Latest news with #SunriseMovement
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump takes aim at city and state climate laws in executive order
Donald Trump is taking aim and city- and state-led fossil fuel accountability efforts, which have been hailed as a last source of hope for the climate amid the president's ferociously anti-environment agenda. In a Tuesday executive order, Trump instructed the Department of Justice to 'stop the enforcement' of state climate laws, which his administration has suggested are unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable. The president called out New York and Vermont, both of which have passed 'climate superfund' laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help pay for damages from extreme weather. Related: Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' agenda could keep the world hooked on oil and gas 'These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration's objective to unleash American energy,' the executive order says. 'They should not stand.' He also targeted the dozens of lawsuits brought by states, cities and counties against big oil in recent years, accusing the industry of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products and seeking compensation for climate impacts. The move left advocates outraged. 'This order is an illegal, disgusting attempt to force everyday people to pay for the rising toll of climate disasters, while shielding the richest people in the world from accountability,' said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement. The new order came as Trump touted new moves to revive the coal, the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel. It also followed a March meeting at the White House where fossil fuel executives reportedly lobbied Trump to give them immunity from climate litigation. Days earlier, 200 environmental, consumer advocacy and social justice groups had urged top congressional Democrats to block attempts from big oil to gain legal immunity, the Guardian reported. Oil interests applauded the new move from the president. 'Directing the Department of Justice to address this state overreach will help restore the rule of law and ensure activist-driven campaigns do not stand in the way of ensuring the nation has access to an affordable and reliable energy supply,' Ryan Meyers, the senior vice-president of top US fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement. But advocates say the order is an an anti-democratic attack on municipalities' climate action, which serve a crucial role in counterbalancing Trump's anti-environmental agenda. 'Make no mistake: this executive order isn't about energy independence or economic security – it's about ensuring billionaire polluters never have to face a jury of ordinary Americans,' said Cassidy DiPaola, the communications director of Make Polluters Pay, which backs the climate superfund laws. 'The American people deserve better than a government that protects polluters' profits over people's lives.' Fossil fuel companies poured $96m into Trump's re-election campaign and affiliated political action committees, as he pledged to roll back environmental regulations and loosen regulations on the industry. This was less than the $1bn Trump requested from the sector in an infamous meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club last spring, but still constituted record levels of spending. Trump pledged to attack climate lawsuits, which he has called 'frivolous', on the campaign trail. And during his first term, his administration filed influential briefs in the cases supporting the oil companies. But environmental lawyers question the validity of the new executive order. Related: Trump signs orders to allow coal-fired power plants to remain open 'This illegal and unconstitutional order panders to the biggest polluters on the planet and shows Trump's utter hypocrisy on states' rights,' said Jason Rylander, the legal director of the climate law institute at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. 'Trying to sic the justice department on state officials who are protecting their people from pollution will fail because the US attorney general has no power to declare state laws illegal.' In recent months, rightwing groups have launched campaigns attempting to shield oil companies from city and state climate accountability. Some have ties to Leonard Leo, who is known as a force behind the Federalist Society, which orchestrated the ultraconservative takeover of the American judiciary and helped select Trump's supreme court justice picks. A truck parked outside a major fossil fuel conference last month in Houston warned that city and state policies and lawsuits 'are threatening America's pro-consumer energy dominance', linking to an op-ed from a group with links to Leo. The new executive order echoes this sentiment, saying the litigation and laws 'threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security'.
