern: when racist political rhetoric and policies persist, so do acts of anti-Asian hate.

Political leaders do not just reflect public sentiment – they shape it. Their words define who is seen as American and who is cast as “other.” Their policies signal who is protected and who is targeted. When leaders use racist rhetoric or advance xenophobic policies, they create the conditions in which hate thrives. Right now, those conditions persist.

The danger is not only that anti-Asian hate remains high – it’s that we have also stopped paying attention. Because when attention fades, so does accountability. And when accountability fades, harm continues unchecked.

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How We Effectively Counter The Hate

If we are serious about confronting hate, we cannot treat it as a temporary crisis that flares up and disappears. We must recognize it as a systemic issue that requires sustained actions such as investing in organizations that support survivors and prevent violence, holding political leaders accountable, and openly rejecting the myth that anti-Asian hate is no longer an urgent issue.

Many are already taking action. In recent years, advocates have secured major new investments – such as California’s historic $140 investment in the Stop the Hate program that has benefitted millions by providing legal assistance for victims, mental health services for seniors, workshops for youth to address hate in their schools, and more.

At the same time, Asian American communities have also been building political power, increasing visibility, and advancing strategies that prioritize preventing hate rather than only responding to it.

Without this ongoing advocacy, it’s very well possible that we could have seen even sharper increases in anti-Asian hate rather than the persistently high levels we see today. All of the gains matter – not because they signal the problem is solved, but because they show what sustained resistance can achieve even in the face of escalating attacks.

And that is precisely why we must continue to act.

Cynthia Choi is a Co-Founder of Stop AAPI Hate and the Co-Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. With over 30 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, she has led local, state, and national community-based organizations and initiatives on a range of issues from racial and gender justice to violence prevention.

Manjusha Kulkarni is a Co-Founder of Stop AAPI Hate and the Executive Director of AAPI Equity Alliance. A prominent civil rights advocate and lawyer recognized for her work in addressing anti-Asian hate, she was appointed to California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs (CAPIAA) in January 2026.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This. Share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

In this guest essay, Ade Salami, Program Director of Pro-Democracy Political Coalitions at Democracy 2076, examines Minneapolis as a case study for that shift. Drawing on her experience leading cross-party coalition work, as well as her time as a Senior Policy Aide to Minneapolis City Council members and a principal at Park Street Public specializing in bipartisan policy advocacy, she offers a grounded look at how new political alliances are taking shape — and what they signal for the future of power in the United States. Let’s Address This.

Guest Post: What Minneapolis Can Teach Us About How Our Politics Are Changing

By: Ade Salami

American politics are organized as if the coalitions of the past still exist. Issues animating our political divide are no longer a matter of party—anti-imperialists and America First supporters can share a goal of ending U.S. involvement in foreign wars. With issues putting progressives and conservatives on the same side, it’s hard not to wonder: what’s going on?

The answer, I’d argue, is a political realignment—when party coalitions, underlying ideologies, and the issues that divide them change. By the time we call something the New Deal or Reagan era, it’s already happened—and the opportunity to shape it has closed. So how can you shape a realignment instead of just watching it? This question led me to look for where the shift is already visible. One of those places is my home; Minneapolis.

Minneapolis: Signs That Change is Here

Minneapolis has been showing us something that hasn’t entered the national conversation yet. Twice in six years, this city has produced coalitions nobody planned—because people were hurt, scared, angry, and fed up.

The first time was in May of 2020. I was working for a Minneapolis City Council member when George Floyd was murdered at the end of my block. In the weeks that followed, a veto-proof majority of council members—spanning ideological differences—agreed that the city’s approach to policing needed to change. That coalition was built by years of rising tension and the reality that the existing system had failed people.

The second time was three months ago. Federal immigration enforcement operations turned Minneapolis into a city under siege— and the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti forced something that looked more like a human response than a partisan one. Republican and Democratic leaders alike raised concerns about transparency. When people are being killed, the question of whose side you’re on becomes less important than what you’re willing to do about it.

These moments show what becomes possible when shared human stakes cut through partisan noise—and how quickly those possibilities can collapse. In 2020, the coalition around policing reform fractured over rhetoric. Today, similar dynamics are emerging in debates around immigration. If I can see these divides in my community, can other Americans see it, too? That question was foundational to our research. In our November report, we surfaced 17 emerging axes of political polarization that cut across the traditional left-right divide.

The data points in the same direction. Forty-five percent of Americans now identify as independent— while 2025 Gallup data shows Democratic Party identification has hit historic lows at twenty-seven percent. People are not finding what they need in what politics currently offers.

So This Is a Pattern— What Does That Mean for Us?

The issues driving this realignment don’t sort neatly into old partisan lines. A conservative voter may believe health should be governed collectively— as evidenced by the Make America Healthy Again movement demanding regulation. A progressive voter may suspect that higher education reinforces existing hierarchies, and be less invested in making college accessible. What’s happening in Minnesota right now around ICE is a live example of this pattern.

Here’s what that means for you: the people you assume are your political allies may not be on the same side as you on the issues that matter most in ten years. And the people you assume are your opponents might be. This is a reason to understand these shifts now.

How Do We Move Forward?

If this realignment is already happening, the question is whether we understand it well enough to shape it. I’ve watched coalitions form in my city, built by people who were too fed up to stay in their assigned lanes. A lot of people feel politically homeless— like the ground shifted under them, and they’re not sure where they landed. I think something else is more true: the people you agreed with haven’t disappeared— they are also moving.

You have a choice: stay isolated, or build with new people. Some of the challenges we face—like economic insecurity—cut across partisan lines, and are too real for us to keep organizing as if party identity defines who is “us” and “them.”

That’s why we built a tool to help people see where they fall on these emerging divides. It maps your instincts and compares them with others who share your background or identity.

If we keep organizing for coalitions that no longer exist, rooted in ideological purity, we will keep losing—even when we’re right on the issues. The coalition that can build a democracy that works for all of us may look nothing like the one we have today. But if you look closely, it may already be forming around you.

So will you find your new tribe, or wait for history to tell you where you land?

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, religious freedom, and the accountability that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry is well documented. From his December 2015 Muslim ban announcement—litigated all the way to a Supreme Court that ultimately allowed a version of it to stand—to his grotesquely ignorant claim that “Islam hates us,” to his reckless and demonstrably false assertion that Muslims in New Jersey “celebrated on 9/11,” his contempt for Islam and Muslims has never been ambiguous.

Trump’s antisemitism is equally well documented. He called Nazis “very fine people” in Charlottesville. He said he only wants Jewish people counting his money. He dined with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. The record is clear.

But there is a third religious community whose systematic dehumanization under Trump has gone almost entirely unreported. And that community is Christians.

Not Christian nationalists. Not white Evangelicals performing political theater in the name of a faith whose teachings they have largely abandoned. I mean Christians—the actual global body of believers whose lives, churches, communities, and ability to worship in peace are being actively destroyed by Donald Trump’s policies.

As a legal scholar and human rights lawyer who has studied the intersection of policy, power, and religious freedom, I am prepared to make the following argument with full evidentiary support: Donald Trump may be the most anti-Christian president the United States has ever had.

Let’s Address This.

The Performative Christianity Objection — And Why It Doesn’t Hold

Before I present the evidence, let me address the inevitable deflection. I’m not here to argue that because of Trump’s moral failings, he’s anti-Christian. That’s already well documented and even his staunchest allies acknowledge his hypocrisy.

Yes, Trump cannot cite a single Bible verse from memory. Yes, he referred to “Two Corinthians” instead of the properly cited Second Corinthians. Yes, he held a Bible upside down as a prop while his administration tear-gassed peaceful American citizens who happened to be standing in his path. Yes, he preaches morality while his documented history includes affairs with adult film performers, cheating on every one of his wives, and sexually assaulting at least 27 women, that we know of. Yes, he claims to protect children while appearing in the still-illegally-withheld Epstein files more than one million times. And yes, he claims to fight for working Americans while having pardoned dozens of fraudsters who stole billions from those same working people, and while being a 34X convicted felon for fraud, himself.

White evangelical supporters will wave all of this away with the theological contortion that God sends “a perfect message through an imperfect vessel.” For the record, that’s an insufferably weak argument, and moreover the word “imperfect” in that construction is doing more heavy lifting than Hercules himself could handle.

But again, I am not primarily arguing about Trump’s personal hypocrisy. What I am documenting is something far more consequential: deliberate policy choices that destroy the lives, communities, churches, and physical safety of Christians around the world.

As scholars like Tim Whitaker have rightly noted, the loyalty of white Christian nationalists to Trump derives not from the teachings of Jesus Christ or the Christian faith, but from Christian nationalism and white supremacy — a political ideology that has merely borrowed the aesthetic of Christianity while gutting its moral substance. That distinction matters enormously for what follows.

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The Evidence: Trump’s War on Christians

1. Bombing Lebanon — Where One Third of the Population Is Christian

Trump continues to fund and support Israeli military operations in Lebanon, where approximately 33% of the population is Christian. The human cost of those operations has fallen heavily on Christian communities.

More chillingly, the New York Times has reported that Israeli military officials have been privately urging Christian and Druze communities in southern Lebanon to force out Shiite Muslim residents sheltering among them — with the implicit threat that failure to do so would result in those Christian communities being targeted as well. Human rights organizations have condemned this approach as ethnic cleansing. Trump has said nothing. His funding has not wavered, even as attacks continue.

