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The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide
Speaking the truth and exposing lies is not enough.
The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide
Speaking the truth and exposing lies is not enough.
by Robin D. G. Kelley
with responses from
David Waldstreicher
Jennifer Zacharia
Martin O’Neill
Published in our Summer 2025 issue
Fourteen years ago, Noam Chomsky published “The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux” in these pages. He used the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to revisit his classic 1967 essay on the subject, although the immediate occasion for the piece was the assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals. As the Obama administration (and much of America) celebrated, Chomsky exposed the operation as a violation of U.S. and international law. The singular goal was to kill bin Laden, not capture him and bring him to trial. There was no pretense of habeas corpus since his body was summarily dumped into the sea.
Chomsky thus reiterates his original contention that it is the “responsibility of intellectuals” to tell the truth about war—in this instance, the war on terror and the crimes of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Referring to decades of debate on the phrase, he notes, “The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established institutions?” His answer was clear: intellectuals must be guided by conscience and refuse to be beholden to state interests, either out of political loyalty or ideological commitment or both.
Chomsky’s injunction to “speak the truth and to expose lies” feels incomplete today. Whatever power truth-telling might have had against fascism has been radically diminished.
The original essay, penned by a thirty-seven-year-old Chomsky, was adapted from a talk he gave at Harvard Hillel Society in 1966 and published in the student journal Mosaic. A revised and expanded version appeared as a special supplement in the February 23, 1967, edition of the New York Review of Books. The essay is a razor-sharp critique of intellectuals who, by assuming the roles of “experts” and technocrats for the state, abandon all moral, ethical, and historical judgment in order to advance ruling class interests and U.S. hegemony. Chomsky takes aim at the scholars and bureaucrats who had advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on Vietnam and Cuba and had no qualms about lying to the press and general public. These were the liberal intellectuals of Pax Americana who touted free-market capitalism as the universal measure of modern civilization. Communism, socialism, or any such alternatives were dismissed as dangerous “ideology,” beyond the pale of common sense. Chomsky insisted that it was the responsibility, if not the duty, of intellectuals “to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”
Chomsky drew inspiration from a pair of essays by Dwight Macdonald in politics magazine in 1945. In a brief comment he would later retitle “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Macdonald lampoons American journalist Max Lerner for wandering through postwar Germany asking ordinary people why they allowed Nazi atrocities to happen, all the while assuming an air of moral superiority and ignoring the role of the German state or the complicity of other Western powers. But Chomsky was primarily responding to “The Responsibility of Peoples,” his longer, more nuanced essay, published a month earlier, critiquing the concept of collective war guilt. Macdonald observes that the conflation of “common peoples” with the interests and policies of nation-states corresponds with a devolution of their power and authority over their own government—what he termed “the dilemma of increasing political impotence accompanied by increasing political responsibility.” This paradox not only fuels collective punishment but effectively relieves the “victors” of responsibility. As examples, Macdonald cites Allied carpet bombing, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japanese internment, as well as the crimes of colonial violence, lynching, and racial segregation. To blame all German people for Nazism, he concluded, is to blame all people for all atrocities, effectively occluding the specific operations of state violence and conflating compliance with universal consent, if not active support.
While Chomsky agreed with Macdonald’s critique of collective guilt, he argued that intellectuals in Western democracies bear some moral responsibility by virtue of their privileged position. “In the Western world, at least,” he contended, “they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression.” This privilege affords intellectuals unique opportunities to speak out. “Opportunity,” he adds in his 2011 redux, “confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.”
Of course, Chomsky knew that such “privilege” was hardly universal—that dissenting without fear of state violence eluded dissident intellectuals in other parts of the world. Graveyards and gulags are filled with intellectuals who tried to exercise their “moral responsibility” to tell the truth. Even in the “liberal” United States, prison or exile has been the fate of generations of radical thinkers, especially those from marginalized communities. Who can speak, when, on what subjects, and from what platforms is determined by historical context and differentiated by race, gender, class, ideology, and politics. Individuals may have choices, but they are constrained by social and political conditions. In times of crisis, war, and fascism, opportunities open or close depending on where one stands in relation to the ruling power. We do not now—and never did—live in a world, or a nation, dominated by independent iconoclasts, tenured radicals, or dedicated philosophes pursuing knowledge free from politics.
On the contrary, dissidents or insurgents represent just a tiny fraction of what is erroneously called “the intellectual class.” Chomsky believed that the intellectuals who fully backed the ruling regime had somehow betrayed their duty or obligation to expose the administration’s lies. I think it is more accurate to say that they thought they were fulfilling their duty, but their choices were ideologically and politically driven. As they saw it, their responsibility was to defend U.S. foreign policy because they believed it was right: there was no need to expose facts or disclose the truth because the threat of communism is what mattered. The problem, that is, was not an absence of moral courage but a dedication to Cold War liberalism.
By the time Chomsky revisited his essay in 2011, he had not only become a much sharper critic of liberalism. Neoliberalism had also reshaped higher education. The university’s embrace of market fundamentalism is now totally complete, and the creeping privatization of public universities has seen corporate donors, higher tuitions, and questionable investments replace shrinking state funding. Top administrators are no longer beholden to students and faculty, the pursuit of knowledge, or the public good but to donors, trustees, and government. For the last couple of decades, we’ve seen a growing assault on critical inquiry, academic freedom, and safety, alongside the casualization of labor, rising tuitions, severe budget cuts to humanities and other non-STEM fields, and the financialization of higher education. Finance capital has become a silent driver of university policy, and conservative state legislatures have imposed additional limits and mandates on higher education in their respective states. As a consequence, the “privilege” that Chomsky recognized in 1967 now eludes many insurgent academics. And another privilege he recognized—access to information—has been dispersed with the internet.
The political context is different, too. At a time when lies, deceptions, and fake news are so entrenched that critics have dubbed ours the “post-truth era,” we are facing a global turn toward authoritarianism, rising fascism in the United States, mounting political violence, multiple genocides, and a relentless right-wing attack on critical knowledge, colleges and universities, and basic liberal education. With the help of the United States, Israel continues to massacre, starve, and displace Gaza’s civilian population under the pretense of self-defense. We are witnessing genocide. We are living in fascist times.
Under these conditions, the possibilities that Chomsky saw in the power of truth-telling from privileged intellectuals are vastly diminished. But more than that, our situation helps us to see that there was always something misformulated about Chomsky’s question, however forcefully it exposed the moral bankruptcy of the “value-free” experts who perpetrated war in Vietnam. Those intellectuals aligned with the state were always going to lie, since they had chosen their side. The real questions before us are: What is the responsibility of intellectuals committed to fighting fascism and genocide? How do we refuse and resist complicity when our own institutions are complicit? And what might we learn from earlier antifascist and anticolonial struggles?
To begin to answer these questions, it is instructive to return to the notion of the “organic intellectual” developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935 while he was imprisoned by the Mussolini regime. “It is difficult to find a single criterion to characterize equally well all the disparate activities of intellectuals and, at the same time, distinguish them and in an essential way from the activities of other social groups,” Gramsci wrote:
The most widespread methodological error, it seems to me, has been to look for the essential characteristic in the intrinsic nature of intellectual activity rather than in the system of relations wherein this activity (and group that personifies it) is located in the general ensemble of social relations.
By “ensemble,” Gramsci wasn’t just referring to class relations but to the whole range of identities and institutions that shape our place in society. Because every human being has the capacity to think critically and possesses a worldview formed from experience, Gramsci insisted that all people are intellectuals, but they do not all function as such in society. “Traditional” intellectuals—for Gramsci, the teachers, scholars, clergy, and other figures who imagined themselves occupying an autonomous position in the social world—play a critical role in maintaining the hegemony of the dominant class, shaping ideology, law, culture, and “common sense,” organizing consent, and stifling class antagonisms. “Organic” intellectuals, by contrast, are embedded in specific classes or social groups, reflecting as well as articulating the interests and ideology of their class. To them, the responsibility of intellectuals is to choose a side and fight.