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Protest can shape the world': Rebecca Solnit on the fight back against Trump
On 5 April, millions of people rallied against the Trump administration and its campaigns of destruction. In small towns and big cities from Alaska to Florida, red counties and blue (and a handful of European cities), they gathered with homemade signs full of fury and heartbreak and sarcasm. Yet the 'Hands Off' protests received minimal media coverage, and the general response was that they didn't do anything, because they didn't have immediate and obvious, and most of all quantifiable, consequences. I've heard versions of 'no one cares', 'no one is doing anything' and 'nothing came of it' for all my activist life. These responses are sometimes a sign that the speaker isn't really looking and sometimes that they don't recognise impacts that aren't immediate, direct or obvious. Tracking those indirect and unhurried impacts, trying to offer a more complex map of the world of ideas and politics, has been at the heart of my writing. For more direct impact, at least when it came to the rally I attended in San Francisco, you could have walked six or seven blocks to the Tesla dealership. Weekly protests there since February, like those across the country and beyond, have helped tank the Tesla brand and Tesla shares. They remind Elon Musk that he's in retail, where the customer is always right – and right now the customer would like him and his Doge mercenaries to stop dismantling the US government the way a hog dismantles a garden. Tesla aside, activists sometimes really do have tangible results and even immediate ones. The protests around the world and in Seattle, where we blockaded the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, encouraged the global south nations inside to stand up and refuse a raw deal from the global north and corporations. At that very meeting that very week. It might be the most immediately and obviously effective protest I ever attended, in fortysomething years of attending protests (even if protesting this version of corporate globalisation under the rubric 'free trade' is hard to explain during a catastrophic tariff crisis). But that was an exception. Mostly protests, campaigns, boycotts and movements do a lot, but do it in less tangible and direct ways than these. They influence public opinion, make exploitation and destruction and their perpetrators more visible, shift what's considered acceptable and possible, set new norms or delegitimise old ones. Because politics arises from culture, if culture is our values, beliefs, desires, aspirations shaped by stories, images – and yeah, memes – that then turns into politics as choices and actions that shape the world. If you want to measure impact you need more sophisticated tools and longer timeframes than the many versions of 'where's the payoff for this thing we just did'. Take the Green New Deal, advocated for passionately by the young climate activists in the Sunrise Movement, starting around 2018. The simple story to tell about it is that, as legislation cosponsored by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey, it did not pass. The complex story is that it shifted the frameworks in which we think about climate and economics in consequential ways. In other words, it was very effective, just not directly. It strongly influenced the Biden campaign's platform in 2020. His administration sought to pass it as Build Back Better and succeeded in doing so with the watered-down but still impactful Inflation Reduction Act, which influenced governments in other countries to amplify their own climate policies. (The Trump administration is dismantling some of it, but some will survive.) Change happens in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways – it often unfolds with slow and indirect consequences The Green New Deal as a proposal and campaign moved us beyond the old jobs-versus-the-economy framing that had plagued environmental activists for decades, making it clear that doing what the climate requires is a jobs-creation programme, and you could care about both. I don't hear the old framework any more, and one of the hardest things to detect in the department of indirect consequences is the thing that doesn't happen or the frame that no longer circulates. Jobs v environment is one. Another is the many stereotypes-become-slurs that treated female rape survivors as inherently dishonest and unreliable, deployed to protect countless rapists. This blanket discrediting is not part of the culture the way it was before the feminist insurrections that began in 2012-13. Seeing what's no longer there or what didn't happen is also an art, whether it's seeing the persecution that ceased or the forest that wasn't cut down. One of the aphorisms I have been coming back to for at least half my lifetime is 'everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler', attributed to Einstein and useful for almost everything. Because we get explanations of how things work – big things such as politics, change, history, human nature – that themselves don't work when they fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, uncertainties and indirect and delayed influences and consequences. It's like hacking off all the limbs of a tree because you'd rather call it a log or because you haven't quite figured out what leaves and branches do. Or looking at a tree today and saying it isn't growing, since it hasn't visibly changed since yesterday. Which, put that way, sounds infinitely ridiculous and yet in speech – which, ideally, reflects thought – people do it all the time. As I write in my forthcoming essay anthology No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, 'It's not that I have anything against the easy, the immediate, the obvious, the straightforward, and the predictable. It's just that I think much of what we face and endeavour to achieve requires an embrace or at least a recognition of its opposite. So I have chased after the long trajectories of change as both the often forgotten events and ideas leading up to a rupture, a breakthrough, or a revolution, and the often overlooked indirect consequences that come afterward. I've celebrated how a movement that may