Christian News reports:

Israeli troops have been filmed destroying solar panels in the same Christian village in southern Lebanon, where an IDF (Israel Defence Force) soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus earlier this month. The soldiers were seen destroying the panels with diggers in Debel on Saturday night. It’s reported that there has also been wider damage to homes, roads, an industrial vehicle and olive trees.

These are not isolated anti-Christian attacks, they’re systemic and organized.

2. Funding the Violent Displacement of Christians From the West Bank

Earlier this month The Guardian reported:

The Taybeh [Christian] community has survived crusaders and the Ottoman and British empires, but the latest attacks leave its future in question. Over the past year, the pressure has been turned up further. In July last year, settlers set fire to the grounds of the fifth–century Byzantine church, St Peter’s. Since then, bands of hilltop youth have raided the town four times, setting fire to cars, slashing tires and smashing windows. In the West Bank, the Christian population has shrunk from 5% of the total population in 1967 to roughly 1% today, about 45,000 people. The fierce religious nationalism that the Israeli government has cultivated in recent years has largely been directed at Palestinian Muslims but there has been a rising tide of anti-Christian incidents. The Religious Freedom Data Center (RFDC), an Israeli-run organisation that documents such incidents in Jerusalem, recorded a 65% rise in cases of harassment, many of them involving spitting on Christians.

Trump’s unconditional financial and diplomatic support for Israeli settlement expansion is directly funding the appropriation of land belonging to Palestinian Christians—some of the oldest Christian communities on Earth, with roots in the Holy Land predating nearly every Western Christian denomination by more than a millennium. These are not abstractions. These are families losing their land, their homes, and their ability to remain in the birthplace of their faith. Trump funds it. Evangelical America largely applauds.

3. Bombing Gaza — Hitting Christian Churches

Last July the Israeli government used American taxpayer funded bombs to destroy the only Catholic church in Gaza, killing three Palestinian Christians. Pope Leo reissued a painful appeal:

I renew my appeal to the international community to observe humanitarian law and to respect the obligation to protect civilians, as well as the prohibition of collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force and the forced displacement of the population. I have profound sorrow for the Israeli army’s attack on the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City. I pray for the victims: Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad and Najwa Ibrahim Latif Abu Daoud, and I am particularly close to their families and to all the parishioners. Sadly, this act adds to the continuous military attacks against the civilian population and places of worship in Gaza.

Sadly, the Pope’s appeal fell on deaf ears as persecution of Christians in Gaza and the West Bank—at the hands of the Israeli military—continues unabated. All with Trump continuing to fund these atrocities.

4. Bombing Nigeria — Hitting Christian Areas

As I’ve previously written, Trump’s contempt for Nigerian Christians is palpable. While falsely claiming Nigerian Christians are suffering genocide as an excuse to bomb Nigeria, Trump directed Secretary of State Rubio to specifically ban Nigerians from seeking asylum in the United States. Meanwhile, Nigerian Minister of Information and National Orientation Mohammed Idris Malagi declared:

Nigeria has a history of violent extremism that has created tension for us in the country, but I also want to point out that mostly they don’t discriminate between who is a Muslim or who is a Christian. Christian communities and Muslim communities have been attacked by these extremists. [He added that] claims Christians are being specifically targeted reflect a “lack of proper understanding of the diversity and complexity of the situation that we have in Nigeria”.

Still, that did not prevent Trump from bombing Nigeria, destroying farmland, and having nothing meaningful to show as a positive result. Instead, the same Nigerian Christians he falsely claims are suffering genocide are banned from seeking asylum in the United States.

5. Holding HIV/AIDS Medicine Hostage From a 98% Christian Nation

Zambia is 98% Christian. It is also one of the nations hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS crisis, dependent on USAID-funded antiretroviral medication to keep hundreds of thousands of patients alive. The New York Times and Esquire Magazine report that Donald Trump set April 30 as a deadline for the Zambian Government to accept Trump's new health funding agreement and maintain access to critical AIDS medications Zambians need to live. The new agreement also gives the United States expanded access to its precious mineral resources like copper, lithium, and cobalt. Last year the Trump regime already cut access to HIV AIDS medications and Zambians are already suffering as a result of that change. Now, Trump is further extorting the Zambian government to give up more control over its precious mineral deposits, or let its citizens die due to lack of vital AIDS medications.

Let us be precise about what this is: the United States is withholding life-saving medicine from a nearly entirely Christian nation and allowing people to die unless that nation surrenders its natural resources. This is not foreign policy. It is extortion. It is modern day colonizer mentality. And the victims are overwhelmingly Christian.

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6. Threatening the Pope

Donald Trump has threatened the leader of the Roman Catholic Church—the spiritual head of 1.4 billion Christians worldwide.

When an internet troll surfaced a tweet that Pope Leo had retweeted in 2018—a tweet condemning Trump’s policy of caging migrant children at the border—Trump replied publicly: “Not good!!!”

Let us be clear about what was actually “not good” in that exchange. Caging children is not good. A moral leader condemning the caging of children is precisely what moral leadership looks like. Pope Leo’s position was not a political act. It was a Christian one—consistent with a papacy that has also condemned the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize a Palestinian state, spoken words of solidarity to the people of Lebanon using the Islamic greeting Asalamu Alaikum as Israeli bombs fell, and steadfastly refused to respond to Trump’s aggressive provocations with anything other than dignified silence.

The Vatican has since reported that the Pentagon militarily threatened the Pope for his criticism of Donald Trump.

The sitting President of the United States directed military threats against the head of the global Catholic Church. For condemning the caging of children.

White evangelical America has been largely silent.

7. Blocking Latino Christians From Asylum

Approximately 95% of Latin American asylum seekers are Christian—many of them fleeing gang violence, political persecution, and the very instability that decades of American foreign policy have helped produce. Trump’s systematic dismantling of the asylum system, his weaponization of immigration enforcement, and his dehumanization of Latino migrants is, by any demographic accounting, an assault on one of the largest and fastest-growing Christian populations in the Western hemisphere.

These are not criminals being kept out. These are, overwhelmingly, Christian families seeking the same refuge that the faith they practice commands nations to offer. And meanwhile, the DHS itself admits that up to 97.4% of the immigrants it has illegally rounded up have no criminal record and more than 90% are Latino and ostensibly Christian. Still, the Trump regime has zero regard for the persecution these Christians face—and instead is doubling down by building concentration camps.

Christian Nationalism Is Not Christianity

I want to make a distinction that is both theologically and politically essential.

The white evangelical movement that has attached itself to Trump with near-cultlike devotion is not, in any meaningful doctrinal sense, practicing the Christianity of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ healed the sick without demanding payment. He fed the hungry without means testing. He embraced the poor, the destitute, and the despised. He reserved his most withering contempt not for sinners but for the powerful and self-righteous who used religion to justify their own comfort and condemn everyone else.

By every measure of the actual teachings of Jesus Christ, Donald Trump’s policies are an affront to Christianity—not a fulfillment of it.

What white Christian nationalism offers is not Christianity. It is a political identity that has borrowed Christianity’s iconography while replacing its moral core with the worship of power, wealth, whiteness, and nationalist dominance. It is, in the most precise theological sense, idolatry—and the idol being worshipped is Donald Trump.

The Christians in Lebanon, Zambia, Nigeria, the West Bank, and Latin America—the ones whose lives are being directly destroyed by Trump’s policies—are not abstractions in a culture war. They are the actual global body of Christian believers. Sadly, none of them enjoy the complexion for protection, to quote Paul Mooney. And their suffering does not register in the white evangelical political imagination because Christian nationalism was never actually about Christianity. It was always about power.

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Do Not Let the Culture War Distract You From the Fascism

Imagine being the person who watches Donald Trump bomb and kill Black and brown Christians in three different continents—and yet pretend his cause is noble. That person is a Christian nationalist, and who Trump hides behind to mask his hatred and contempt for Christianity and Christians. But to be sure, this argument—that Trump is the most anti-Christian president in American history—while true, documentable, and important, is not enough. Because the goal is not to win a theological argument.

The goal is to stop fascism.

Donald Trump is not a Christian president. He is not a defender of Christian values. He is a fascist who has successfully weaponized Christian identity as a tool of political control—and the Christians paying the highest price for that weaponization are the ones his supporters never think about. My ask of you is to see through the culture war. Name the fascism. And organize—across every line that divides us—to end it.

Because that is, as it happens, exactly what Jesus would do.

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Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, religious freedom, and the accountability that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

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Imagine this: Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans pass a law making it illegal to criticize the United States government. Or worse, they pass a law making it illegal to criticize or boycott Russia for their war on Ukraine. Or yet worse—Trump and MAGA politicians decide that because Saudi Arabia is our ally, it is now illegal to criticize or boycott Saudi Arabia under punishment of fine.

What First Amendment loving free speech supporting person would accept this?

Indeed, we would all resoundingly reject such absurd legislation. Yet, in 2015, Illinois became the first state in the country to pass an anti-BDS law, penalizing companies that refuse to do business with Israel or in the occupied West Bank. And 38 more states have since followed suit. Now, for the first time, we have the opportunity to right this historic wrong— and the window closes Thursday. Here's how you can help. Let's Address This.

BDS and the BIG Problem With Anti-BDS Laws

BDS stands for Boycott, Divest, and Sanction. Officially launched in the early 2000s, the BDS movement is a peaceful, Palestinian-led movement to boycott the Israeli government for its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, illegal blockades of goods into Palestine, and more recently, its genocide upon Palestinians in Gaza. BDS activists often compare their peaceful resistance to the Israeli Government to Nelson Mandela’s peaceful resistance to apartheid South Africa. And like the resistance to South African apartheid, the BDS movement is an interfaith, interracial, and international movement for justice comprised of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and people of all faiths and no faith.