We tend to associate organic intellectuals with what Gramsci refers to as “subaltern” groups—the oppressed, marginalized, and exploited classes. But the dominant classes also have their organic intellectuals, as do right-wing and fascist movements contesting for power—all of whom also see it as their responsibility to analyze and critique the social order from the standpoint of their class or social group, educate, build and hold power, lay out a vision of a future rooted in their movement’s collective imagination, and fight to bring it into existence. In other words, they are not just cogs in a machine beyond their control but ideologues who create, drive, and justify policy in the interests of their class or political bloc.
In 1967, Chomsky was writing as a kind of organic intellectual with many of the privileges typically reserved for traditional intellectuals. As a tenured professor at MIT, the epicenter of the nation’s burgeoning academic-military complex, he managed to say and write what he wanted—including severe criticism of the liberal ruling class around him and in Washington—without professional or legal consequences. (Not that he didn’t experience blowback: he was always widely reviled by the mainstream media and was arrested for an antiwar teach-in outside the Pentagon in 1967, for example.)
We are witnessing levels of repression not seen since the Red Scare.
At the time, the American professoriate was overwhelmingly white and male. Cold War expansion turned leading universities into the research and development arm of corporations and the warfare state, thanks in large part to federal grants and foundations. But as more universities began opening their doors to women and students of color, the struggles in the streets and the world spilled over onto campuses. Universities were hardly engines of change, but they increasingly became contested terrain. Chomsky’s initial talk reflected growing student discontent with U.S. foreign policy and its publication paralleled the rise of an explosive student movement: resisting the draft, demanding new forms of democracy, opening the vaunted doors of academia to the people, breaking universities’ ties with imperialism, and launching new forms of inquiry—Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies.
And yet, a wider problem looms over his New York Review essay like a faint shadow: fascism. It was Macdonald’s musings on fascism and war that drew Chomsky to the question of responsibility in the first place—subjects Macdonald would ponder for years to come. Indeed, when “The Responsibility of Peoples” appeared in his 1953 book, The Root Is Man: Two Essays in Politics, Macdonald added the following footnote:
By an ironical twist of history, the victims have now become oppressors in their turn. Since 1948, some 800,000 Arab refugees, who fled from Palestine during the fighting, have been living wretchedly in camps around the country’s borders maintained by UN charity. The Israeli government—opposed by no important Jewish group that I know of—refuses to let them back and has given their homes, farms, and villages to new Jewish settlers. This is rationalized by the usual ‘collective responsibility’ nonsense. This expropriation cannot, of course, be put on the same plane as the infinitely greater crime of the Nazis. But neither should it be passed over in silence.
Today this passage would be considered antisemitic, its author subject to investigation, libelous condemnation by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and possible dismissal. But so long as Macdonald forswore communism, he was free to exercise his “privilege” as an intellectual.
Chomsky makes no mention of this footnote in his New York Review essay, but he heeds Macdonald’s message that wars of dispossession and ethnic cleansing should never “be passed over in silence.” And he, too, turns to the analogy of Nazi Germany to make sense of Vietnam, likening U.S. aggression “with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny” to Hitler. “Of course, the aggressiveness of liberal imperialism is not that of Nazi Germany,” Chomsky writes, “though the distinction may seem academic to a Vietnamese peasant who is being gassed or incinerated.”
Still, the imminent threat of fascism back home goes notably unaddressed. Treating intellectuals as an autonomous social category, Chomsky sidesteps their differential relationship to, and embeddedness within, social relations. Three weeks after “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” appeared, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., published an account of the Chicago Freedom Movement’s 1966 march for open housing in which he compared the mob violence they encountered to that of Nazi Germany. “Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds,” he wrote. “Our marchers were met by a hailstorm of bricks, bottles, and firecrackers. ‘White power’ became the racist hatecall, punctuated by obscenities.” Later that summer, police violence sparked massive rebellions in Detroit, Newark, and over 150 cities, prompting state officials to send National Guard troops to occupy Black neighborhoods. The Black Panther Party declared U.S. state violence “fascist” and in 1969 organized a United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland, California, in addition to forming the National Committee to Combat Fascism to resist police repression.
Black and brown struggles against homegrown fascism were not Chomsky’s focus at the time. This is perfectly understandable: he was concerned mainly with the crimes of American empire and colonial violence abroad. In fact, years later Chomsky explained that part of the reason for the focus of his Harvard talk was that McGeorge Bundy, who had served as dean there, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Vietnam war as President Johnson’s national security advisor. But as a long line of Black radicals had argued, colonial violence abroad was closely linked with fascism at home. To understand this relationship, we need to pay attention to the longer history of antifascism, particularly the role of Black organic intellectuals in the 1930s and ’40s—when politics, media, and intellectual production more closely resembled the highly partisan landscape of our own time than the postwar liberal ideal of objectivity and consensus that prevailed when Chomsky was writing.
In that period, antifascism not only drew students and faculty out of the universities and into the streets, union halls, unemployed councils, communist and socialist parties, and the battlefields of Spain. It also brought antifascism and varieties of Marxism—Trotskyism, Stalinism, Fabian Socialism—into the university. The largely Jewish working-class campus of City College in New York became a hotbed of socialist and antifascist organizing. Even pristine Columbia University became a major site of antifascist protest when its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, welcomed Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States to speak on campus in December 1933. The more than 1,000 students and allies who showed up to disrupt the speech confronted police wielding billy clubs. But they were not deterred. Students called on the administration to publicly rebuke the Nazi regime, boycott German goods, assist German refugees, and hire exiled scholars. Butler, a longtime admirer of Mussolini who had established ties between Columbia and Italy, remained steadfast for several years, electing to crush student dissent rather than disavow fascism.
Left-wing, anticolonial, antifascist, and civil rights organizations had their share of Black organic intellectuals whose activism and writing reshaped scholarship and politics in the U.S. The writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Louise Thompson Patterson, George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Marvel Cooke, Ella Baker, Abram Harris, Richard Wright, young Ralph Bunche, and many others, were not produced in isolation but in relation to movement and as conscious efforts to combat fascism, racism, and colonialism. Indeed, they recognized that fascism was born of racism and colonialism. Their mobilizations against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, as American business leaders and university presidents such as Butler feted Mussolini, were among the first antifascist actions in the United States. They called out and resisted homegrown fascism in the form of lynch law, the suppression of workers’ organizations and virtually all forms of dissent, and the denial of civil and democratic rights to Black citizens. As poet, playwright, essayist, and activist Langston Hughes told those assembled at the Third U.S. Congress against War and Fascism in 1936, “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America. . . . This kind of terrorism is extending more and more to groups of peoples whose skins are not black.”
The early life and work of sociologist St. Clair Drake is exemplary of this generation of organic intellectuals whose work shaped, and was shaped by, opposition to fascism and colonialism. Son of a Garveyite father from Barbados and a mother from Virginia, Drake came to activism through the pacifism of the Quakers. Four years after graduating from Hampton Institute in 1931, he went to Dillard University in New Orleans to work as a research assistant and teach, all the while immersing himself in antifascist and pacifist politics. He worked with the NAACP and published articles in The Crisis, the organization’s official magazine, on lynching and the antiwar movement. In May 1936, he and two other Black Dillard faculty members, Lawrence Reddick and Byron Augustine, joined local NAACP Secretary James LaFourche to disrupt a massive pro-fascist parade organized by the city’s Italian community. The men boldly drove a car through the line of march bearing a placard that read “We Protest Against the Celebration of Aggressive War and Fascism.” Police surrounded the car and allowed the marchers to tear up the sign but no one was arrested. Drake left the following year to pursue graduate work at the University of Chicago, continuing to organize against fascism, before returning to Dillard in 1941. He didn’t last long; within a year he was fired for supporting student protests against bus segregation.
Drake went on to coauthor, with fellow sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr., Black Metropolis, a landmark two-volume study of Chicago’s South Side, also known as Bronzeville. While the book broke new ground in the study of Black life, what I find particularly striking is its consistent antifascist politics: there is no pretense of detachment or effort to conceal its political stakes. Published in 1946, when Black men who had helped defeat fascism faced unemployment and an uptick in racist violence, the authors predicted that “the Negro may again become a chronic relief client, despised by the majority of white citizens who have to support him from taxes and the symbol around which the aggressions of a frustrated society can be organized, so that he may fill the role of the whipping boy for an emerging American Fascism.” Such an outcome could be avoided, they argued, so long as the United States achieved full employment and the entire world embraced, in their words, a “program for emancipating the Common Man.” “The problems that arise on Bronzeville’s Forty-seventh Street encircle the globe,” they wrote. “A blow struck for freedom in Bronzeville finds its echo in Chungking and Moscow, in Paris and Senegal. A victory for Fascism in Midwest Metropolis will sound the knell of doom for the Common Man everywhere.”