not achieve its official goal may nevertheless generate or inspire those indirect consequences that matter sometimes as much or more than the original goal. I've also noticed how often a movement is dismissed as having failed during the slow march to victory, when victory comes. So much activism has, on the sidelines, people telling us we can't win, who routinely vanish if and when we do.' One of the curiosities of American political life is that Republicans refuse to acknowledge the complexities and interconnections as ideology, but are very good at working with them practically, while the opposite is true of the Democrats. Republicans and the far right famously built power from the ground up, getting their people to run for school board and other low-level positions at the state and local level, working hard on winning state legislatures to pass voter-suppression measures that would help Republicans broaden their power even while they narrowed their support. They played the long game, patiently building power, pushing propaganda, recruiting – and of course did so with hugely wealthy foundations and billionaire donors who could afford to underwrite such efforts and provide the stability for such campaigns. In other respects, Republicans deny that everything or anything is connected to everything else, that actions and policies have consequences, that the shape of a life is not entirely up to that individual but is influenced by economic and social forces, that everything exists in relationship. It's convenient for rightwing ideology to deny the reality of environmental impacts, be it mining and burning fossil fuel or spreading toxins, because acknowledging the impact of individual and corporate actions would justify the regulations and collective responsibilities that are anathema to their deregulated free-enterprise rugged individual ethos. Likewise, it's convenient to claim that poverty and inequality are the result of individual failure, that the playing field is level and everyone has equal opportunity, because if you acknowledge that discrimination is real – well, discrimination is itself a system, and they prefer to deny systems exist. Democrats on the other hand have long recognised the existence of systems, including the systems that are the environment and climate, as well as the ugly systems of discrimination that have permeated American life such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so forth. But they're remarkably bad at building political frameworks to address this, failing where Republicans succeed when it comes to the long game of building power from the ground up, being on message, having a long-term strategy and sometimes, it seems, any strategy at all. So we live in an environment of conflicting and confusing information, furthered by the way the mainstream media too often see background and context on what just happened as editorialising and bias, so tend to present facts so stripped of context that only those who are good at building context themselves can find meaning in them. Media outlets routinely play down protest and when they cover it often do so dismissively. Media critic and former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes of the thin coverage of the Hands Off rallies: 'Organizers said that more than 100,000 demonstrators came to the protests in both New York and Washington DC. Crowd estimates are always tricky, but that certainly seems like a big story to me.' She points out that for many months news outlets have commented on how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter than in 2017. 'But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.' Protests against Trumpism in 2017, which were probably sneered at and dismissed at the time, are now being used to dismiss 2025 protests. But the most precise calibrators of these protests, Erica Chenoweth and colleagues at the Crowd Counting Consortium, write: 'And since Jan. 22, we've seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago … In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump's agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017.' The Consortium counted 686 protests on 21 January, 2017, with total participation above 3 million, making the Women's March the biggest one-day protest in US history. Meanwhile more than 1,300 US rallies happened on 5 April this year. This is part of why it's hard to recognise the impact of such events; they're so often written out of the story of change. Mostly the story of change we get is that great men hand it down to us, and we should admire and be grateful to them and periodically implore them for more crumbs. This is built into how history narrows down the civil rights movement and all the crucial work done by women into a few great men, into how the decades of dedicated work by the abolitionist movement are written out of the version in which Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves out of the blue. It's built into the superhero movies in which problems are solved by musclebound men deploying violence to definitively defeat evil, when the real superheroes of our time mostly look like scruffy stubborn people who build alliances and networks and movements over years, with an occasional burst of drama in the legislatures, courts and streets (but mostly through stuff that looks like office work, even if it's administration for liberation). The language of 'save the whales/children/country' suggests some kind of finality, and so do the plots of action movies. But evil comes back, so you have to keep defending your reproductive rights, your freedom of speech, your marriage equality, your forests and rivers and climate, even though maintenance is not as exciting as conflict. The phrase 'theory of change' has become popular in recent years, as in 'what's your theory of change?' Mine is that categories are leaky and anomalies abound. That change happens in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways, that it often unfolds with slow and indirect consequences, and that what ends up in the centres of power often begins in the margins and shadows. That stories have profound power and changing the story is often the beginning of changing the world. Something the current crisis in the US