At its core, the BDS is a non-violent peaceful movement. It is therefore by default protected free speech as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, under anti-BDS laws, businesses that take a moral stance—or even make a purely financial decision—to avoid doing business with Israel, the Illinois state pension funds are forced to divest from those companies. No other country enjoys this kind of statutory protection. Illinois does not mandate pension fund investment in China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, or any other nation-state. Only Israel.

That should immediately raise constitutional alarms.

Yet, those who support Israel’s illegal occupation in the West Bank have not mended their ways. Instead, they have successfully lobbied 39 states to pass “anti-BDS laws,” which criminalize economic boycotts of the State of Israel.

As I’ve written many times before, States do not have rights. Governments do not have rights. People have rights. And among the most fundamental of those rights is the right to engage in political boycotts, to criticize governments, and to organize collective economic action in pursuit of justice.

Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that boycotts are protected speech under the First Amendment. Economic activism is not coercion; it is expression. Indeed, this is not a red verses blue issue. Public opinion has long reflected broad, bipartisan opposition to laws that punish boycott activity, with polling showing majorities of both Republicans and Democrats rejecting anti-BDS legislation as a violation of free speech rights. Whether one supports BDS or opposes it is irrelevant to the constitutional principle at stake. The government cannot and must not be allowed to punish individuals or companies for engaging in lawful, protected, and peaceful speech.

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How Did This Happen

The origins of these laws are not accidental. In 2014, then–Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government allocated approximately $25 million to launch a global campaign to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement through coordinated legislative efforts. Within a year, in 2015, Illinois passed its anti-BDS law under Governor Bruce Rauner. At the time, Rauner’s chief of staff was a vocal supporter of these measures and is now affiliated with a Trump-linked pro-Israel policy institute.

This timeline is not speculation. It reflects how foreign policy interests and domestic political actors converged to advance legislation that restricts Americans’ constitutional rights.

How We Right This Wrong — And Why It Has to Be Now

For the first time since Illinois’ anti-BDS law passed more than a decade ago, Illinoisans have an opportunity to correct this injustice. The momentum is already building — earlier this month, six Illinois townships voted to place repeal referendums on their November ballots.

Now, HB 2723, the Illinois Human Rights Advocacy Protection Act, has a subject matter hearing scheduled for April 30 at 10 AM. Opponents of repeal are actively submitting witness slips against us. 1,000 more proponent slips are needed before Thursday. You do not have to live in Illinois to submit one.

Follow these steps:

1. Identification — Fill in your name and contact information

2. Representation — Type “Self”

3. Firm/Business and Title — Type “N/A” for both

4. Position — Select “PROPONENT” and add position: HB 2723, then click “ADD POSITION”

5. Testimony — Select “RECORD OF APPEARANCE ONLY”

6. Check “I agree to the ILGA Terms of Agreement” and click “Create (Slip)”

Take a few minutes to complete the process. Then share with your networks. It’s a tight timeline, and urgency matters.

Submit your witness slip

This is about more than BDS. It is about whether a state government can punish political expression simply because it finds that expression inconvenient. It is about whether we defend free speech consistently—or only when it benefits us.

We cannot claim outrage when MAGA politicians and Donald Trump restrict speech, intimidate critics, or weaponize state power against dissenters—if we remain silent when similar tactics are deployed elsewhere. Once the government is empowered to decide which peaceful boycotts are permissible and which are punishable, no movement is safe.

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Conclusion

Return for a moment to the thought experiment at the top of this article.

We agree it is untenable to criminalize criticism or peaceful boycott of Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia—and that same principle must apply to Israel. Criticizing a government’s policies is not an attack on a people or a religion. It is core democratic discourse. Likewise, choosing not to do business with a government or with entities tied to government policy is a protected form of political expression. We may boycott for moral reasons, financial reasons, or no reason at all. Our Constitution does not condition speech protections on whether lawmakers approve of the viewpoint.

Thus, the absurdity of anti-BDS laws lie precisely in this inversion of values: they protect a state from criticism by penalizing people for expressing it. That is not how constitutional democracies function. Illinois was the first state to pass anti-BDS legislation. We now have the chance to make history again—by becoming the first state to repeal one.

If you believe in the First Amendment, if you believe that governments must tolerate criticism rather than criminalize it, and if you believe that political boycotts are a legitimate tool of democratic accountability, then act now.

Submit your witness slip

Submit your witness slip. Share the link. Contact your legislators. Make clear that protecting a foreign state from criticism is not the role of Illinois government, and that punishing political expression is incompatible with constitutional democracy.

This is our opportunity to rebuke an unjust law and reaffirm a foundational principle: governments are accountable to people, not shielded from them.

Today’s post is in collaboration with Let’s Address Illinois State Director . Become a free or paid subscriber to Let’s Address Illinois for daily content on local politics, social justice, and human rights in Illinois.

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On Episode 220 of The Qasim Rashid Show:

I sat down with two congressional candidates who are doing something rare: running people-powered campaigns against entrenched money and power—and winning. Both races are “five-alarm fires” for anyone who believes government should actually represent the people.

You can watch both live interviews below.

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Brad Lander helped bring ranked choice voting to New York City, cross-endorsed Zohran Mamdani to stop Andrew Cuomo, and is now running for Congress in NY-10 against Dan Goldman—a quarter-billionaire who has voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, authorized warrantless wiretaps, and taken AIPAC money while the genocide in Gaza continues. The average rent in Brad’s district is over $5,000 a month, and Goldman is not going to be the one to unrig that. Brad is going in to fight for affordable housing, healthcare, immigrant protections, and a foreign policy grounded in human rights.

Pennsylvania State Rep. Chris Rabb is running for Congress in one of the most watched primaries in the country—outraising his establishment opponents without a single dollar of corporate PAC money, even as dark money groups tied to AIPAC pour millions into the race to stop him. We get into who is funding the attacks, why corporate money shapes both parties, and why he believes accountability has to start within the Democratic Party itself.

The Qasim Rashid podcast has surpassed 258,000 downloads! Thank you for your support.

It was a long, strange, and deeply unsettling night in Washington DC. I want share with you what I saw, what I know, and what corporate media is already burying beneath the spectacle of a third alleged assassination attempt. Let’s Address This.

What Happened—And What We Don’t Know

Last night, a 31-year-old teacher from California named Cole Allen allegedly attempted to attack Donald Trump. He was stopped. No one died. Early reports circulating online indicated authorities had killed Allen. That was incorrect. Allen is alive and is currently being treated for injuries.

Here is security footage of the incident:

I was not far from where this happened, finding myself at the Renwick to attend the Substack New Media correspondents dinner. This event serves as a counter to the corporate media White House Correspondents Dinner. It is one of the events I wrote about last week as a symbol of independent media’s rising power.

The night hard hardly begun when the city began to change around us in real time. Everything shut down, and Metro Police and Secret Service informed us we could not leave. The shutdown was immediate. Not just our event—the entire city. Police sealed off entire sections. We were restricted to specific walking corridors. What had been a vibrant, energized evening became something eerie and tense within minutes.

Here my footage of Washington D.C. taken after finally leaving the Substack new media event several hours later:

Earlier in the evening—before any of this—I watched the Trump motorcade pass by on my way to the Substack event. I filmed it. At the time it was just another DC moment. In retrospect, it carries a different weight. Here is my footage of the motorcade:

What We Don’t Know—And A Disturbing Press Conference

We do not yet know Cole Allen’s motive or his history. We do not yet know the full circumstances of what happened in those moments. What I do know is speculation—especially in the first hours after an event like this—is not constructive. It is noise.

Right now, a significant portion of online commentary is dismissing the alleged attack as a hoax or a false flag. I will simply say this: We should put pressure on our state and federal authorities to provide a full and transparent investigation. Admittedly, the Trump regime has repeatedly failed to meet this seemingly basic demand, which in turn only further fuels speculation that these alleged attacks are hoaxes.

Moreover, the ensuing White House press conference leaves one with a sense of confusion. Donald Trump and his team stood before the cameras smiling ear to ear.

Just sit with this image for a moment. A man allegedly just attempted to attack the President of the United States. The city of Washington DC was in lockdown. And the response from the White House was not solemnity, not gravity, not the measured tone you would expect from leaders confronting a genuine security crisis.

It was smiles.

I do not know what to make of that. But I know it disturbed me. Because not only does this further fuel the narrative of a false flag attack, it reminds us that Donald Trump himself has inspired much of the political violence Americans are seeing today. And this is a story almost no one in corporate media is willing to discuss. In fact, CNN’s Dana Bash instead asked Congressman Jaime Raskin if “heated rhetoric” from Democrats somehow inspired this attack. Notwithstanding that Bash’s claim is complete propaganda, the evidence shows the exact opposite is true.

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Trump And Political Violence

Most every elected official is currently issuing statements to the effect of “Political violence is never acceptable. We are a nation of laws and seek to advance our policies with votes at the ballot box, not with violence and bullets.” The part most are leaving out, and that corporate media is wholly ignoring is that while yes, political violence is unacceptable—Trump’s actions demonstrate that he does not believe that. And right now, corporate media is giving Trump a pass, one that endangers us all.

Let me explain.

The last decade of violent rhetoric espoused by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement has been the most significant contributor to political violence this point. And that’s not hyperbole. A 2020 study by ABC documented that as President, Donald Trump inspired at least 54 acts of political violence even before the January 6 insurrection, while the previous four Presidents combined inspired 0 such acts of political violence, and another study found that Trump’s vile and violent tweets resulted in massive spikes in hate crimes against marginalized communities.