A long line of Black radicals argued that violence abroad was closely linked with fascism at home.
Drake and Cayton understood that defeating Germany and Japan would not end fascism at home. In an opinion piece for the Pittsburgh Courier dated May 19, 1945, Cayton wrote, “We now turn to the war within our own country. Victory for democracy will mean some chance of a peace. Victory for our own native Fascism—the Hitler which lives in us—will mean that we’re setting the stage for the next world war.” His warning was echoed by Black Communist Party leader Claudia Jones, who argued in a 1946 article that fascism was alive and well in the Jim Crow South, evidenced in part by the revival of lynching and the beatings and assassinations of Black veterans. “Today the main danger of fascism to the world comes from the most colossal imperialist forces which are concentrated within the United States,” Jones observed. “The perpetrators of these attacks are the representatives of the most reactionary section of monopoly capital and of the semi-feudal economy of the Black Belt.”
The West claimed victory over fascism even as it continued to perpetuate fascist and genocidal policies in the colonies, semi-colonies, and ghettos. In 1945, three years before the Afrikaner-led National Party came to power and implemented apartheid, the Non-European Unity Movement, a multiracial Trotskyist-led organization opposed to white minority rule, issued a powerful statement comparing life in South Africa to the Third Reich: “The Non Europeans of South Africa live and suffer under a tyranny very little different from Nazism. And if we accept that there can be no peace as long as the scourge of Nazism exists in any corner of the globe, then it follows that the defeat of German Nazism is not the final chapter of the struggle against tyranny.” Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1950, not only joined other radical thinkers in identifying the seeds of fascism in the colonial order but pointed to the atrocities committed by French occupation forces in response to anticolonial resistance as evidence of fascism’s persistence. “Think of it!” Césaire intoned. “Ninety thousand dead in Madagascar! Indochina trampled underfoot, crushed to bits, assassinated, tortures brought back from the depths of the Middle Ages!”
In 1951, William L. Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and a leading member of the Communist Party, attempted to submit a copy of We Charge Genocide!: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People, a book-length study of American state-sanctioned racial violence, to a UN delegation in Paris. Paul Robeson simultaneously attempted to submit the same text to the UN in New York. Drafted by Patterson, Richard Boyer, Elizabeth Lawson, Yvonne Gregory, Oakley Johnson, and Aubrey Grossman, We Charge Genocide! not only documented hundreds of incidents of anti-Black violence during the six years since the end of World War II; it also served as a petition to the UN indicting the United States for violating both the UN Charter and its 1948 Convention on Genocide. Patterson did not believe that the UN could ensure world peace so long as modern democracies promoted racism at home and colonialism abroad. If the United States, the most powerful nation on the planet after World War II, could continue to subject African Americans to what amounted to a fascist order, then world peace was illusory. The UN could easily become a smokescreen for American imperialism. “We cannot forget Hitler’s demonstration,” reads the opening statement, “that genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, that domestic genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war. The wrongs of which we complain are so much the expression of predatory American reaction and its government that civilization cannot ignore them nor risk their continuance without courting its own destruction.”
The UN never seriously considered the document. Eleanor Roosevelt, then the U.S. representative to the UN Human Rights Commission, as well as Black delegates Edith Sampson and Channing Tobias, condemned We Charge Genocide!. The U.S. State Department viewed Patterson’s actions as libelous and possibly criminal. When Patterson refused an order from the U.S. Embassy to surrender his passport, he fled France and was ultimately detained in Britain. His passport was revoked as soon as he returned to the United States, sharing the same fate as his friends Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. A little over two years later, Patterson would also be jailed for refusing to turn over the CRC’s receipt books.
The story of Black antifascism and resistance to genocide doesn’t end here, but it is worth pausing to consider the fates of Patterson, Du Bois, and Robeson for exercising what they believed was their responsibility to expose and resist fascism. We might include C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones, both of whom were deported for their political work. Black insurgent intellectuals warned the nation and the world, took principled stances against fascism when it wasn’t popular, spoke truth to power from a position of marginality, and fought for an oppressed class—a large proportion of which would not fight for them.
To return, then, to the urgent question: What is the responsibility of intellectuals in the age of fascism and genocide? Certainly, Chomsky’s ending to his 1967 essay continues to ring true: an individual with privilege has choices. But one must choose sides, and as we have seen, opportunities for acting depend on where one stands in relation to the ruling power. On campuses over the past few decades, dissident intellectuals have increasingly faced growing hostility and silencing. And now, in our fascist moment, we are witnessing levels of repression not seen since the Red Scare.
For decades the new economic precarity for academics has worked in conjunction in particular with repression of criticism of Israel to silence truth-telling. At least since the launch of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS) in 2004, American colleges and universities have been relentless in their suppression of Palestine advocacy. For his criticism of Israel, Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007. Those of us who have been fighting for Palestine’s freedom are familiar with the Canary Mission website posting names of people it falsely accuses of antisemitism, or the practice of doxxing, or the ADL’s long history of spying on progressive organizations. The David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) spent years plastering campuses with posters accusing students and faculty by name of terrorism and “Jew hatred.” Since it started operating in 2002 the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) has boasted its direct ties to Israeli intelligence and to AIPAC, collected information on Palestine solidarity organizations, assembled dossiers on targeted students and faculty, and passed them on to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Data collected from the ICC is then fed to the ADL, which it uses to monitor and attack critics of Israel and produce an annual report: “Anti-Israel Activism on U.S. Campuses.”
The intensity and scope of the repression escalated after October 7 as university administrators started firing and suspending faculty, rescinding job offers, surveilling classrooms, expanding campus security forces, and calling police to clear Palestine solidarity encampments and arrest students. Since then hundreds of academics who have stood with student protesters, voiced criticism of Israel, or insisted that Palestinian lives be given equal value have been disciplined, assaulted, arrested, sued, harassed, doxxed, and dismissed. Thanks to the work of Palestine Legal, Academics for Palestine, and Faculty for Justice in Palestine, we know their names: Anne D’Aquino, Mohamed Abdou, Eman Abdelhadi, Ruha Benjamin, Graeme Blair, Jodi Dean, Caroline Fohlin, Amin Husain, Sang Hea Kil, Noëlle McAfee, Annelise Orleck, Steven Thrasher, Danny Shaw, and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, to name just a few. Most of those who were dismissed were untenured, although tenure did not protect Maura Finklestein, Rupa Marya, and Katherine Franke from being fired or forced into early retirement.
By suppressing criticisms of Israel and campus protests and capitulating to donor demands, university administrators violated the principles of academic freedom and therefore undermined their moral authority and political standing. University administrators, most having risen from the ranks of the faculty, are also intellectuals; as such, they too have a moral responsibility and “choices.” But like state intellectuals, they believe they are beholden to the interests of the university. Confronted with trustees and donors who not only threaten to withhold funds but demand severe punishments for student protesters and conspire with the corporate and legal world to deny them future employment, administrators chose to cower before such pressure rather than stand up for the rights, well-being, and safety of their own students. Capitulating to donors paved the way for capitulating to Trump.
Accusations of antisemitism thus became the pretext for the Trump administration to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of federal grants from colleges and universities. Of course, given the influence of white Christian nationalists and white supremacists among the MAGA base, the image of Trump protecting the Jewish community strains credulity. For Christian Zionists and right-wing evangelicals, antisemitism is tolerable, and the final solution is prophesy: Christ will appear in the Second Coming and destroy nearly all of mankind, including the vast majority of Jews. The born again will be “raptured” into the clouds out of danger, and, when the battle is over, will rejoin Jesus and inherit the Holy Land. Jews who survive will then have to accept Christ as their lord and savior. Antisemitic Zionism may not be new, but the use of the U.S. state to advance the Zionist project is unprecedented.