demonstrates is that power is rarely as simple as it's supposed to be. We see those who are supposed to be immensely powerful – captains of industry, prestige law firms, Ivy League universities – cringe and cave in fear while ordinary people (including lawyers and professors) stand on principle and judges mete out the law without intimidation. As for the unpredictability, I find hope in the fact that we're making the future in the present, and while you can't predict it with the certainty too many self-anointed prophets seem afflicted with, you can learn a lot from the patterns of the past – if you can remember the past and view events on the scale of those patterns that spread across decades and centuries. Places popular with tourists often put out maps that oversimplify the terrain on the assumption that we visitors are too dumb to contend with the real lay of the land, but those maps often mislead, literally, so you wander into a sketchy neighbourhood or a marsh that's not on the map. What I've tried to do as a writer is give people maps adequate to navigate the rocky, uneven territory of our lives and times. • No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca Solnit will be published by Granta on 8 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Protest can shape the world': Rebecca Solnit on the fight back against Trump
On 5 April, millions of people rallied against the Trump administration and its campaigns of destruction. In small towns and big cities from Alaska to Florida, red counties and blue (and a handful of European cities), they gathered with homemade signs full of fury and heartbreak and sarcasm. Yet the 'Hands Off' protests received minimal media coverage, and the general response was that they didn't do anything, because they didn't have immediate and obvious, and most of all quantifiable, consequences. I've heard versions of 'no one cares', 'no one is doing anything' and 'nothing came of it' for all my activist life. These responses are sometimes a sign that the speaker isn't really looking and sometimes that they don't recognise impacts that aren't immediate, direct or obvious. Tracking those indirect and unhurried impacts, trying to offer a more complex map of the world of ideas and politics, has been at the heart of my writing. For more direct impact, at least when it came to the rally I attended in San Francisco, you could have walked six or seven blocks to the Tesla dealership. Weekly protests there since February, like those across the country and beyond, have helped tank the Tesla brand and Tesla shares. They remind Elon Musk that he's in retail, where the customer is always right – and right now the customer would like him and his Doge mercenaries to stop dismantling the US government the way a hog dismantles a garden. Tesla aside, activists sometimes really do have tangible results and even immediate ones. The protests around the world and in Seattle, where we blockaded the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, encouraged the global south nations inside to stand up and refuse a raw deal from the global north and corporations. At that very meeting that very week. It might be the most immediately and obviously effective protest I ever attended, in fortysomething years of attending protests (even if protesting this version of corporate globalisation under the rubric 'free trade' is hard to explain during a catastrophic tariff crisis). But that was an exception. Mostly protests, campaigns, boycotts and movements do a lot, but do it in less tangible and direct ways than these. They influence public opinion, make exploitation and destruction and their perpetrators more visible, shift what's considered acceptable and possible, set new norms or delegitimise old ones. Because politics arises from culture, if culture is our values, beliefs, desires, aspirations shaped by stories, images – and yeah, memes – that then turns into politics as choices and actions that shape the world. If you want to measure impact you need more sophisticated tools and longer timeframes than the many versions of 'where's the payoff for this thing we just did'. Take the Green New Deal, advocated for passionately by the young climate activists in the Sunrise Movement, starting around 2018. The simple story to tell about it is that, as legislation cosponsored by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey, it did not pass. The complex story is that it shifted the frameworks in which we think about climate and economics in consequential ways. In other words, it was very effective, just not directly. It strongly influenced the Biden campaign's platform in 2020. His administration sought to pass it as Build Back Better and succeeded in doing so with the watered-down but still impactful Inflation Reduction Act, which influenced governments in other countries to amplify their own climate policies. (The Trump administration is dismantling some of it, but some will survive.) The Green New Deal as a proposal and campaign moved us beyond the old jobs-versus-the-economy framing that had plagued environmental activists for decades, making it clear that doing what the climate requires is a jobs-creation programme, and you could care about both. I don't hear the old framework any more, and one of the hardest things to detect in the department of indirect consequences is the thing that doesn't happen or the frame that no longer circulates. Jobs v environment is one. Another is the many stereotypes-become-slurs that treated female rape survivors as inherently dishonest and unreliable, deployed to protect countless rapists. This blanket discrediting is not part of the culture the way it was before the feminist insurrections that began in 2012-13. Seeing what's no longer there or what didn't happen is also an art, whether it's seeing the persecution that ceased or the forest that wasn't cut down. One of the aphorisms I have been coming back to for at least half my lifetime is 'everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler', attributed to Einstein and useful for almost everything. Because we get explanations of how things work – big things such as politics, change, history, human nature – that themselves don't work when they fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, uncertainties and indirect and delayed influences and consequences. It's like hacking off all the limbs of a tree because you'd rather call it a log or because you haven't quite figured out what leaves and branches do. Or looking at a tree today and saying it isn't growing, since it hasn't visibly changed since yesterday. Which, put that way, sounds infinitely ridiculous and yet in speech – which, ideally, reflects thought – people do it all the time. As I write in my forthcoming essay anthology No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, 'It's not that I have anything against the easy, the immediate, the obvious, the straightforward, and the predictable. It's just that I think much of what we face and endeavour to achieve requires an embrace or at least a recognition of its opposite. So I have chased after the long trajectories of change as both the often forgotten events and ideas leading up to a rupture, a breakthrough, or a revolution, and the often overlooked indirect consequences that come afterward. I've celebrated how a movement that may not achieve its official goal may nevertheless generate or inspire those indirect consequences that matter sometimes as much or more than the original goal. I've also noticed how often a movement is dismissed as having failed during the slow march to victory, when victory comes. So much activism has, on the sidelines, people telling us we can't win, who routinely vanish if and when we do.' One of the curiosities of American political life is that Republicans refuse to acknowledge the complexities and interconnections as ideology, but are very good at working with them practically, while the opposite is true of the Democrats. Republicans and the far right famously built power from the ground up, getting their people to run for school board and other low-level positions at the state and local level, working hard on winning state legislatures to pass voter-suppression measures that would help Republicans broaden their power even while they narrowed their support. They played the long game, patiently building power, pushing propaganda, recruiting – and of course did so with hugely wealthy foundations and billionaire donors who could afford to underwrite such efforts and provide the stability for such campaigns. In other respects, Republicans deny that everything or anything is connected to everything else, that actions and policies have consequences, that the shape of a life is not entirely up to that individual but is influenced by economic and social forces, that everything exists in relationship. It's convenient for rightwing ideology to deny the reality of environmental impacts, be it mining and burning fossil fuel or spreading toxins, because acknowledging the impact of individual and corporate actions would justify the regulations and collective responsibilities that are anathema to their deregulated free-enterprise rugged individual ethos. Likewise, it's convenient to claim that poverty and inequality are the result of individual failure, that the playing field is level and everyone has equal opportunity, because if you acknowledge that discrimination is real – well, discrimination is itself a system, and they prefer to deny systems exist. Democrats on the other hand have long recognised the existence of systems, including the systems that are the environment and climate, as well as the ugly systems of discrimination that have permeated American life such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so forth. But they're remarkably bad at building political frameworks to address this, failing where Republicans succeed when it comes to the long game of building power from the ground up, being on message, having a long-term strategy and sometimes, it seems, any strategy at all. So we live in an environment of conflicting and confusing information, furthered by the way the mainstream media too often see background and context on what just happened as editorialising and bias, so tend to present facts so stripped of context that only those who are good at building context themselves can find meaning in them. Media outlets routinely play down protest and when they cover it often do so dismissively. Media critic and former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes of the thin coverage of the Hands Off rallies: 'Organizers said that more than 100,000 demonstrators came to the protests in both New York and Washington DC. Crowd estimates are always tricky, but that certainly seems like a big story to me.' She points out that for many months news outlets have commented on how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter than in 2017. 'But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Protests against Trumpism in 2017, which were probably sneered at and dismissed at the time, are now being used to dismiss 2025 protests. But the most precise calibrators of these protests, Erica Chenoweth and colleagues at the Crowd Counting Consortium, write: 'And since Jan. 22, we've seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago … In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump's agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017.' The Consortium counted 686 protests on 21 January, 2017, with total participation above 3 million, making the Women's March the biggest one-day protest in US history. Meanwhile more than 1,300 US rallies happened on 5 April this year. This is part of why it's hard to recognise the impact of such events; they're so often written out of the story of change. Mostly the story of change we get is that great men hand it down to us, and we should admire and be grateful to them and periodically implore them for more crumbs. This is built into how history narrows down the civil rights movement and all the crucial work done by women into a few great men, into how the decades of dedicated work by the abolitionist movement are written out of the version in which Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves out of the blue. It's built into the superhero movies in which problems are solved by musclebound men deploying violence to definitively defeat evil, when the real superheroes of our time mostly look like scruffy stubborn people who build