We see the Trump’s promotion of political violence right before our eyes.

It is Donald Trump who proudly pardoned all 1600 violent January 6 insurrectionists, is funding the genocide in Palestine that has killed up to 186,000 per the Lancet, and celebrated the SCOTUS ruling expanding Presidential immunity to include killing a political opponent as an official act.

It is Donald Trump and his sycophants who incessantly mocked the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, glorified car decals of President Biden being kidnapped, bound, and gagged, and called Democrats traitors who deserve the death penalty, and whose Project 2025 founders claim that “the country is in the midst of a second American Revolution that will be bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

It is Donald Trump’s MAGA party who passed dozens of stand your ground laws to justify murdering civilians and escalating conflicts with violence, rather than deescalate them through diplomacy, who passed dozens of anti-protestor laws justifying running over peaceful protestors with vehicles, rather than allowing law enforcement to peacefully disperse protestors, who expanded access to weapons of war even after mass shootings, and even for people who absolutely should not have access to them while guns become the leading cause of death for children in America.

This is the man now surprised about the rise of political violence?

What Corporate Media Covered Last Night—And What They Didn’t

While corporate media spent the night wall-to-wall on this story—framing the most powerful politician on Earth as a victim, infantilizing a man who has spent years cultivating an atmosphere of political violence—here is what they ignored:

• The Epstein Files Transparency Act—H.R. 4405—mandated the full release of the Epstein files by December 19, 2025. That deadline has passed. The files implicating Donald Trump have still not been released. Corporate media said nothing about this last night. They continue to say little.

• Trump’s illegal war on Iran—launched without congressional authorization, in violation of international law—has now cost American taxpayers more than $62 billion. Fifteen American soldiers are confirmed dead. Nearly 2,000 Iranian civilians have been killed. Corporate media did not mention this last night.

• Sixty percent of Americans cannot currently afford basic essentials to get by. Medical bankruptcies continue at a rate of 500,000 per year. Working families are in financial crisis. Meanwhile, billionaire tech companies like Amazon, Oracle, and Meta—to whom Trump gifted massive tax breaks—are laying off tens of thousands of workers. Corporate media did not mention this last night.

Instead, they gave us a man who has been directly tied to inspiring more acts of political violence than all living president—combined—and framed him as the victim of a dangerous, unstable country.

The irony would be almost poetic if the stakes weren’t so deadly serious.

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A Closing Word

As I wrote this piece, I felt compelled to close with these two points.

One, I am not explaining away what Cole Allen allegedly did. I am demanding a thorough investigation, something the Trump regime has repeatedly denied the American people after previous alleged attempts on his life.

And two, I am not willing to pretend this alleged attack happened in a vacuum. One in which corporate media spends another news cycle framing Trump as a fragile victim while ignoring his decades of inciting political violence. All while also ignoring the $62 billion illegal war he launched, the Epstein files he has blocked, the financial devastation he has imposed on working people, and the political violence he proudly continues to inspire both with his reckless actions and his volatile policies.

The most powerful man in the world is not a victim. He must be accountable. And accountability—honest, factual, unflinching accountability—is exactly what corporate media refuses to deliver and exactly what independent media exists to provide.

That is why this work matters. That is why independent media matters. That is why your support of Let’s Address This matters. I will continue to report what I see, bring the receipts as I have in this article, and hold accountable those who believe their power places them beyond scrutiny. Last night reminded me—walking through those empty, police-lined streets—that the stakes of this moment could not be higher.

We cannot afford to look away. We will not look away.

Stay informed. Stay engaged. And join us at Let’s Address This so we can can continue to fight to protect your human rights, and our collective democracy.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This. Share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

In the last 2 years, you have made this the platform that more than 185,000 subscribers and 2 million monthly readers rely on for daily, critical, and accurate information on human rights.

This week we also launched our official expansion into a second state to provide local coverage on the most important developments impacting your human rights. Let’s Address Texas will be led by our new State Director Saadia Mirza—an orgaizer, political strategist, and marketing professional who has led in this space for 22 years.

And did you catch the new logo, too?

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An Important Call to Action

This weekend, I am attending two events bringing together independent journalists, lawyers, advocates, and creators who have built audiences not through corporate backing or billionaire ownership, but through one radical proposition: earn the trust of the people, or lose everything. With public trust in national media at all time lows, one thing is clear: independent media is important and it is growing.

Doing this work responsibly means not just holding others accountable—but also ourselves. Ground News helps us do so. They are, like us, subscriber-supported—not billionaire-funded.

Right now, you can subscribe to Ground News at 40% off their Vantage Plan—the same plan I use—for just $5 a month.

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Content from This Week

1. Monday — INTERVIEW: Rep. Sara Jacobs Won’t Stay Silent On Sudan, Iran, or Lebanon

2. Monday — DEBUNK: All You Had to Do Was Pay Us Enough to Live | An Economic Injustice Story

3. Tuesday — ARTICLE: Trump Attacks the Pope for His Old Tweets

4. Wednesday — ARTICLE: Let’s Address This Turns Two Today

4. Friday — ARTICLE: The Rise of Independent Media — And Why the Powerful Are Terrified of It

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Dad Joke of the Week

Me: Scientists say that if a man speaks to you and you hesitate, you’re experiencing manopause :D

Wife: 🤦🏽‍♀️

Me: And if two men speak to you and you hesitate, it’s pairo-manopause. :D

Wife: 🤦🏽‍♀️

#DadJokes

The first is Crooked Media’s unofficial White House Correspondents’ weekend event. The second is Substack’s New Media gathering. Both are bringing together independent journalists, writers, lawyers, advocates, and creators who have built audiences not through corporate backing or billionaire ownership, but through one radical proposition: earn the trust of the people, or lose everything.

These events could not have existed in any meaningful way five years ago. Today they are strengthening pillars of an entirely new media landscape—one that is rising directly from the rubble of a corporate media system that has catastrophically failed the American public. Let’s Address This.

The Collapse of Corporate Trust

The numbers tell the story with brutal clarity.

Gallup polling shows that trust in national media has collapsed to just 28%. Less than three in ten Americans trust the institutions that are supposed to keep them informed. That is not a polling blip. That is a civilizational warning signal.

And local media—historically the most trusted, most community-rooted form of journalism—has been decimated by 75% since the year 2002. The newsrooms that once covered city council meetings, school board decisions, local elections, and the stories that directly shaped people’s daily lives have been gutted, consolidated, or eliminated entirely.

Into that vacuum have stepped billionaires—purchasing media outlets not to inform the public, but to protect their interests, sanitize their reputations, and shape the information environment in ways that serve their bottom line. I have written about this in detail before. The pattern is unmistakable and the consequences are severe.

But something else has also stepped into that vacuum. Something the billionaires did not anticipate and cannot fully control.

Independent media.

What Independent Media Does That Corporate Media Cannot

The new civic media landscape—built on platforms like Substack, powered by direct reader support, and accountable to no one but the people who fund it—does three things that corporate media is structurally incapable of doing.

First: We are accountable to the people. Our entire model depends on earning the trust of working people—subscribers who choose, every single month or year, to invest in this work with their own money. We are not billionaire-owned. We cannot be bought. We cannot be pressured into silence by an advertiser, an owner, or a political donor. When we lose your trust, we lose everything. That is not a vulnerability. That is the most powerful accountability structure in civic media.

Second: Truth and facts are our product. Corporate media in Washington has increasingly become a vehicle for sanitizing genocide, cheerleading illegal wars, and functioning as a mouthpiece for state power. Their agenda is not to inform—it is to maintain access, protect relationships, and serve the interests of those who sign their checks. Our agenda is different. Facts matter here because our readers demand them and because our credibility depends entirely on delivering them.

Third: We don’t suffer from access bias. Corporate media in Washington has an incestuous relationship with elected officials that makes genuine accountability nearly impossible. Reporters who depend on access to powerful politicians cannot afford to hold those politicians accountable—because accountability costs access, and access is their currency. We have no such constraint. We hold everyone accountable. Including—and especially—the people who represent us.

I’m a visual learner so I want to give you an example of my third point. While a deeper story is forthcoming, I want to share a preview of something no corporate media outlet in Illinois has had the integrity to report.

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The Story Corporate Media Won’t Tell You: Congressman Bill Foster and Kevin Warsh

In January, my current congressman—a corporate funded Democrat named Bill Foster—issued a press release announcing that he has an “open mind” about Donald Trump’s pick for Federal Reserve Chair, Kevin Warsh.

I want to walk you through exactly what that means—because there are at least four reasons why Foster’s position is not just indefensible, but genuinely disqualifying.

One: Kevin Warsh was one of the architects of the 2008 financial collapse—one of the most devastating economic catastrophes in modern American history, one that wiped out the savings, homes, and livelihoods of millions of working Americans. Bill Foster has an open mind about handing this man control of our national finances again.

Two: Kevin Warsh and his family have been among the driving forces behind Trump’s push to illegally annex Greenland—a brazen act of imperial aggression that violates international law and the sovereignty of an allied nation. Bill Foster has an open mind about elevating a man actively working to violently expand the American empire.

Three: When asked directly just this week in Senate confirmation hearings who won the 2020 presidential election, Kevin Warsh refused to confirm that Joe Biden won. In 2026, Bill Foster has an open mind about confirming an election denier to one of the most powerful economic positions in the world.

Four: As if the above three aren’t disqualifying enough, Kevin Warsh appears in the Epstein files. A child sex trafficking and abuse document. Bill Foster has an open mind about this man.

