Today in Labor History February 22, 2004: Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union, National Education Association (NEA), a terrorist organization. No teachers were killed or imprisoned for belonging to the union under the Bush administration, but the government did use the epithet to justify imprisoning citizens and non-citizens indefinitely without trial for being “terrorists.” And the 20-year “war on terror” that Bush initiated led to at least 900,000 deaths, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project (https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar). However, Professor Catherine Lutz, co-author of report, called this a vast undercount. She said that “one has to multiply that direct death number… by an estimated two to four times to get to the total number of people – in the millions – who are dead today who would not have been dead had the wars not been fought.” This would put Bush up there with the top ten most murderous world leaders of the past 100 years.
Currently, the Trump administration is using the “terrorist” epithet to justify the mass deportation of immigrant “criminals.” In reality, they are going after anyone who doesn’t look “white,” including many who have never been accused of a crime. There have already been numerous reports of citizens and legal residents, including Indigenous people, being deported or imprisoned. Trump is also using the epithet to justify flying CIA spy drones over Mexico to surveil drug cartels, in violation of international law. And, in the future, he could start using armed drones to kill people accused of gang affiliation, whether they are in Mexico, El Salvador, or the working-class communities of major U.S. cities, like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Indeed, Todd Zimmerman, the DEA’s special agent in Mexico City, said that U.S. military action in Mexico was on the table (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-02-21/trump-militarizes-approach-to-mexico).
If the U.S. government did start targeting its own citizens as “terrorists,” it would nothing new. They are already calling pro-Palestinian activists terrorists, attempting to label all of them as Hamas symps, and threatening deport any who don’t have U.S. citizenship. They prosecuted and imprisoned numerous environmental and animal rights activists as terrorists in the 90’s and early 2000’s. In the 1960s and early ‘70s, they murdered numerous activists from organizations they labeled as “terrorists,” like the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement. And going back at least as far as the 1860s, they were falsely accusing Irish union organizers of being Molly Maguire terrorists, wrongfully executing 10 of them on June 21, 1877, the second largest single-day mass execution in U.S. history, after the 1862 mass execution of 38 Dakota Indians. Considering Trump’s goal of abolishing, or at least gutting, the Department of Education; his hatred of unions; and the anti-union objectives of Protest 2025; it is not hard to see the “terrorist” epithet again being hurled at teacher unions, and at all unions (except, perhaps, those that affiliate with a future pro-MAGA American Labor Front, like Hitler’s German Labor Front).
Or, we could just start arming teachers, as many on the right have demanded, and see where that takes us…
You can read more about the so-called Molly Maguires here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/13/the-myth-of-the-molly-maguires/
mass murderer?"
gutting the world’s largest provider of food aid. We're watching evil at work."