The Heritage Foundation provided the model for the administration’s aggressive attacks on Israel’s critics with Project Esther, a “national strategy to combat antisemitism” that in turn takes its entire playbook from the Cold War “experts” who deceived America about Vietnam: if you can’t win the argument, lie. Drafted in the wake of the October 7 attacks, the plan intends to crush what it deems “anti-Israel” protests by labeling all critics of Israel and Zionism antisemites, Marxists, and terrorists with direct ties to Hamas. The authors use every possible platform—social media, online publications, letter-writing, websites—to accuse groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and Alliance for Global Justice of being a “Hamas Support Organization” (HSO) or part of a “Hamas Support Network” (HSN). In other words, the strategy is to knowingly lie and see what sticks. The document lays out a detailed plan to delegitimize and criminalize critics of Israel through lawfare, dig up evidence of “criminal wrongdoing” through financial audits and public records requests, spread propaganda “designed to illuminate and expose—‘name and shame,’—to undermine HSN and HSO members’ credibility,” and pressure federal authorities to revoke the visas of and deport international students who criticize Israel or its war on Gaza.
Even Harvard University, held up as the only major institution of higher education to stand up to the Trump administration after it canceled some $3.2 billion dollars in grants and contracts, has now quietly taken steps to conform with the new political reality. It replaced its office for diversity, equity, and inclusion and with “Community and Campus Life”; suspended a research partnership between Harvard’s School of Public Health and Birzeit University in the West Bank; removed two prominent scholars, Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer, director and associate director respectively, from running the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES); and pushed out the leadership of the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life Program and its affiliate, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI). By spring 2025, the university had suspended RCPI, firing Atalia Omer, a Jewish Israeli scholar of religion who works on Israel/Palestine peacebuilding, and Hilary Rantisi, the program’s associate director and the only Palestinian staff member in the Divinity School.
Of course, the repression of U.S. scholars does not compare to what Palestinian scholars in Palestine have had to endure. Oxford University Professor Karma Nabulsi coined the term “scholasticide” to describe Israel’s ongoing war on intellectuals, intellectual life, and academic institutions in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Since the start of the war, every college and university in Gaza has been destroyed, and thousands of professors, administrators, schoolteachers, and students have been killed, wounded, or jailed.
Defeating fascism requires recognizing that we need to stand in solidarity and fight for others as if our lives depended on it.
Meanwhile, MAGA has been forging a robust community of its own organic intellectuals and benefiting from their work. Philosopher Jason Stanley correctly observes that universities are among the first targets of fascist attacks. However, when we pit “intellectuals” or the university against the Trump regime, as if “reason” or the lack thereof is the primary antagonism, we commit a grave error. Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Christopher Rufo, Peter Brimelow, Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton, Jason Richwine, and the army of scholars and policy wonks behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 all play a significant role in MAGA’s success. Many of these figures are leading proponents of eugenics and other manifestations of discredited race science, which provide the intellectual scaffolding for mass deportations targeting Latinx, Caribbean, African, and Asian immigrants, while extending refugee status to white South Africans. Anton, who served as senior national security official during Trump’s first term and was appointed Director of Policy Planning at the State Department in his second term, made the case for ending birthright citizenship, arguing in part that diversity is “a source of weakness, tension and disunion. America is not a ‘nation of immigrants’; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants.”
To be clear, the Biden administration had much in common with the first Trump administration from a policy standpoint, particularly with respect to immigration and its promotion of war across the planet, from its anti-China saber rattling to its support for (or indifference to) genocidal violence in Sudan, Eastern Congo, Haiti, and Palestine. Nevertheless, MAGA’s organic intellectuals have helped create a new fascist political bloc representing the interests of billionaires, fossil fuel corporations, cryptocurrency magnates, Silicon Valley, Christian nationalists, and white supremacists. Their broad agenda entails eliminating the social safety net, trade unions, affordable health care, public health safeguards, trans people, civil and disability rights, academic freedom, and investment in renewable energy, promoting the mass deportation of immigrants, deregulating anything that might hinder capital accumulation (including fossil fuel extraction and generative AI), reorganizing and privatizing education—all with the quite explicit goal of remaking the United States in the image of whiteness.
In these conditions, Chomsky’s injunction to choose dissent, to “speak the truth and to expose lies,” feels incomplete. To be sure, Chomsky harbored no illusions about the need to build a movement powerful enough to take on the ruling class, but the public memory of his essay has ossified into misleading mantra. Whatever power truth-telling might have had against fascism has been radically diminished. There is ample scholarship proving that immigrants do not take jobs, that they are not responsible for low wages, that war in Gaza doesn’t make Jews safe, that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, that the United States is not a benevolent agent of democracy promotion, that antiracism is not hating America. The right can pull out its own “evidence,” make up authoritative stories, use emotions rather than cold reason; they are not bound by so-called liberal values and have said so. Besides, liberals themselves bear some responsibility for this catastrophe. As former State Department spokesman Matthew Miller recently admitted, “I think it is, without a doubt, true that Israel has committed war crimes.” Miller had tenaciously defended Israel’s onslaught in Gaza before the press corps. But as he explained, “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government.”
What we can do is what generations of antifascist intellectuals, from Gramsci to Cayton to Claudia Jones, did eighty years ago and after: cast our lot with the insurgent class and enter the struggle. In the words of Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, “It’s not enough to have just done the reading or even tell compelling stories. . . . We need to put it into practice in and with our communities.” There are so many movements to plug into, from fighting for tenants’ rights, affordable housing, disability and reproductive justice, and trans rights; resisting ICE raids; joining the Debt Collective or the Poor People’s Campaign in their fight for a livable future; supporting independent left think tanks such as the Hampton Institute, the People’s Policy Project, the Institute for Policy Studies, or the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research; to building political capacity through groups like the Working Families Party.
Moving beyond the ivory tower does not mean abandoning the university. The university is still contested terrain, and groups such as Scholars for Social Justice, the African American Policy Forum, and the Smart Cities Lab have managed to carve out spaces for resistance and visionary planning from within. UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy, founded by Ananya Roy, is an exemplary model of what insurgent intellectual work can look like. For the last ten years, the Institute has not only effectively fought for affordable housing and against racial banishment but developed a dynamic activist-in-residence program to provide space for movement intellectuals—from South Africa to Chicago to here in Los Angeles—to think with scholars in order to better understand the forces pushing people into greater precarity and find ways to fight back.
In order to sustain this work, we need to create a new university. And we will never change anything unless we are organized. Unionizing all faculty and teaching staff is not just about salaries and teaching loads, but about academic freedom, free speech, and the right to protest. Our efforts to build solidarity on campuses have tended to be around something bigger, about values and intervening in the world. Yes, we do this in our classrooms all the time, which is why the state and our university admins try to monitor everything we do. But it’s when we seek to build power, expand governance, take the offensive, and recognize our responsibility to transform this world, that the hammer falls. And the myth of the liberal university, of the transcendent intellectual, of the power of reason shatters at once. The lesson is that defeating the fascism we face now requires much more than defeating the current administration or winning elections. It requires a deeper shift: the recognition that we need to always stand in solidarity and fight for others as if our lives depended on it.
On May 16 last year, Howard Gilman, Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, called the police to disperse what had been a peaceful Palestine solidarity encampment. My friend and colleague, Global Studies Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, was standing with her students in an effort to protect them when three cops pushed her down on the concrete and cuffed her. Escorted by two officers, she was caught on video as local media attempted to interview her. “We cannot have a genocidal foreign policy in a democracy,” she cried:
These young people are going to be the ones that have to pay the price for these horrible decisions. These police officers out here today, that’s thousands of students’ scholarships. Thousands of students that could have been able to go to school and have books and have housing. But instead, our Chancellor, who is a very cruel man, decided to send thousands of dollars’ worth of state funding paid for by the taxpayers into the trash.
When asked if she was concerned about jeopardizing her job, she replied in a single sentence that still brings tears to my eyes: “What job do I have if the students don’t have a future?”