Let me be precise about what we are dealing with here. There are only two possible explanations—and both are disqualifying.

Option A: Bill Foster is so ignorant of his basic due diligence that he was unaware of any of the above. That is catastrophic incompetence from a sitting congressman.

Option B: Bill Foster knew all of the above—and simply does not care. That is moral complicity of the highest order.

Incompetence or complicity, Bill? Which one is it? Here’s the major problem. No corporate media outlet has bothered to ask or investigate this abdication of duty. This story deserved to be on the front page of every Illinois newspaper. It has appeared in none of them. That is the access bias problem in real time. And that is exactly why independent media like Let’s Address This exists and is growing.

This is why just this month we launched Launched Let’s Address Illinois with Dylan Blaha and Let’s Address Texas with Saadia Mirza. If you are in Illinois or Texas, I highly encourage you to subscribe to them (as always, no paywall).

One Tool That Keeps Us Honest: Ground News

Doing this work responsibly means not just holding others accountable—but also ourselves. Ground News helps us do so. In fact, Ground News has invested in independent media like Let’s Address This, and I am proud to accept their support precisely because of their commitment to transparency and accuracy. They are, like us, subscriber-supported—not billionaire-funded. Which means when you subscribe to Ground News, you are directly investing in the kind of media ecosystem that keeps power accountable.

Subscribe to Ground News

Ground News is more than a news app. In an age of disinformation, algorithmic manipulation, and billionaire-owned outlets masquerading as objective journalism, Ground News is a critical tool for navigating the information landscape with clarity and precision. It aggregates related articles from across the political spectrum in one place, reveals the bias and factuality ratings of sources, cuts through partisanship and sensationalism to focus on verifiable facts, and—crucially—reports on who funds a media outlet. In 2026, that last piece of information is not optional. It is essential.

Subscribe to Ground News

Right now, you can subscribe to Ground News at 40% off their Vantage Plan—the same plan I use—for just $5 a month. That is $5 a month to stop letting other people’s agendas control how you think.

Something New Is Rising

Here is what this Friday and Saturday represent to me—beyond just the events.

The White House Correspondents’ weekend has long symbolized much of what’s wrong with corporate media: a hall full of journalists and the politicians they are supposed to hold accountable, laughing, dining, and celebrating together—while the people those journalists are supposed to serve watch from the outside.

Independent media now has its own parallel gathering—its own community, its own ecosystem, its own weekend. This is not a footnote. It is a paradigm shift.

Twenty-eight percent of Americans trust national media. Seventy-five percent of local newsrooms are gone. Billionaires are buying up what remains. And in the space that corporate media has abandoned—the space where truth should live, where accountability should live, where the stories that powerful people don’t want told should live—independent media is building something new.

It is imperfect. It is still growing. It requires your support to survive and expand. But it is real, it is necessary, and it is working.

The powerful are not afraid of corporate media. Corporate media protects them. What they are afraid of is a reader-funded, paywall-free, people-accountable, and bias-free press that names them by name, cites the receipts, and cannot be bought into silence.

That is what we are building. That is what this weekend represents. And that is what your subscription to Let’s Address This makes possible. The story of our democracy is still being written. Independent media is one of the last institutions fighting to make sure it’s written honestly.

Stay with us. Share this. And let’s keep building.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, accountability, and the independent journalism that corporate media refuses to deliver. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

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I wrote back on April 23, 2024:

Global human rights are at historic lows, and the United States is among the worst offenders. By subscribing to Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid, you're helping turn the tide to protect human rights for all.

In the last 2 years, you have made Let’s Address This that platform that more than 182,000 subscribers and more than 2 million monthly readers rely on for daily, critical, and accurate information on human rights. And we’re just getting started.

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Here is what you have helped accomplish in the last two years with Let’s Address This:

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I receive hundreds of notes every week and I wish I could respond to them individually. Here’s just a snapshot of why you subscribed to Let’s Address This.

These are but a snapshot of the thousands of notes I receive from you each month. Please know I read and cherish them all.

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EXPAND LOCALLY: Let’s Address This is expanding! We are using our national platform to build State platforms. Why? To give you more insights into your local communities. We have already made our first two hires, with more forthcoming:

1. Illinois-based Dylan Blaha — Veteran, scientist, and former candidate for Congress — leads Let’s Address Illinois.

2. Texas-based Saadia Mirza — politico, strategist, and organizer — leads Let’s Address Texas.

If you reside in Illinois or Texas, I encourage you to subscribe to your respective state.

GROW NATIONALLY: Please choose at least 1 of 3 actions to help elevate Let’s Address This.

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A Final Word

As we build into year three and beyond, I’d like to reaffirm these three promises:

1. Let’s Address This will never sit behind a paywall. It is, and will remain, accessible to all people regardless of whether they are a paid subscriber or free subscriber.

2. Our accuracy will remain unassailable. If we get something wrong, we will course correct. We do not profess perfection, but truth remains as our North Star.

3. Our standard is absolute justice above all else. As we shed light on the struggles harming our nation, we will also elevate practical steps to rectify injustice.

As billionaires continue to buy out media outlets, the new independent media universe is our ticket to factual accuracy on the human rights issues that impact us all. Your investment into Let’s Address This makes that possible. Thank you for your support during these last two years. I look forward to another great year of partnered success.

Thank you for your trust.❤️

Sincerely,

Qasim

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In a time of deep political division and escalating global crises, Pope Leo has emerged as a powerful advocate for justice, human rights, and moral clarity. His public stances on issues ranging from combatting gun violence, to protecting immigrant rights, abolishing the death penalty, to ending the genocide in Gaza, and the war on Iran — are reflections of his faith and bold assertions of humanity’s shared responsibility to uphold dignity and compassion for all people.

These principled stances have upset Donald Trump, JD Vance, and even Sean Hannity, who recently announced he’s now leaving the Catholic Church. In particular, the Pope’s old Tweets have created controversy, with Donald Trump himself now citing them to attack the Pope. Let’s Address This.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, social justice, and the facts that corporate media ignores. For only two more days, an annual subscription to support this work is 50% off in honor of our two-year anniversary.

Support with a paid subscription. $25.

The Tweet That Upset Trump

After an internet troll found a Tweet Pope Leo retweeted in 2018 in condemnation of Trump’s policy of caging children, Donald Trump responded “Not good!!!”

Let’s be clear for a moment—caging children is bad. The Pope’s decision to retweet a Tweet calling out this injustice is what you want in a moral leader. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Pope Leo also posted the following.

This, after Pope Leo condemned the Israeli government for refusing to recognize a Palestinian state, spoke to the people of Lebanon as Israel was bombing them with the Islamic greeting of Asalaamo Alaikum, and finally, refused to respond to Trump’s aggressive attacks against him. Indeed, the Vatican states that the Pentagon reportedly militarily threatened the Pope for criticizing Donald Trump.

Upholding Justice and Opposing the Death Penalty

Pope Leo has instead made clear that he refuses to engage in such attacks. That his purpose is to uphold justice and peace, as Jesus Christ taught. I, for one, am grateful to see a religious leader whose words match his actions. It is no wonder that the Pope’s approval rating is nearly 50 points higher than that of Donald Trump’s approval rating.

The Pope’s Old Tweets

So I thought, given that Trump is digging up the Pope’s old Tweets, I’d beat him to the punch. I read through the Pope’s entire Twitter history, and this is what I found.

First, his staunch opposition to the death penalty. His Tweet from March 5, 2015, simply stating, “It’s time to end the death penalty,” reflects his firm belief that state-sanctioned executions are not only morally indefensible but contrary to the essence of justice.

The Pope’s stance aligns with growing global recognition that capital punishment is a violation of human rights, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities, and often riddled with wrongful convictions. His call for abolition is a reminder that justice should be restorative, not retributive.

Defending the Vulnerable: Immigrants and Refugees

The Pope’s commitment to human rights extends deeply into his advocacy for immigrants and refugees.

His public denouncement of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his visible support for Syrian refugees speaks volumes. On January 27, 2017, he reposted the famous and heartbreaking image of a Syrian child, bloodied and battered, with the caption: “We’re banning all Syrian refugees? The men, women, and children who most need help? What an immoral nation we are becoming. Jesus weeps.”

His words call attention to the moral crisis of denying sanctuary to those fleeing war and persecution, echoing a core principle of faith: to welcome the stranger and protect the vulnerable. Pope Leo has likewise openly condemned the Trump administration’s child separation policy, and the caging of children.

In another repost, he called out the racist undertones of Trump’s policies, highlighting how terms like “bad hombres” fuel nativism and bigotry.

And most recently, he’s openly opposed the cruelty of JD Vance, as he demonizes immigrants with bizarre faith based justifications.

The Pope’s voice on these issues is not just compassionate—it is courageous, cutting through political noise to demand that America live up to its ideals of liberty and justice for all. JD Vance meanwhile has the audacity to lecture the Pope on morality.

Combating Gun Violence and Demanding Action

Gun violence is a uniquely American epidemic, and Pope Leo has not shied away from calling out political inaction. His retweet of Senator Chris Murphy’s powerful statement after the Las Vegas shooting—“Your cowardice to act cannot be whitewashed by thoughts and prayers. None of this ends unless we do something to stop it.”—is a testament to his belief in action over rhetoric.

The Pope’s alignment with leaders who demand legislative action on gun control is a bold stance that underscores his commitment to safeguarding lives.

If you’re finding value in this article and research, I invite you to become a free or paid subscriber. For 2 more days, you can support this work for one year at 50% off—$25.