alliances and networks and movements over years, with an occasional burst of drama in the legislatures, courts and streets (but mostly through stuff that looks like office work, even if it's administration for liberation). The language of 'save the whales/children/country' suggests some kind of finality, and so do the plots of action movies. But evil comes back, so you have to keep defending your reproductive rights, your freedom of speech, your marriage equality, your forests and rivers and climate, even though maintenance is not as exciting as conflict. The phrase 'theory of change' has become popular in recent years, as in 'what's your theory of change?' Mine is that categories are leaky and anomalies abound. That change happens in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways, that it often unfolds with slow and indirect consequences, and that what ends up in the centres of power often begins in the margins and shadows. That stories have profound power and changing the story is often the beginning of changing the world. Something the current crisis in the US demonstrates is that power is rarely as simple as it's supposed to be. We see those who are supposed to be immensely powerful – captains of industry, prestige law firms, Ivy League universities – cringe and cave in fear while ordinary people (including lawyers and professors) stand on principle and judges mete out the law without intimidation. As for the unpredictability, I find hope in the fact that we're making the future in the present, and while you can't predict it with the certainty too many self-anointed prophets seem afflicted with, you can learn a lot from the patterns of the past – if you can remember the past and view events on the scale of those patterns that spread across decades and centuries. Places popular with tourists often put out maps that oversimplify the terrain on the assumption that we visitors are too dumb to contend with the real lay of the land, but those maps often mislead, literally, so you wander into a sketchy neighbourhood or a marsh that's not on the map. What I've tried to do as a writer is give people maps adequate to navigate the rocky, uneven territory of our lives and times. No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca Solnit will be published by Granta on 8 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Alex Soros fumes at left-wing climate group over 'Palestine' obsession: 'What the hell'
Alex Soros, the son of notorious billionaire George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundations, took aim at a left-wing climate group, saying: "All they do is talk about Palestine." In an interview with New York Magazine in which he detailed his plans to fund efforts to foil the Trump administration's agenda, Soros expressed his frustration with the leftist environmentalist group "Sunrise Movement," which is heavily funded by Soros-backed organizations. "What the hell did they do, by the way?" Soros, who is Jewish, complained. "We gave them money, and now all they do is talk about Palestine. It's ridiculous." During the 2020 election season, Sunrise Movement, whose website says it wants to "force the government to end the era of fossil fuel elites," received nearly a third of its funding from the Soros-backed Democracy PAC and Sixteen-Thirty Fund, totaling $750,000. Musk Claims George Soros, Linkedin Co-founder Reid Hoffman Are Funding 'Protests' Against Tesla Shortly after receiving these funds, Sunrise stepped into a massive controversy sparked by its Washington, D.C., chapter posting an antisemitic statement in which it vowed to boycott any events co-sponsored by "Zionist" Jewish groups. Read On The Fox News App In an October 2021 statement on "future coalition spaces with Zionist organizations," Sunrise DC said it was declining to participate in a D.C. statehood rally specifically because of the inclusion of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which it said "are all in alignment with and in support of Zionism and the State of Israel." Sunrise DC called Israel a "colonial project" that "treats all Palestinians, as well as Black and brown Jewish-Israelis, as second-class citizens." The group went on to ask the event organizers to remove the Jewish groups from participation, saying that the D.C. statehood movement is "incompatible with Zionism." The statement was quickly slammed as blatantly antisemitic. Former Biden Official 'Pleased' Trump Admin Tackling Antisemitism One user named Blake Flayton, a Jewish podcaster, called out the group, commenting, "You are intentionally pushing Jewish people outside of your movement." "You are associating Jews in the United States with the actions of Israel," added Flayton. "This is antisemitic. You are antisemites." In a follow-up post published several days later, Sunrise DC apologized for singling out the three Jewish organizations while not mentioning other groups associated with the event "with similar positions." The group doubled down on its stance against Zionism, calling it an "ideology that has led to Palestinians being violently pushed out of their homes since 1948." The group said it was "committed to learning and growing as we continue to stand against Zionism, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and all other forms of oppression." Antisemitic Incidents Break Record For 4Th Straight Year, Adl Finds This post was also widely panned as antisemitic, with one user named Joel Petlin commenting that Sunrise was "trying to get out of a hole they dug for themselves by digging it deeper." "*We apologize for singling out 3 Jewish organizations when we should've singled out everyone who doesn't hate Israel* is not actually an apology. It's just doubling down on Antisemitism," said Petlin. This past October, Sunrise Movement published a long Instagram post railing against Israel, saying, "Climate justice means freedom for Palestinians." "Why? Because Israel's ongoing oppression of Palestinians means they will suffer some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, and Israel's constant bombing harms the climate, ultimately harming us all," Sunrise Movement continued. "While committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli military – which is backed and armed by