In sixty seconds, while being zip-tied and dragged away by riot police, Willoughby-Herard put in bold relief the question at the heart of this essay: What is our responsibility in the face of fascism and genocide? Her very presence in struggle, putting her body and her future on the line, answered the question.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
with responses from
David Waldstreicher
Jennifer Zacharia
Martin O’Neill
Published in our Summer 2025 issue
Fourteen years ago, Noam Chomsky published “The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux” in these pages. He used the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to revisit his classic 1967 essay on the subject, although the immediate occasion for the piece was the assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals. As the Obama administration (and much of America) celebrated, Chomsky exposed the operation as a violation of U.S. and international law. The singular goal was to kill bin Laden, not capture him and bring him to trial. There was no pretense of habeas corpus since his body was summarily dumped into the sea.
Chomsky thus reiterates his original contention that it is the “responsibility of intellectuals” to tell the truth about war—in this instance, the war on terror and the crimes of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Referring to decades of debate on the phrase, he notes, “The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established institutions?” His answer was clear: intellectuals must be guided by conscience and refuse to be beholden to state interests, either out of political loyalty or ideological commitment or both.
Chomsky’s injunction to “speak the truth and to expose lies” feels incomplete today. Whatever power truth-telling might have had against fascism has been radically diminished.
The original essay, penned by a thirty-seven-year-old Chomsky, was adapted from a talk he gave at Harvard Hillel Society in 1966 and published in the student journal Mosaic. A revised and expanded version appeared as a special supplement in the February 23, 1967, edition of the New York Review of Books. The essay is a razor-sharp critique of intellectuals who, by assuming the roles of “experts” and technocrats for the state, abandon all moral, ethical, and historical judgment in order to advance ruling class interests and U.S. hegemony. Chomsky takes aim at the scholars and bureaucrats who had advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on Vietnam and Cuba and had no qualms about lying to the press and general public. These were the liberal intellectuals of Pax Americana who touted free-market capitalism as the universal measure of modern civilization. Communism, socialism, or any such alternatives were dismissed as dangerous “ideology,” beyond the pale of common sense. Chomsky insisted that it was the responsibility, if not the duty, of intellectuals “to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”
Chomsky drew inspiration from a pair of essays by Dwight Macdonald in politics magazine in 1945. In a brief comment he would later retitle “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Macdonald lampoons American journalist Max Lerner for wandering through postwar Germany asking ordinary people why they allowed Nazi atrocities to happen, all the while assuming an air of moral superiority and ignoring the role of the German state or the complicity of other Western powers. But Chomsky was primarily responding to “The Responsibility of Peoples,” his longer, more nuanced essay, published a month earlier, critiquing the concept of collective war guilt. Macdonald observes that the conflation of “common peoples” with the interests and policies of nation-states corresponds with a devolution of their power and authority over their own government—what he termed “the dilemma of increasing political impotence accompanied by increasing political responsibility.” This paradox not only fuels collective punishment but effectively relieves the “victors” of responsibility. As examples, Macdonald cites Allied carpet bombing, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japanese internment, as well as the crimes of colonial violence, lynching, and racial segregation. To blame all German people for Nazism, he concluded, is to blame all people for all atrocities, effectively occluding the specific operations of state violence and conflating compliance with universal consent, if not active support.
While Chomsky agreed with Macdonald’s critique of collective guilt, he argued that intellectuals in Western democracies bear some moral responsibility by virtue of their privileged position. “In the Western world, at least,” he contended, “they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression.” This privilege affords intellectuals unique opportunities to speak out. “Opportunity,” he adds in his 2011 redux, “confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.”
Of course, Chomsky knew that such “privilege” was hardly universal—that dissenting without fear of state violence eluded dissident intellectuals in other parts of the world. Graveyards and gulags are filled with intellectuals who tried to exercise their “moral responsibility” to tell the truth. Even in the “liberal” United States, prison or exile has been the fate of generations of radical thinkers, especially those from marginalized communities. Who can speak, when, on what subjects, and from what platforms is determined by historical context and differentiated by race, gender, class, ideology, and politics. Individuals may have choices, but they are constrained by social and political conditions. In times of crisis, war, and fascism, opportunities open or close depending on where one stands in relation to the ruling power. We do not now—and never did—live in a world, or a nation, dominated by independent iconoclasts, tenured radicals, or dedicated philosophes pursuing knowledge free from politics.
On the contrary, dissidents or insurgents represent just a tiny fraction of what is erroneously called “the intellectual class.” Chomsky believed that the intellectuals who fully backed the ruling regime had somehow betrayed their duty or obligation to expose the administration’s lies. I think it is more accurate to say that they thought they were fulfilling their duty, but their choices were ideologically and politically driven. As they saw it, their responsibility was to defend U.S. foreign policy because they believed it was right: there was no need to expose facts or disclose the truth because the threat of communism is what mattered. The problem, that is, was not an absence of moral courage but a dedication to Cold War liberalism.
By the time Chomsky revisited his essay in 2011, he had not only become a much sharper critic of liberalism. Neoliberalism had also reshaped higher education. The university’s embrace of market fundamentalism is now totally complete, and the creeping privatization of public universities has seen corporate donors, higher tuitions, and questionable investments replace shrinking state funding. Top administrators are no longer beholden to students and faculty, the pursuit of knowledge, or the public good but to donors, trustees, and government. For the last couple of decades, we’ve seen a growing assault on critical inquiry, academic freedom, and safety, alongside the casualization of labor, rising tuitions, severe budget cuts to humanities and other non-STEM fields, and the financialization of higher education. Finance capital has become a silent driver of university policy, and conservative state legislatures have imposed additional limits and mandates on higher education in their respective states. As a consequence, the “privilege” that Chomsky recognized in 1967 now eludes many insurgent academics. And another privilege he recognized—access to information—has been dispersed with the internet.
The political context is different, too. At a time when lies, deceptions, and fake news are so entrenched that critics have dubbed ours the “post-truth era,” we are facing a global turn toward authoritarianism, rising fascism in the United States, mounting political violence, multiple genocides, and a relentless right-wing attack on critical knowledge, colleges and universities, and basic liberal education. With the help of the United States, Israel continues to massacre, starve, and displace Gaza’s civilian population under the pretense of self-defense. We are witnessing genocide. We are living in fascist times.
Under these conditions, the possibilities that Chomsky saw in the power of truth-telling from privileged intellectuals are vastly diminished. But more than that, our situation helps us to see that there was always something misformulated about Chomsky’s question, however forcefully it exposed the moral bankruptcy of the “value-free” experts who perpetrated war in Vietnam. Those intellectuals aligned with the state were always going to lie, since they had chosen their side. The real questions before us are: What is the responsibility of intellectuals committed to fighting fascism and genocide? How do we refuse and resist complicity when our own institutions are complicit? And what might we learn from earlier antifascist and anticolonial struggles?
To begin to answer these questions, it is instructive to return to the notion of the “organic intellectual” developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935 while he was imprisoned by the Mussolini regime. “It is difficult to find a single criterion to characterize equally well all the disparate activities of intellectuals and, at the same time, distinguish them and in an essential way from the activities of other social groups,” Gramsci wrote:
The most widespread methodological error, it seems to me, has been to look for the essential characteristic in the intrinsic nature of intellectual activity rather than in the system of relations wherein this activity (and group that personifies it) is located in the general ensemble of social relations.
By “ensemble,” Gramsci wasn’t just referring to class relations but to the whole range of identities and institutions that shape our place in society. Because every human being has the capacity to think critically and possesses a worldview formed from experience, Gramsci insisted that all people are intellectuals, but they do not all function as such in society. “Traditional” intellectuals—for Gramsci, the teachers, scholars, clergy, and other figures who imagined themselves occupying an autonomous position in the social world—play a critical role in maintaining the hegemony of the dominant class, shaping ideology, law, culture, and “common sense,” organizing consent, and stifling class antagonisms. “Organic” intellectuals, by contrast, are embedded in specific classes or social groups, reflecting as well as articulating the interests and ideology of their class. To them, the responsibility of intellectuals is to choose a side and fight.
We tend to associate organic intellectuals with what Gramsci refers to as “subaltern” groups—the oppressed, marginalized, and exploited classes. But the dominant classes also have their organic intellectuals, as do right-wing and fascist movements contesting for power—all of whom also see it as their responsibility to analyze and critique the social order from the standpoint of their class or social group, educate, build and hold power, lay out a vision of a future rooted in their movement’s collective imagination, and fight to bring it into existence. In other words, they are not just cogs in a machine beyond their control but ideologues who create, drive, and justify policy in the interests of their class or political bloc.