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Racial Justice and Moral Leadership

On May 30, 2020, amidst nationwide protests for racial justice after police murdered George Floyd, Pope Leo tweeted, “Thank you! We need to hear more from leaders in the Church, to reject racism and seek justice.”

On the same day he elevated additional voices for racial justice. And these were not isolated Tweets. I found Tweets from years prior celebrating racial justice.

Back in 2014 Pope Leo celebrated the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. His call for moral leadership in the face of racial injustice highlights his understanding that silence is complicity.

Prevost’s consistent advocacy for racial equality and justice is a reminder that the fight for civil rights is far from over and requires voices of faith and moral clarity to lead the charge.

Climate Action as a Moral Imperative

Prevost’s environmental advocacy is equally strong. He publicly urged Donald Trump to read Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change, calling for immediate action to protect the environment. His retweet from June 1, 2017, emphasized the urgency of combating climate change, aligning with global scientific consensus that protecting the planet is not just a political issue but a moral one.

He’s additionally recognized that religion and science are not enemies, and should be treated as such. Like his predecessor, the late Pope Francis, Pope Leo is continuing an important tradition of ensuring that those of faith also embrace science.

As the current anti-science administration dismantles critical regulations and departments, one can only hope that Pope Leo might influence someone in the Trump regime to reverse course and instead re-embrace science based policy.

Conclusion

Pope Leo XIV’s bold stances on issues like racial justice, climate action, and ending the death penalty reveal a leader unafraid to challenge political powers in defense of human rights. His unwavering support for immigrants and refugees stands as a testament to his commitment to compassion and justice. He’s called for unity between Christians and Muslims and been unequivocal in condemning war and bombing of civilians in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.

While Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the MAGA right continue to attack the Pope, the Pope responds fearlessly that he serves God, not a political agenda.

In my view, that’s what frightens Trump the most—a man he cannot force to bend to his will.

Long live the Pope.

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Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, accountability, and the justice that our society demands. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

First, An Important Announcement 📢

Thanks to your support, Let’s Address This is expanding into a second state! The brilliant Saadia Mirza has joined our team as Texas State Director. Today, Saadia launches Let’s Address Texas. Saadia is a business owner, political strategist, and marketing professional who has led in this space for 22 years. She’ll be sharing daily Texas-specific content on politics, human rights, and social justice, with receipts, sources, names, and calls to action to counter the injustices we see.

And lest there be any doubt—always without a paywall.

Read her launch post, and especially if you're in Texas, make sure you subscribe.

Read the launch post!

That's two states now providing the independent, fact-checked, human rights coverage too often ignored by corporate media. In case you missed it, and you live in Illinois, make sure you sign up for the most important political developments shared on a daily basis from Let's Address Illinois with Dylan Blaha.

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On Episode 219 of The Qasim Rashid Show:

Now, let's dive into today's episode. Three years into the war in Sudan, 33 million Sudanese people are at risk of starvation, the UAE is funding the RSF to commit genocide, and the U.S.—the largest arms seller to the UAE—is not using the leverage it has. Congresswoman Sara Jacobs joins the show to talk about the Stand Up for Sudan Act, what cutting USAID funding means for people on the ground, and how we can play a more meaningful role to stop these atrocities from happening.

Watch my full interview with Congresswoman Sara Jacobs on YouTube:

Also in today’s episode, a contractor named Chamel Abdul Karim allegedly set fire to a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California—causing $750 million in damage—and filmed himself doing it. Corporate media called it a crime story and stopped there. I do the math corporate media won’t do: Kimberly-Clark made $2.55 billion in profit while paying workers $30,000 below the cost of living in the city where they worked. Chamel will likely go to prison. The executives who made that choice face no consequences whatsoever.

You can listen to today’s episode here on Substack or watch my mathematical breakdown of the Kimberly-Clark warehouse fire:

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The Qasim Rashid podcast has surpassed 254,000 downloads! Thank you for your support.

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This Week’s Articles & Interviews

• Monday — Episode 218: Corporate Media Is Dead. Here’s How We’re Rebuilding Media That Serves People — Dylan Blaha’s return to the show as a colleague

• Tuesday — All You Had to Do Was Pay Us Enough to Live — The Kimberly-Clark warehouse fire isn’t just a crime story. It’s an economic injustice story. And corporate America wrote every word of it

• Wednesday — Rep. Sara Jacobs Won’t Stay Silent On Sudan, Iran, or Lebanon — Today marks three years of war, mass displacement, and genocide in Sudan. Rep. Sara Jacobs confronts the crises Congress would rather ignore

• Thursday — Zohran Mamdani Is Winning. And Politicians Everywhere Should Take Notes — In 100 days, New York’s mayor proved that bold, principled politics doesn’t just drive mass mobilization—it delivers results

• Friday — Men, We Need to Talk About “Rape Academy” — This isn’t about women. This is about us. And it’s long past time we had this conversation

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Readers in Illinois

Earlier this month we launched “Let’s Address Illinois” led by State Director Dylan Blaha—a Veteran, scientist, and former candidate for US Congress. Let’s Address Illinois will serve as your main stop for all things human rights, politics, and social justice in Illinois. Analysis on the latest pieces of legislation that impact your rights, the elections that impact your representation, and the social justice issues that corporate media continues to ignore.

Subscribe to Let’s Address Illinois as a free or paid subscribers. As always, no paywall.

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Dad Joke of the Week

Pull this one from the Twitter archives of April, 2017 :D #DadJokes

This article is not for women.

Women already know everything I’m about to say. They navigate it every single day—calculating risks, adjusting routes, reading rooms, and making hundreds of small decisions designed to keep themselves safe from us.

This is for men. Specifically, it is for the men who need to hear this, process it, and do something about it. So if you’re a man reading this—good. Stay with me. Because we need to talk. Let’s Address This.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This, a paywall-free platform dedicated to human rights, social justice, and the facts that corporate media ignores. If able, you can support this work with a paid subscription. 50% off for a limited time.

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The Pattern You Cannot Look Away From

Let me give you a series of recent news items. I want you to read them not as isolated incidents, but as the pattern of systemic behavior it is:

• This week, Former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Justin Fairfax killed his wife Cerina Fairfax—then killed himself.

• Last week Nancy Metayer, a woman and inspiring community leader on the verge of announcing her congressional campaign in Florida, was murdered by her husband. He is currently in custody.

• This week former California congressman Eric Swalwell, a former presidential candidate, was forced to resign after it was revealed that four to five women had allegedly been raped and sexually assaulted by him.

• Recently Former Texas congressman Tony Gonzales used his institutional power to coerce an affair with a staffer. She died by suicide—by setting herself on fire.

• The Epstein files document countless cases of rich and powerful men abusing children, raping women, and facing virtually no accountability. Donald Trump himself appears in those files more than one million times. Members of Congress who feign outrage have meanwhile expressed willingness to confirm men nominated by Trump, despite their own extensive appearance in the Epstein Files.

• And now this week we learn about the existence of “Rape Academy.” More on this below.

Rape Academy is the nickname given to a website that accumulated more than 60 million hits in February and more than 80 million hits in March—the majority from men in the United States. According to the CNN expose, Rape Academy exists for one explicit purpose: to teach men how to drug and rape their wives and partners, prostitute them to other men for money, and broadcast it online for the world to see, also for money.

Read that again. 140 million hits in just two months.

This is not a collection of unrelated bad actors. This is a pattern. And the pattern has a name: systemic male violence.

The Part Where Some Men Get Defensive

I already know what a segment of men reading this are going to say: “I’ve never done anything like that”.

Let me be direct: you do not get a cookie for not being a rapist.

That is not an accomplishment or something to hold up as a shield against this conversation. Basic human decency is the floor—the absolute minimum—not a ceiling. And the men who rush to announce their non-rapist status the moment this conversation begins are doing exactly what this culture has trained them to do: center themselves instead of confronting the problem.

The problem is this: we live in a society where one in three women, at minimum, report experiencing sexual assault or rape at some point in their lives. Men are committing those assaults. We live in a society where according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), 98% of men who commit rape will never spend a single day in prison. This is no accident. Our criminal justice system was built by men, is run predominantly by men, and has been structured, whether consciously or not, to protect other men from accountability.

The Men Who Watch and Say Nothing

There is a category of man I want to speak to directly: the ones who watch.

The friend who knows. The colleague who suspects. The family member who looks away. The man who tells himself it’s not my business or I don’t really know what happened or I don’t want to get involved—while a woman in his orbit is being harmed by a man he calls a friend, a brother, a teammate, a colleague.

It is your problem.

The culture of male violence does not survive without the culture of male silence. Every man who watches and says nothing is not a neutral bystander—he is an active enabler of a system that protects predators at the expense of survivors.

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What Men Have Said to Me for Saying This

Once I learned of the horrific “Rape Academy” website, I posted this video—it went viral.

I want to share specific examples of men who have responded to this message with mockery, insecurity, personal attacks, and deflection rather than engaging with the substance or holding other men accountable.

First, the men who falsely alleged my comments call all men rapists by default (they do not). This comment is what insecurity looks like.

Next, the men who call it “paid propaganda” to condemn rape culture. (It is not).

And let’s not forget about the men who think it’s misinformation, clickbait, or a distraction to call out rape culture (it is not, in any way).

And these are but a snapshot of the hundreds of angry, insecure, and in some cases violent responses men sent me for my ‘crime’ of condemning systemic male violence and abuse of women. Still talking to the men reading this—given these are the responses I received from one post about abusive men—imagine what women must navigate every single moment of their lives?

It is horrific, unsustainable, and inexcusable.