the US – has released more carbon emissions than 20 of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations combined. Democrats and left-wing leaders have long called criticisms of George Soros, who is a Hungarian-born Jew, antisemitic attacks. However, the Soros family's funding of progressive anti-Israel agitators across the country, including those who mobilized at New York City's Columbia University, has raised eyebrows as well. Fox News Digital previously reported on Israel's minister of diaspora affairs and social equality, Amichai Chikli, saying that Alex is a mirror image of his father's anti-Israel agenda. Cair Panelist Accuses Trump Admin Of Using Ai And Antisemitism Against Free Speech When asked if Alex will continue to fund anti-Israel entities that bash the Jewish state, Chikli said it "looks like the son is a replica of his father. We have no expectation that his son will be a big Zionist." Chikli noted that the Soros foundation "gives money to radical small Palestinian organizations in Israel that describe Israel as a colonial state and a moral sin." Fox News Digital reached out to Open Society Foundations and the Sunrise Movement for comment, but neither responded in time for publication. Benjamin Weinthal and Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this article source: Alex Soros fumes at left-wing climate group over 'Palestine' obsession: 'What the hell'
Fox News
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Alex Soros fumes at left-wing climate group over 'Palestine' obsession: 'What the hell'
Alex Soros, the son of notorious billionaire George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundations, took aim at a left-wing climate group, saying: "All they do is talk about Palestine." In an interview with New York Magazine in which he detailed his plans to fund efforts to foil the Trump administration's agenda, Soros expressed his frustration with the leftist environmentalist group "Sunrise Movement," which is heavily funded by Soros-backed organizations. "What the hell did they do, by the way?" Soros, who is Jewish, complained. "We gave them money, and now all they do is talk about Palestine. It's ridiculous." During the 2020 election season, Sunrise Movement, whose website says it wants to "force the government to end the era of fossil fuel elites," received nearly a third of its funding from the Soros-backed Democracy PAC and Sixteen-Thirty Fund, totaling $750,000. Shortly after receiving these funds, Sunrise stepped into a massive controversy sparked by its Washington, D.C., chapter posting an antisemitic statement in which it vowed to boycott any events co-sponsored by "Zionist" Jewish groups. In an October 2021 statement on "future coalition spaces with Zionist organizations," Sunrise DC said it was declining to participate in a D.C. statehood rally specifically because of the inclusion of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which it said "are all in alignment with and in support of Zionism and the State of Israel." Sunrise DC called Israel a "colonial project" that "treats all Palestinians, as well as Black and brown Jewish-Israelis, as second-class citizens." The group went on to ask the event organizers to remove the Jewish groups from participation, saying that the D.C. statehood movement is "incompatible with Zionism." The statement was quickly slammed as blatantly antisemitic. One user named Blake Flayton, a Jewish podcaster, called out the group, commenting, "You are intentionally pushing Jewish people outside of your movement." "You are associating Jews in the United States with the actions of Israel," added Flayton. "This is antisemitic. You are antisemites." In a follow-up post published several days later, Sunrise DC apologized for singling out the three Jewish organizations while not mentioning other groups associated with the event "with similar positions." The group doubled down on its stance against Zionism, calling it an "ideology that has led to Palestinians being violently pushed out of their homes since 1948." The group said it was "committed to learning and growing as we continue to stand against Zionism, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and all other forms of oppression." This post was also widely panned as antisemitic, with one user named Joel Petlin commenting that Sunrise was "trying to get out of a hole they dug for themselves by digging it deeper." "*We apologize for singling out 3 Jewish organizations when we should've singled out everyone who doesn't hate Israel* is not actually an apology. It's just doubling down on Antisemitism," said Petlin. This past October, Sunrise Movement published a long Instagram post railing against Israel, saying, "Climate justice means freedom for Palestinians." "Why? Because Israel's ongoing oppression of Palestinians means they will suffer some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, and Israel's constant bombing harms the climate, ultimately harming us all," Sunrise Movement continued. "While committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli military – which is backed and armed by the US – has released more carbon emissions than 20 of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations combined. Democrats and left-wing leaders have long called criticisms of George Soros, who is a Hungarian-born Jew, antisemitic attacks. However, the Soros family's funding of progressive anti-Israel agitators across the country, including those who mobilized at New York City's Columbia University, has raised eyebrows as well. Fox News Digital previously reported on Israel's minister of diaspora affairs and social equality, Amichai Chikli, saying that Alex is a mirror image of his father's anti-Israel agenda. When asked if Alex will continue to fund anti-Israel entities that bash the Jewish state, Chikli said it "looks like the son is a replica of his father. We have no expectation that his son will be a big Zionist." Chikli noted that the Soros foundation "gives money to radical small Palestinian organizations in Israel that describe Israel as a colonial state and a moral sin." Fox News Digital reached out to Open Society Foundations and the Sunrise Movement for comment, but neither responded in time for publication.