In 1967, Chomsky was writing as a kind of organic intellectual with many of the privileges typically reserved for traditional intellectuals. As a tenured professor at MIT, the epicenter of the nation’s burgeoning academic-military complex, he managed to say and write what he wanted—including severe criticism of the liberal ruling class around him and in Washington—without professional or legal consequences. (Not that he didn’t experience blowback: he was always widely reviled by the mainstream media and was arrested for an antiwar teach-in outside the Pentagon in 1967, for example.)
We are witnessing levels of repression not seen since the Red Scare.
At the time, the American professoriate was overwhelmingly white and male. Cold War expansion turned leading universities into the research and development arm of corporations and the warfare state, thanks in large part to federal grants and foundations. But as more universities began opening their doors to women and students of color, the struggles in the streets and the world spilled over onto campuses. Universities were hardly engines of change, but they increasingly became contested terrain. Chomsky’s initial talk reflected growing student discontent with U.S. foreign policy and its publication paralleled the rise of an explosive student movement: resisting the draft, demanding new forms of democracy, opening the vaunted doors of academia to the people, breaking universities’ ties with imperialism, and launching new forms of inquiry—Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies.
And yet, a wider problem looms over his New York Review essay like a faint shadow: fascism. It was Macdonald’s musings on fascism and war that drew Chomsky to the question of responsibility in the first place—subjects Macdonald would ponder for years to come. Indeed, when “The Responsibility of Peoples” appeared in his 1953 book, The Root Is Man: Two Essays in Politics, Macdonald added the following footnote:
By an ironical twist of history, the victims have now become oppressors in their turn. Since 1948, some 800,000 Arab refugees, who fled from Palestine during the fighting, have been living wretchedly in camps around the country’s borders maintained by UN charity. The Israeli government—opposed by no important Jewish group that I know of—refuses to let them back and has given their homes, farms, and villages to new Jewish settlers. This is rationalized by the usual ‘collective responsibility’ nonsense. This expropriation cannot, of course, be put on the same plane as the infinitely greater crime of the Nazis. But neither should it be passed over in silence.
Today this passage would be considered antisemitic, its author subject to investigation, libelous condemnation by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and possible dismissal. But so long as Macdonald forswore communism, he was free to exercise his “privilege” as an intellectual.
Chomsky makes no mention of this footnote in his New York Review essay, but he heeds Macdonald’s message that wars of dispossession and ethnic cleansing should never “be passed over in silence.” And he, too, turns to the analogy of Nazi Germany to make sense of Vietnam, likening U.S. aggression “with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny” to Hitler. “Of course, the aggressiveness of liberal imperialism is not that of Nazi Germany,” Chomsky writes, “though the distinction may seem academic to a Vietnamese peasant who is being gassed or incinerated.”
Still, the imminent threat of fascism back home goes notably unaddressed. Treating intellectuals as an autonomous social category, Chomsky sidesteps their differential relationship to, and embeddedness within, social relations. Three weeks after “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” appeared, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., published an account of the Chicago Freedom Movement’s 1966 march for open housing in which he compared the mob violence they encountered to that of Nazi Germany. “Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds,” he wrote. “Our marchers were met by a hailstorm of bricks, bottles, and firecrackers. ‘White power’ became the racist hatecall, punctuated by obscenities.” Later that summer, police violence sparked massive rebellions in Detroit, Newark, and over 150 cities, prompting state officials to send National Guard troops to occupy Black neighborhoods. The Black Panther Party declared U.S. state violence “fascist” and in 1969 organized a United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland, California, in addition to forming the National Committee to Combat Fascism to resist police repression.
Black and brown struggles against homegrown fascism were not Chomsky’s focus at the time. This is perfectly understandable: he was concerned mainly with the crimes of American empire and colonial violence abroad. In fact, years later Chomsky explained that part of the reason for the focus of his Harvard talk was that McGeorge Bundy, who had served as dean there, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Vietnam war as President Johnson’s national security advisor. But as a long line of Black radicals had argued, colonial violence abroad was closely linked with fascism at home. To understand this relationship, we need to pay attention to the longer history of antifascism, particularly the role of Black organic intellectuals in the 1930s and ’40s—when politics, media, and intellectual production more closely resembled the highly partisan landscape of our own time than the postwar liberal ideal of objectivity and consensus that prevailed when Chomsky was writing.
In that period, antifascism not only drew students and faculty out of the universities and into the streets, union halls, unemployed councils, communist and socialist parties, and the battlefields of Spain. It also brought antifascism and varieties of Marxism—Trotskyism, Stalinism, Fabian Socialism—into the university. The largely Jewish working-class campus of City College in New York became a hotbed of socialist and antifascist organizing. Even pristine Columbia University became a major site of antifascist protest when its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, welcomed Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States to speak on campus in December 1933. The more than 1,000 students and allies who showed up to disrupt the speech confronted police wielding billy clubs. But they were not deterred. Students called on the administration to publicly rebuke the Nazi regime, boycott German goods, assist German refugees, and hire exiled scholars. Butler, a longtime admirer of Mussolini who had established ties between Columbia and Italy, remained steadfast for several years, electing to crush student dissent rather than disavow fascism.
Left-wing, anticolonial, antifascist, and civil rights organizations had their share of Black organic intellectuals whose activism and writing reshaped scholarship and politics in the U.S. The writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Louise Thompson Patterson, George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Marvel Cooke, Ella Baker, Abram Harris, Richard Wright, young Ralph Bunche, and many others, were not produced in isolation but in relation to movement and as conscious efforts to combat fascism, racism, and colonialism. Indeed, they recognized that fascism was born of racism and colonialism. Their mobilizations against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, as American business leaders and university presidents such as Butler feted Mussolini, were among the first antifascist actions in the United States. They called out and resisted homegrown fascism in the form of lynch law, the suppression of workers’ organizations and virtually all forms of dissent, and the denial of civil and democratic rights to Black citizens. As poet, playwright, essayist, and activist Langston Hughes told those assembled at the Third U.S. Congress against War and Fascism in 1936, “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America. . . . This kind of terrorism is extending more and more to groups of peoples whose skins are not black.”
The early life and work of sociologist St. Clair Drake is exemplary of this generation of organic intellectuals whose work shaped, and was shaped by, opposition to fascism and colonialism. Son of a Garveyite father from Barbados and a mother from Virginia, Drake came to activism through the pacifism of the Quakers. Four years after graduating from Hampton Institute in 1931, he went to Dillard University in New Orleans to work as a research assistant and teach, all the while immersing himself in antifascist and pacifist politics. He worked with the NAACP and published articles in The Crisis, the organization’s official magazine, on lynching and the antiwar movement. In May 1936, he and two other Black Dillard faculty members, Lawrence Reddick and Byron Augustine, joined local NAACP Secretary James LaFourche to disrupt a massive pro-fascist parade organized by the city’s Italian community. The men boldly drove a car through the line of march bearing a placard that read “We Protest Against the Celebration of Aggressive War and Fascism.” Police surrounded the car and allowed the marchers to tear up the sign but no one was arrested. Drake left the following year to pursue graduate work at the University of Chicago, continuing to organize against fascism, before returning to Dillard in 1941. He didn’t last long; within a year he was fired for supporting student protests against bus segregation.
Drake went on to coauthor, with fellow sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr., Black Metropolis, a landmark two-volume study of Chicago’s South Side, also known as Bronzeville. While the book broke new ground in the study of Black life, what I find particularly striking is its consistent antifascist politics: there is no pretense of detachment or effort to conceal its political stakes. Published in 1946, when Black men who had helped defeat fascism faced unemployment and an uptick in racist violence, the authors predicted that “the Negro may again become a chronic relief client, despised by the majority of white citizens who have to support him from taxes and the symbol around which the aggressions of a frustrated society can be organized, so that he may fill the role of the whipping boy for an emerging American Fascism.” Such an outcome could be avoided, they argued, so long as the United States achieved full employment and the entire world embraced, in their words, a “program for emancipating the Common Man.” “The problems that arise on Bronzeville’s Forty-seventh Street encircle the globe,” they wrote. “A blow struck for freedom in Bronzeville finds its echo in Chungking and Moscow, in Paris and Senegal. A victory for Fascism in Midwest Metropolis will sound the knell of doom for the Common Man everywhere.”