I share these not to relitigate those exchanges, but to illustrate the precise problem. When a man responds to a conversation about male violence with ridicule, personal attacks, and defensiveness—rather than with reflection or accountability—he is only further demonstrating exactly what I’m describing. The instinct to protect male ego above all else, even when the cost of that ego protection is the safety and lives of women, is itself a symptom of the sickness I’m naming.

These men are not outliers. And that is the crisis.

My Message to Women

I say this with full awareness of how uncomfortable it makes men: most men are not safe to be around alone.

Not because every man is a predator. But because a woman who does not know a man has no reliable way to determine whether he is one—and the statistical and cultural evidence does not give her reason for default trust. I know I am safe to be around. The women who don’t know me cannot know that. And I refuse to place the burden of that discernment on them.

And to those who would assert that more women should obtain firearms—the FBI data horrifyingly confirms that when a firearm is present, women are 100x more likely to die by that gun than to defend themselves with that gun. The “Rape Academy” story proves once more that if women cannot trust even their husbands, how are they to trust random men in public? Women have been carrying that infinite burden for their entire existence. They have been told to dress differently, walk differently, drink differently, trust differently—as if the solution to male violence is female vigilance.

It is not.

The solution to male violence is male accountability.

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This Is Not Sustainable

I close with something that should matter even to the men who cruelly do not care about women’s safety as a moral proposition: this is destroying our society.

A civilization in which one in three women (at minimum) are sexually assaulted, in which 98% of rapists face no consequences, in which a website teaching men to drug and rape their partners accumulates hundreds of millions of visits, in which powerful men kill their wives and abuse children and face no accountability—is a civilization in collapse. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Societies that normalize the systematic abuse and dehumanization of any minority community do not survive. But what’s happening here goes beyond a minority community, as women are the majority of society. Thus, societies that normalize the dehumanization of the majority of society ensure their own violent collapse. And that is what this society is facing if men do not change.

We are at an inflection point. And the path forward requires men—not governments, not policies alone, not women doing yet more emotional labor—but men to do the work. Get therapy. Do the internal work to understand where your rage, your entitlement, and your defensiveness come from. Hold your friends accountable—not just the strangers in the headlines, but the men in your actual life. Refuse to be silent when you know something is wrong. Refuse to prioritize male camaraderie over female safety.

This is not a political position. It is a human one.

Men, we are capable of better. The question is whether we will choose it—or whether we will continue to watch the consequences of our collective failure accumulate until there is nothing left to salvage.

The time for half-measures and defensive deflection is over.

Fix yourself. Hold each other accountable. Or own the consequences of refusing to.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, accountability, and the justice that our society demands. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

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In just 100 days, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has:

• Secured free childcare for two year olds

• Opened the city’s first public grocery store

• Won $10 million for gig workers

• Paid $30 an hour to shovel streets

• Delivered historic low crime and murder rates

• Filled 100,000 potholes

• Negotiated a tax on second homes of the ultra wealthy from Gov.Hochul

For the first time in New York State history—a tax on pied-à-terres: the multimillion dollar second homes that wealthy out-of-state residents park in Manhattan while working people can barely afford to stay in the city they actually live in. Under this landmark agreement, any second residence in New York City valued at $5 million or more will now be taxed at a higher rate—money that goes back to the people of New York, not to the billionaires who treat the city as a luxury storage unit.

One hundred days. That is all it took. And here’s how we must keep building.

Let’s Address This.

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The Pied-À-Terre Tax: A National Blueprint

Let’s dwell on this latest win—because it matters far beyond New York City. By slightly raising taxes on only 13,000 homes, New York City will generate another $500 million for working people.

For years, housing advocates, tax justice organizers, and working-class New Yorkers have demanded that the city’s most exclusive real estate—properties worth millions, owned by people who don’t even live here full time—contribute meaningfully to the public good. For years, they were told it was politically impossible. That the wealthy would fight it. That Albany would never agree.

Mamdani and the coalition of organizers behind DREAM for NYC didn’t accept that answer. They organized. They pressured—and are still pressuring. They made their voices impossible to ignore. And they won—securing a negotiated agreement with Governor Hochul that makes New York the first state in the nation to tax pied-à-terres at this scale as they continue fighting for a budget that refuses to force working New Yorkers to foot the bill for the ultra wealthy.

Here is the video announcing this win in tax the rich negotiations with Gov. Hochul.

This is not just a policy victory. It is a proof of concept for the entire country — especially in the wake of Trump’s trillion-dollar handout to the Epstein class.

If New York can tax the second homes of the ultra-wealthy, so can California. So can Illinois. So can Texas. So can every state where working people are being priced out of their own communities while the wealthy treat their housing market as an investment portfolio.

The tax-the-rich movement is not a slogan. It is a strategy. And it is working.

But the fight is not over because the pied-à-terre tax is a first step. The campaign for a millionaire income tax and put NY’s corporate tax on par with New Jersey—essential to funding the full vision of a city that works for everyone—is still being negotiated. Governor Hochul has not yet submitted her final budget. The movement to make it happen must increase its efforts to make these changes happen. And while the window to make history is open, it will not stay open forever.

This is the moment to turn the volume all the way up.

If you live in New York, sign DREAM’s petition right now and demand we tax the rich.

Tax the rich

If you don’t live in New York, send this to your friends, family and exes in New York.

Every signature matters. This win proves that organizing works. Don’t stop now—organize a similar letter in your own state!

Governor Hochul: Choose Your Side

The pied-à-terre tax win was made possible because Mayor Mamdani negotiated with Governor Hochul—and that negotiation produced something historic.

And to state once more for absolute clarity, the remaining fights—the millionaire income tax, the corporate tax, free buses for working New Yorkers—will require the Governor to make a clear and consequential choice. Will Governor Hochul stand with billionaires who want to keep hoarding wealth while workers struggle? Or stand with the millions of working New Yorkers who are watching, organizing, and voting?

Let me offer her a piece of advice that transcends ideology: Mamdani already proved which side has more power.

It was not the billionaires who won the pied-à-terre tax. It was the people—organized, persistent, loud, and united—who made it impossible to say no. Whether Governor Hochul’s north star is serving working people, or political self-preservation, the math remains straightforward: the people who organize, vote, and show up are more numerous and more powerful than the donors who write checks.

Governor Hochul: the organizing is not stopping. The pressure is not stopping. And the window to be on the right side of history—to be the governor who helped deliver a more just New York—is still open.

Choose wisely.

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This Is What Happens When You Put Principles Above Partisan Cowardice

Politicians who have spent decades telling you that change is slow, complicated, and incremental should be paying very close attention. Because Zohran Mamdani just called their bluff. There is a class of politician—and you know them well—who treats boldness as a liability. Who looks at a popular, necessary, morally urgent policy and says: not yet. Not now. The time isn’t right. We have to be realistic.

Zohran Mamdani is going to make such politicians go extinct.

Mayor Mamdani has proven in 100 days of bold, principled, people-powered governance that every politician in America who has ever used the word “realistic” as an excuse for timidity, has lied to us. And as Americans, we are done waiting. The people are not asking for the possible. They are demanding the necessary.

Free childcare is necessary. Public groceries are necessary. Living wages are necessary. Taxing the ultra-wealthy is necessary. Historic safety for communities is necessary. And a city where working people can actually afford to live is necessary and long overdue.

Zohran Mamdani is winning. Not despite his principles. Because of them.

Politicians everywhere should be afraid—not of him, but of what he represents: the proof that the people, organized and determined, are more powerful than any donor, any lobbyist, or any political machine that tells them to wait their turn.

We are not waiting any more.

Sign the petition. Tax the rich. Keep the pressure on:

TAX THE RICH

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, economic justice, and the bold politics that corporate media ignores. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

We further examined the urgent push for a War Powers Resolution to halt Trump’s illegal war in Iran, and the moral and legal obligation to uphold international law as Israel continues its bombing campaign in Lebanon.

Watch now and be sure to subscribe to Let’s Address This on YouTube.

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Rep. Jacobs does what too few in Washington are willing to do: speak plainly about injustice—no matter which administration is responsible. From challenging Donald Trump to holding Joe Biden accountable, she makes clear that international law is not optional—it is the baseline.

This is a conversation about accountability, human rights, and the cost of silence.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights and the accountability that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

Those are the words Chamel Abdul Karim spoke while filming himself allegedly burning down a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California. The fire caused an estimated $500 million in destroyed inventory and hundreds of millions more in rebuild costs. He also allegedly texted: “Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

The Justice Department has charged him. Corporate media has covered it as a crime story. And that’s where most outlets stopped.

I’m not stopping there. Let’s Address This.

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You can watch part of the video shared by Chamel here.

The Math That Corporate Media Won’t Do

I want to be clear: I am not endorsing what Chamel Abdul Karim did. Destruction of property is not a policy platform, and I am not treating it as one.

What I am saying is this: his anger is grounded in a documented, quantifiable, economic reality that billion-dollar corporations and their political allies have worked very hard to keep you from seeing clearly. So let’s see it clearly.

Chamel was not even a Kimberly-Clark warehouse employee. He was a contractor earning approximately $18 an hour — roughly $36,000 a year.

Kimberly-Clark’s own warehouse workers fare only marginally better, earning approximately $23 to $24 an hour — about $46,000 to $47,000 a year.

And lest anyone claims these are livable wages, let’s look at what it actually costs to live in Ontario, California. A simple living, not luxuriously, not comfortably, but simply to get by: approximately $67,000 a year for a single person.

That means Kimberly-Clark was paying its own employees $20,000 less per year than the basic cost of living in the city where they worked. It was paying contractors like Chamel $30,000 less per year than what it costs to survive.

