Defend Free Speech & Community Media

Remarks by Gerald Horne at FCM/PFB Town Hall, 01-25-2025, with response to a question from a listener from Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African Peoples Socialist Party, another keynote speaker

     Thank you for inviting me to this important forum. My name is Gerald Horne, historian, and an activist within Pacifica going back to WBAI in the 1970s, continuing, as noted through KPFK to this very day.

     In any case, this past week of shock and awe has given a foretaste of what to expect from the Trump team in coming years. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, withdrawing from the World Health Organization. Militarizing the border in preparation for mass deportations and threatening imprisonment for executives of major cities who dared to intervene. Trying to… defund nonprofits. Most ominously, there is the pardoning of the criminals who sought to execute a coup on January 6, 2021. Some of them are already threatening retribution and retaliation.

     But for the 77 million strong Trump base, perhaps the most important measure was the decision to overthrow diversity, equity, and inclusion, overturning an executive order by President Johnson in 1965 seeking to bar discrimination at the workplace, which has served as a foundation for affirmative action, already writhing in its death throes in light of recent U.S. High court decisions overturning this anti-discrimination regime at Harvard and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From the point of view of the Trump base, discrimination against the beneficiaries of affirmative action is a gain for the Trump base.

     Unfortunately, our team will be on defense in coming years, but as any sports fan can tell you, a strong defense can generate offense.

     Already there is talk in Washington, D.C. of organizing a general strike from May 1st, 2025 in response to the threat to worker rights embodied in this shock and awe program, particularly the idea, a long-standing dream of the ultra-right, to move the jobs of the federal government from the vicinity of Washington, D.C.

Leaving workers with the unappetizing choice of moving, for example, to Idaho or becoming unemployed.

     In this context, our sister station WPFW, becomes critically important. And my first recommendation is that the Pacifica board ignite a national and international campaign to raise funds for WPFW so that it can coordinate a national and international news bureau to keep close tabs on [the federal government] during [this period, from] the nation’s capital.

     In this regard, we should also take advantage of our global alliances by, for example, more dedicated sharing of content with the media organs from the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and their allies, such as Telesur, Press TV, Radio Havana, etc.

     Unfortunately, this impending attack on the mass media is nothing new. Many of us recall the Red Scare following World War II, where a particular target was television. Hollywood and radio. We recall vividly that it was hardly accidental that the anti-Jim Crow, anti-racist movement accelerated with the founding of Pacifica Radio about 75 years ago and the ascendancy of TV as a household appliance which was able to broadcast nationally and internationally the horrors that were part and parcel of U.S. Apartheid.

     Similarly, we recall from about 1919 to 1967 there was an associated Negro press, with stringers and reporters nationally and internationally, that was able to tell our story of struggle domestically and globally to the point where the mainstream press, which theretofore often had ignored our stories, changed course and began finally hiring reporters to cover this titanic battle.

    Similarly, a turning point in our movement arose in 1955 when a black teenager from Chicago was lynched in Mississippi with his terribly disfigured body left in an open casket at his Illinois funeral with photos snapped by the recently minted Black-owned Johnson publishing company, with [such]  photos distributed globally, creating tremendous pressure on US imperialism.

     A particular target of the post-1945 Red Scare were unions. For example, some of you may recall my book, Class Struggle in Hollywood, which deals with this fraught matter. More specifically, a central thrust of the Red Scare was to weaken left-leaning unions, which largely succeeded.

     The National Maritime Union, for example, where the late Pacifica board chair Jack O’Dell was once a leading member, was weakened severely to the point where U.S. [merchant] vessels have been equated with being floating slums.

     Likewise, we should not forget that that former chairman of the Board of Pacifica, the late Jack O’Dell, who passed away a few years ago in his 90s in self-imposed exile in British Columbia, Canada, was a mentor and advisor to the late Dr. King to the point where JFK took MLK into the rose garden of the White House to escape the presumed surveillance of the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in order to instruct Dr. King to get rid of Jack. Which Dr. King agreed to do, but then maintained subterranean contact with him, which the FBI knew since they were surveilling him and Jack Odell, helping to bolster Hoover’s anger to the point where he called Dr. King, quote. The most notorious liar in the country, unquote. Paving the way for his assassination in Memphis in April 1968.

     One lesson that Pacifica should draw from this experience is a lesson I’m sure we already know. Which is to seek alliances with progressive forces and the union movement, be it the UAW, Service Employees International Union, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the Coalition of Labor Union Women etc This should mean affirmative efforts to include their voices, interviewees, and conferring with their leadership to devise how we can be most useful to them.

     Shortly, if the rumors of a general strike on May 1st becomes a substantive reality then this kind of relationship would become exceedingly important. It is no accident that the valuable Pacifica radio archives contain some of the most valuable resources for the anti-Jim Crow and anti-racist movement, obviously we need to put our heads together and think about how to more vigorously exploit those resources in a positive sense.