A long line of Black radicals argued that violence abroad was closely linked with fascism at home.
Drake and Cayton understood that defeating Germany and Japan would not end fascism at home. In an opinion piece for the Pittsburgh Courier dated May 19, 1945, Cayton wrote, “We now turn to the war within our own country. Victory for democracy will mean some chance of a peace. Victory for our own native Fascism—the Hitler which lives in us—will mean that we’re setting the stage for the next world war.” His warning was echoed by Black Communist Party leader Claudia Jones, who argued in a 1946 article that fascism was alive and well in the Jim Crow South, evidenced in part by the revival of lynching and the beatings and assassinations of Black veterans. “Today the main danger of fascism to the world comes from the most colossal imperialist forces which are concentrated within the United States,” Jones observed. “The perpetrators of these attacks are the representatives of the most reactionary section of monopoly capital and of the semi-feudal economy of the Black Belt.”
The West claimed victory over fascism even as it continued to perpetuate fascist and genocidal policies in the colonies, semi-colonies, and ghettos. In 1945, three years before the Afrikaner-led National Party came to power and implemented apartheid, the Non-European Unity Movement, a multiracial Trotskyist-led organization opposed to white minority rule, issued a powerful statement comparing life in South Africa to the Third Reich: “The Non Europeans of South Africa live and suffer under a tyranny very little different from Nazism. And if we accept that there can be no peace as long as the scourge of Nazism exists in any corner of the globe, then it follows that the defeat of German Nazism is not the final chapter of the struggle against tyranny.” Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1950, not only joined other radical thinkers in identifying the seeds of fascism in the colonial order but pointed to the atrocities committed by French occupation forces in response to anticolonial resistance as evidence of fascism’s persistence. “Think of it!” Césaire intoned. “Ninety thousand dead in Madagascar! Indochina trampled underfoot, crushed to bits, assassinated, tortures brought back from the depths of the Middle Ages!”
In 1951, William L. Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and a leading member of the Communist Party, attempted to submit a copy of We Charge Genocide!: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People, a book-length study of American state-sanctioned racial violence, to a UN delegation in Paris. Paul Robeson simultaneously attempted to submit the same text to the UN in New York. Drafted by Patterson, Richard Boyer, Elizabeth Lawson, Yvonne Gregory, Oakley Johnson, and Aubrey Grossman, We Charge Genocide! not only documented hundreds of incidents of anti-Black violence during the six years since the end of World War II; it also served as a petition to the UN indicting the United States for violating both the UN Charter and its 1948 Convention on Genocide. Patterson did not believe that the UN could ensure world peace so long as modern democracies promoted racism at home and colonialism abroad. If the United States, the most powerful nation on the planet after World War II, could continue to subject African Americans to what amounted to a fascist order, then world peace was illusory. The UN could easily become a smokescreen for American imperialism. “We cannot forget Hitler’s demonstration,” reads the opening statement, “that genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, that domestic genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war. The wrongs of which we complain are so much the expression of predatory American reaction and its government that civilization cannot ignore them nor risk their continuance without courting its own destruction.”
The UN never seriously considered the document. Eleanor Roosevelt, then the U.S. representative to the UN Human Rights Commission, as well as Black delegates Edith Sampson and Channing Tobias, condemned We Charge Genocide!. The U.S. State Department viewed Patterson’s actions as libelous and possibly criminal. When Patterson refused an order from the U.S. Embassy to surrender his passport, he fled France and was ultimately detained in Britain. His passport was revoked as soon as he returned to the United States, sharing the same fate as his friends Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. A little over two years later, Patterson would also be jailed for refusing to turn over the CRC’s receipt books.
The story of Black antifascism and resistance to genocide doesn’t end here, but it is worth pausing to consider the fates of Patterson, Du Bois, and Robeson for exercising what they believed was their responsibility to expose and resist fascism. We might include C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones, both of whom were deported for their political work. Black insurgent intellectuals warned the nation and the world, took principled stances against fascism when it wasn’t popular, spoke truth to power from a position of marginality, and fought for an oppressed class—a large proportion of which would not fight for them.
To return, then, to the urgent question: What is the responsibility of intellectuals in the age of fascism and genocide? Certainly, Chomsky’s ending to his 1967 essay continues to ring true: an individual with privilege has choices. But one must choose sides, and as we have seen, opportunities for acting depend on where one stands in relation to the ruling power. On campuses over the past few decades, dissident intellectuals have increasingly faced growing hostility and silencing. And now, in our fascist moment, we are witnessing levels of repression not seen since the Red Scare.
For decades the new economic precarity for academics has worked in conjunction in particular with repression of criticism of Israel to silence truth-telling. At least since the launch of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS) in 2004, American colleges and universities have been relentless in their suppression of Palestine advocacy. For his criticism of Israel, Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007. Those of us who have been fighting for Palestine’s freedom are familiar with the Canary Mission website posting names of people it falsely accuses of antisemitism, or the practice of doxxing, or the ADL’s long history of spying on progressive organizations. The David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) spent years plastering campuses with posters accusing students and faculty by name of terrorism and “Jew hatred.” Since it started operating in 2002 the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) has boasted its direct ties to Israeli intelligence and to AIPAC, collected information on Palestine solidarity organizations, assembled dossiers on targeted students and faculty, and passed them on to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Data collected from the ICC is then fed to the ADL, which it uses to monitor and attack critics of Israel and produce an annual report: “Anti-Israel Activism on U.S. Campuses.”
The intensity and scope of the repression escalated after October 7 as university administrators started firing and suspending faculty, rescinding job offers, surveilling classrooms, expanding campus security forces, and calling police to clear Palestine solidarity encampments and arrest students. Since then hundreds of academics who have stood with student protesters, voiced criticism of Israel, or insisted that Palestinian lives be given equal value have been disciplined, assaulted, arrested, sued, harassed, doxxed, and dismissed. Thanks to the work of Palestine Legal, Academics for Palestine, and Faculty for Justice in Palestine, we know their names: Anne D’Aquino, Mohamed Abdou, Eman Abdelhadi, Ruha Benjamin, Graeme Blair, Jodi Dean, Caroline Fohlin, Amin Husain, Sang Hea Kil, Noëlle McAfee, Annelise Orleck, Steven Thrasher, Danny Shaw, and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, to name just a few. Most of those who were dismissed were untenured, although tenure did not protect Maura Finklestein, Rupa Marya, and Katherine Franke from being fired or forced into early retirement.
By suppressing criticisms of Israel and campus protests and capitulating to donor demands, university administrators violated the principles of academic freedom and therefore undermined their moral authority and political standing. University administrators, most having risen from the ranks of the faculty, are also intellectuals; as such, they too have a moral responsibility and “choices.” But like state intellectuals, they believe they are beholden to the interests of the university. Confronted with trustees and donors who not only threaten to withhold funds but demand severe punishments for student protesters and conspire with the corporate and legal world to deny them future employment, administrators chose to cower before such pressure rather than stand up for the rights, well-being, and safety of their own students. Capitulating to donors paved the way for capitulating to Trump.
Accusations of antisemitism thus became the pretext for the Trump administration to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of federal grants from colleges and universities. Of course, given the influence of white Christian nationalists and white supremacists among the MAGA base, the image of Trump protecting the Jewish community strains credulity. For Christian Zionists and right-wing evangelicals, antisemitism is tolerable, and the final solution is prophesy: Christ will appear in the Second Coming and destroy nearly all of mankind, including the vast majority of Jews. The born again will be “raptured” into the clouds out of danger, and, when the battle is over, will rejoin Jesus and inherit the Holy Land. Jews who survive will then have to accept Christ as their lord and savior. Antisemitic Zionism may not be new, but the use of the U.S. state to advance the Zionist project is unprecedented.