And now for the number that should make every American furious.

On just over $20 billion in annual revenue, Kimberly-Clark generates approximately $2.55 billion in net profit every single year. The company employs roughly 38,000 people. If Kimberly-Clark chose to pay every single one of those employees an additional $20,000 per year — bringing them to the basic cost-of-living threshold — it would cost the company approximately $750 million annually.

They would still pocket nearly $2 billion in profit every single year.

The warehouse Chamel allegedly burned cost $750 million in damage.

Read that again: the cost of one act of economic desperation is identical to the annual cost of simply paying 38,000 workers enough to live. Kimberly-Clark chose the latter outcome through years of wage suppression. The math is not complicated. The choice was deliberate.

This Is Not an Isolated Story

Chamel Abdul Karim is one person. But his circumstances are shared by tens of millions of Americans.

Right now, 60% of Americans are not being paid enough even just to get by. Let alone enough to save or enough to build wealth. Not enough to absorb a single unexpected expense. And when we dare to name this reality, we are told the same tired mythology: Americans are lazy. People just need to work harder. If you give low-income workers more money, they’ll stop being motivated.

This is not economics. It is a weapon — deployed specifically to protect the interests of those at the top of the income ladder while convincing those at the bottom that their suffering is their own fault. Let’s examine who actually stops working when they get more money.

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The Trickle-Down Scam, By the Numbers

The Trump administration sold its tax policy on a simple promise: cut taxes on billionaires and corporations, and they will create jobs, raise wages, and the prosperity will trickle down to working people.

Here is what actually happened.

This week alone, Oracle laid off 30,000 employees. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees. Both companies are posting record profits. The billionaires who run these companies are not creating jobs with their tax windfalls. They are eliminating jobs while hoarding wealth at a scale this country has never seen.

And as reported by the Institute on Economic Policy and Taxation:

Four of the corporations whose CEOs flanked President Trump at his January 2025 inauguration ceremony have now disclosed that they collectively received $51 billion in federal tax breaks in 2025, much of that likely from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was signed into law by Trump over the summer. The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero. That amounts to a collective tax savings of $51 billion last year for these four giant multinational corporations, versus what they would have paid if they paid the full 21 percent federal corporate income tax rate.

It went to shareholders. It went to stock buybacks. It went to executive compensation. It went to the billionaires flanking a president at his inauguration.

Meanwhile, Chamel Abdul Karim was making $18 an hour and couldn’t afford to live where he worked.

Economic Violence Is Still Violence

There is a concept in human rights law and scholarship called structural violence — the idea that social arrangements and institutions can harm people just as surely as physical force, by systematically denying them what they need to survive and thrive. Poverty is not an accident. Wage suppression is not a market outcome. They are choices — made by specific people, in specific boardrooms, with specific political protection — that have specific, measurable human consequences.

When a corporation makes $2.55 billion in annual profit while paying workers $30,000 below the cost of living, that is not an accident or random circumstance. That is economic violence being imposed on working people while the perpetrators collect billion-dollar bonuses and lobby for further tax cuts.

We have criminalized Chamel Abdul Karim’s response to that violence. We have not criminalized the violence itself.

I am not arguing for equivalence. I am arguing for honesty. And honestly, a society that demands compliance from its most economically brutalized members while offering them nothing in return — not a living wage, not healthcare, not dignity, not a basic acknowledgment that their labor has value — should not be surprised when that compliance eventually breaks.

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What We Must Demand

The solutions here are not complicated. Chamel already gave the answer—all you had to do was pay us enough to live. This is common sense, but politically inconvenient for those infected with the sickness of hoarding wealth at the expense of human rights.

We must demand a living wage — not a minimum wage calculated decades ago and eroded by inflation, but a wage indexed to the actual cost of living in the places where people work. If Kimberly-Clark can afford $750 million in warehouse losses, it can afford to pay its workers $67,000 a year. As FDR declared when he signed a minimum wage into law in 1933:

It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

By this standard, Kimberly-Clark had no right to continue to do business in this country. The problem is too many of our elected officials are feckless, lack the basic courage to stop this economic violence, and lack the will to hold exploitative corporations like Kimberly-Clark accountable.

We must demand that billion-dollar corporations pay their actual tax rate—not the 4.9% their lobbyists have engineered. But a rate that reflects the public infrastructure, educated workforce, legal system, and stable society from which they extract their profits. We must demand an end to the trickle-down mythology — a decades-long scam that has transferred at least $79 Trillion from working people to the ultra-wealthy while delivering nothing but record inequality, wage stagnation, and the slow erosion of the American middle class.

And we must be willing to say clearly: the accumulation of obscene, generational, dynastic billionaire wealth while workers cannot afford to live is not a feature of a just society. It is a moral catastrophe.

Abolish billionaire tax shelters. Tax corporations at rates that reflect their actual profits. Pay workers enough to live where they work. These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum requirements of a society that takes human dignity seriously.

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The Real Crime in This Story

The real crime story I’ve described here is one you won’t hear from corporate media. Because their goal is to extract profit, not hold power accountable. This is why your support of our platform at Let’s Address This is even more critical—you help us hold the powerful accountable and elevate stories that corporate media ignores. The harsh truth is that Chamel Abdul Karim will likely go to prison. But the executives who spent years paying workers $30,000 below the cost of living, forcing millions of people to suffer in poverty, while themselves pocketing billions—will face no consequences whatsoever. They will, in fact, continue receiving federal tax breaks funded by those same underpaid workers.

That is the real crime in this story.

And until we have the courage to name it, prosecute it, and dismantle the systems that perpetuate it, we will keep producing the conditions that produce Chamel Abdul Karims — and then act surprised when those conditions explode.

When all they had to do was pay them enough to live.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, economic justice, and the accountability that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.

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On Episode 218 of The Qasim Rashid Show:

I interview Dylan Blaha—combat veteran, cancer researcher, and newly appointed Illinois State Director for Let's Address This. This week, he launched Let's Address Illinois — your main destination for all things politics, social justice, and human rights in Illinois. We discuss the decimation of national and local media, key Illinois legislation like the RIFLE Act and anti-BDS bills, and how we are re-building the media landscape focused on working people—not corporate profit. Let’s Address This.

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You can watch all episodes of the Qasim Rashid Show on YouTube. Make sure to subscribe on that platform for long-form content, deeper analysis, and more guest interviews.

Especially for those in Illinois, consider a free or paid subscription to support Let’s Address This Illinois—your main destination for all things politics, social justice, and human rights in Illinois.

Subscribe to Let's Address Illinois

This week is a milestone one on Let’s Address This, as we launched our first State publication! You’ve helped build our platform on the national level, and now we are expanding our reach on the state and local level. You made this possible! So today, if you’re in Illinois, I invite you to subscribe to Let’s Address Illinois, led by our Illinois State Director, Dylan Blaha. Dylan is a Veteran, a scientist, and a former candidate for United States Congress. I’m thrilled to welcome him aboard.

Join Let's Address Illinois

(Our next State launches later this month. It starts with T, and ends with exas!)

Diving into our national platform, this week Trump publicly posted that “a whole civilization will die” — threatening to annihilate 90 million Iranian lives. Congress said nothing. We break down what the resulting ceasefire actually cost compared to the Iran Deal Trump destroyed.

We meet Mai Vang, challenging a 50-year congressional dynasty in California to fight for working people. We expose the Hasan Piker witch hunt and what it reveals about corporate Democrats’ conflicting morals. We arm you with the truth about the national coordinated anti-Shariah campaign. And I share what happened when I addressed my own city council, calling for them to protect our neighbors from ICE. Let’s Address This.

For The First Time, Annual Subscription to Let’s Address This is 50% Off

In honor of two years of Let’s Address This, you can now become a paid subscriber to our human rights platform dedicated to social justice and the facts that corporate media ignores at 50% off. Until April 23, an annual subscription is only $25. Join us.

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This Week’s Articles & Interviews

• Monday — Episode 217: Her Parents Survived Genocide—She’s Challenging a 50-Year Dynasty — Running for Congress in California’s 7th District, Mai Vang is fighting for working people

• Tuesday — The Hasan Piker Witch Hunt Exposes Everything Wrong With Corporate Democrats — They’ll platform racists, Islamophobes, and war criminals but draw the line at a Muslim who opposes genocide

• Wednesday — Trump Threatened to Annihilate a Civilization — Congress Did Nothing. That Is the Story. And It Cannot Be Allowed To Happen Again

• Thursday — The Anti-Shariah Panic Is a Political Weapon —

  Here’s the truth it’s designed to hide, and the knowledge you need to arm yourself against this dangerous propaganda campaign

• Friday — I Demanded My City Council Protect Our Neighbors from ICE — When the federal government fails, our local leaders must step up, and so must we

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Dad Joke of the Week

Ted Cruz was among the members of Congress who got to ask the Artemis crew a question mid space flight—marking the first time in history someone in space spoke directly to someone in Cancun. :D #DadJokes

In commemoration of two years of growing Let's Address This, you can become a paid subscriber our human rights platform dedicated to the facts that corporate media ignores at 50% off until April 23. For a limited time, it is $25 for an annual subscription to support this work.

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Watch me address my city council:

I share these remarks to encourage you all to take on similar roles in your own communities. We must be active participants in our democracy—not passive bystanders. Find your city council members. Show up to meetings. Call their offices. Write to them. Demand that they use every tool available to protect the people in your community from unconstitutional abuse. Justice right now has to come from all of us.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This, a platform dedicated to human rights and social justice. Subscribe for more.