The Heritage Foundation provided the model for the administration’s aggressive attacks on Israel’s critics with Project Esther, a “national strategy to combat antisemitism” that in turn takes its entire playbook from the Cold War “experts” who deceived America about Vietnam: if you can’t win the argument, lie. Drafted in the wake of the October 7 attacks, the plan intends to crush what it deems “anti-Israel” protests by labeling all critics of Israel and Zionism antisemites, Marxists, and terrorists with direct ties to Hamas. The authors use every possible platform—social media, online publications, letter-writing, websites—to accuse groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and Alliance for Global Justice of being a “Hamas Support Organization” (HSO) or part of a “Hamas Support Network” (HSN). In other words, the strategy is to knowingly lie and see what sticks. The document lays out a detailed plan to delegitimize and criminalize critics of Israel through lawfare, dig up evidence of “criminal wrongdoing” through financial audits and public records requests, spread propaganda “designed to illuminate and expose—‘name and shame,’—to undermine HSN and HSO members’ credibility,” and pressure federal authorities to revoke the visas of and deport international students who criticize Israel or its war on Gaza.
Even Harvard University, held up as the only major institution of higher education to stand up to the Trump administration after it canceled some $3.2 billion dollars in grants and contracts, has now quietly taken steps to conform with the new political reality. It replaced its office for diversity, equity, and inclusion and with “Community and Campus Life”; suspended a research partnership between Harvard’s School of Public Health and Birzeit University in the West Bank; removed two prominent scholars, Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer, director and associate director respectively, from running the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES); and pushed out the leadership of the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life Program and its affiliate, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI). By spring 2025, the university had suspended RCPI, firing Atalia Omer, a Jewish Israeli scholar of religion who works on Israel/Palestine peacebuilding, and Hilary Rantisi, the program’s associate director and the only Palestinian staff member in the Divinity School.
Of course, the repression of U.S. scholars does not compare to what Palestinian scholars in Palestine have had to endure. Oxford University Professor Karma Nabulsi coined the term “scholasticide” to describe Israel’s ongoing war on intellectuals, intellectual life, and academic institutions in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Since the start of the war, every college and university in Gaza has been destroyed, and thousands of professors, administrators, schoolteachers, and students have been killed, wounded, or jailed.
Defeating fascism requires recognizing that we need to stand in solidarity and fight for others as if our lives depended on it.
Meanwhile, MAGA has been forging a robust community of its own organic intellectuals and benefiting from their work. Philosopher Jason Stanley correctly observes that universities are among the first targets of fascist attacks. However, when we pit “intellectuals” or the university against the Trump regime, as if “reason” or the lack thereof is the primary antagonism, we commit a grave error. Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Christopher Rufo, Peter Brimelow, Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton, Jason Richwine, and the army of scholars and policy wonks behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 all play a significant role in MAGA’s success. Many of these figures are leading proponents of eugenics and other manifestations of discredited race science, which provide the intellectual scaffolding for mass deportations targeting Latinx, Caribbean, African, and Asian immigrants, while extending refugee status to white South Africans. Anton, who served as senior national security official during Trump’s first term and was appointed Director of Policy Planning at the State Department in his second term, made the case for ending birthright citizenship, arguing in part that diversity is “a source of weakness, tension and disunion. America is not a ‘nation of immigrants’; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants.”
To be clear, the Biden administration had much in common with the first Trump administration from a policy standpoint, particularly with respect to immigration and its promotion of war across the planet, from its anti-China saber rattling to its support for (or indifference to) genocidal violence in Sudan, Eastern Congo, Haiti, and Palestine. Nevertheless, MAGA’s organic intellectuals have helped create a new fascist political bloc representing the interests of billionaires, fossil fuel corporations, cryptocurrency magnates, Silicon Valley, Christian nationalists, and white supremacists. Their broad agenda entails eliminating the social safety net, trade unions, affordable health care, public health safeguards, trans people, civil and disability rights, academic freedom, and investment in renewable energy, promoting the mass deportation of immigrants, deregulating anything that might hinder capital accumulation (including fossil fuel extraction and generative AI), reorganizing and privatizing education—all with the quite explicit goal of remaking the United States in the image of whiteness.
In these conditions, Chomsky’s injunction to choose dissent, to “speak the truth and to expose lies,” feels incomplete. To be sure, Chomsky harbored no illusions about the need to build a movement powerful enough to take on the ruling class, but the public memory of his essay has ossified into misleading mantra. Whatever power truth-telling might have had against fascism has been radically diminished. There is ample scholarship proving that immigrants do not take jobs, that they are not responsible for low wages, that war in Gaza doesn’t make Jews safe, that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, that the United States is not a benevolent agent of democracy promotion, that antiracism is not hating America. The right can pull out its own “evidence,” make up authoritative stories, use emotions rather than cold reason; they are not bound by so-called liberal values and have said so. Besides, liberals themselves bear some responsibility for this catastrophe. As former State Department spokesman Matthew Miller recently admitted, “I think it is, without a doubt, true that Israel has committed war crimes.” Miller had tenaciously defended Israel’s onslaught in Gaza before the press corps. But as he explained, “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government.”
What we can do is what generations of antifascist intellectuals, from Gramsci to Cayton to Claudia Jones, did eighty years ago and after: cast our lot with the insurgent class and enter the struggle. In the words of Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, “It’s not enough to have just done the reading or even tell compelling stories. . . . We need to put it into practice in and with our communities.” There are so many movements to plug into, from fighting for tenants’ rights, affordable housing, disability and reproductive justice, and trans rights; resisting ICE raids; joining the Debt Collective or the Poor People’s Campaign in their fight for a livable future; supporting independent left think tanks such as the Hampton Institute, the People’s Policy Project, the Institute for Policy Studies, or the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research; to building political capacity through groups like the Working Families Party.
Moving beyond the ivory tower does not mean abandoning the university. The university is still contested terrain, and groups such as Scholars for Social Justice, the African American Policy Forum, and the Smart Cities Lab have managed to carve out spaces for resistance and visionary planning from within. UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy, founded by Ananya Roy, is an exemplary model of what insurgent intellectual work can look like. For the last ten years, the Institute has not only effectively fought for affordable housing and against racial banishment but developed a dynamic activist-in-residence program to provide space for movement intellectuals—from South Africa to Chicago to here in Los Angeles—to think with scholars in order to better understand the forces pushing people into greater precarity and find ways to fight back.
In order to sustain this work, we need to create a new university. And we will never change anything unless we are organized. Unionizing all faculty and teaching staff is not just about salaries and teaching loads, but about academic freedom, free speech, and the right to protest. Our efforts to build solidarity on campuses have tended to be around something bigger, about values and intervening in the world. Yes, we do this in our classrooms all the time, which is why the state and our university admins try to monitor everything we do. But it’s when we seek to build power, expand governance, take the offensive, and recognize our responsibility to transform this world, that the hammer falls. And the myth of the liberal university, of the transcendent intellectual, of the power of reason shatters at once. The lesson is that defeating the fascism we face now requires much more than defeating the current administration or winning elections. It requires a deeper shift: the recognition that we need to always stand in solidarity and fight for others as if our lives depended on it.
On May 16 last year, Howard Gilman, Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, called the police to disperse what had been a peaceful Palestine solidarity encampment. My friend and colleague, Global Studies Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, was standing with her students in an effort to protect them when three cops pushed her down on the concrete and cuffed her. Escorted by two officers, she was caught on video as local media attempted to interview her. “We cannot have a genocidal foreign policy in a democracy,” she cried:
These young people are going to be the ones that have to pay the price for these horrible decisions. These police officers out here today, that’s thousands of students’ scholarships. Thousands of students that could have been able to go to school and have books and have housing. But instead, our Chancellor, who is a very cruel man, decided to send thousands of dollars’ worth of state funding paid for by the taxpayers into the trash.
When asked if she was concerned about jeopardizing her job, she replied in a single sentence that still brings tears to my eyes: “What job do I have if the students don’t have a future?”
In sixty seconds, while being zip-tied and dragged away by riot police, Willoughby-Herard put in bold relief the question at the heart of this essay: What is our responsibility in the face of fascism and genocide? Her very presence in struggle, putting her body and her future on the line, answered the question.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair of U.S. History at UCLA and a contributing editor at Boston Review. His many books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