     Much of this content emerged during Jack O’Dell’s tenure as board chair, but to be fair, this kind of content has become a hallmark of Pacifica, both before and after Odell’s administration.

     This has been an explicit recognition of the structure and history of the United States itself, to whit,  as scholars have begun to inform us, the United States has been a settler colonial regime, with the settlers enmeshed in class collaboration. Indeed, one cannot begin to understand how and why 77 million, mostly settler descendants, voted for the tangerine tyrant, without understanding class collaboration. Similarly, the unpaid sector of the working class and their descendants historically have been in the vanguard of class struggle, as Chairman Omali just made reference to.

     This leads to my second recommendation in order to fight back against Trumpism and their marching orders from Project 2025, we should redouble our anti-racist reporting Not least, it has the added advantage of appealing to constituencies most prone to back our agenda, thereby ensuring not only that we survive but thrive. Let me elaborate.

     More to the point, in light of the pardon of the coup plotters of January 6th, the possibility is now created of the ultra-right developing an armed militia with carte blanche to attack state organs and opponents of the ultra-right. We should work closely with relevant committees of the National Lawyers Guild and overall the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights, public interest groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown [in DC] and other groupings that monitor these paramilitaries who have an eerie resemblance to the Ku Klux Klan, which fundamentally was the armed wing of the then segregationist Democratic Party of the Jim Crow South.

     Indeed, I recommend concretely that Pacifica initiate a nationally broadcast program. Let’s call it Fascism Watch, drawing upon experts from and beyond the aforementioned organizations.

     I would also point you to the guest list of the program that I host, Freedom Now on KPFK Los Angeles, which draws heavily from trends in cutting-edge anti-racist scholarship. And again, these guests are then primed to support our overall agenda.

     Almost all of my interviews can be found on the Activist News Network on YouTube. I have reason to believe that there are interviewees drawn nationally and internationally for this program, that heretofore were not familiar with Pacifica, but became so after being interviewed, to our benefit.

     Thank you for your attention.

Listener: How do we handle the problem of Pacifica’s reluctance For DEI and being and having anti-racist activism in the walls of these five stations. What are we going to do about that? Because one of our biggest problems is that racism isn’t just a republican attribute. And we need to talk about it. How do we do that?

Moderator: The questions were to our three speakers, I think Dr. Horne will be leaving so maybe you can start, Dr. Horne and then Brother Omali and Elisa next on that question of our own backyard.

Dr. Horne: Well, I’ve said my piece, I gave recommendations that speak to programming. So I’ll defer to others to address this as I begin to sign off.

Chairman Omali Yeshitela (APSP): Well, thank you. One of the things I wanted to comment on is it was inferred or referenced by a prior speaker that had to mention the fact that this did not begin with Donald Trump or the Republicans. And I think that’s extremely important for us to recognize. I mean, it wasn’t Trump’s Justice Department or FBI that attacked my home at five o’clock in the morning.

     It was Biden-Harris’s organization that did that. And I think that we have to fight and organize against the system itself. And certainly we have to be able to look at particular individuals who represent a particular expression of the oppression and exploitation that we’re looking at, but the system is exploitative. And I think as even if you talk about issues like fascism, I want us to be careful — Because fascism is an anomaly.

     It is not something that is constant, consistent. It is something that occurred at a particular time in history, but slavery was not fascism. The fact that we’ve got more than the largest prison population in this country being occupied, prisons being occupied primarily by Africans and Mexicans and other colonized people.

It’s never been characterized as fascism and what happens is when the contradictions that we experience as colonized people began to penetrate or threaten to penetrate the life spaces, the social spaces of people who are themselves colonizers, then the question of fascism gets bandied about. And I wanted to just remind us that even when you look at the history of the struggle against fascism, you look at the you see that some of the most outstanding fascists that we were told in the world who fought against the Nazis in France, the French who did that; But at the same time that they were fighting fascism, they were warring and murdering black people in Algeria. They controlled 14 particular territories in Africa. They were making war against the people in Vietnam. The Colonial question is constant. It’s there all the time. It does not require some kind of a shock. It’s not an anomaly. The anomaly is when it does not oppress us. And I think that the issues being raised here around the Spanish language of programming, The issues being raised around the contradictions impacting Africans and others and how we treat this is a critical question.

     I just wanted to say that, because the contradiction is not our contradiction. For example, we had a judge that says that this is a free speech issue. They knew it was a free speech issue before they attacked my home, before they [tried to]  require me to commit perjury by saying that I’m working for Russia or something to that effect. This is important, I think, for us to understand. And I’m calling on you and everybody, because one of the critical issues I’ve seen over a period of time with most of the stations that we would be concerned with, is the inability to deal with the question of Palestinians and Africans and Mexicans, as we are saying now. These are the issues that need to be on the forefront of what it is that we do.

     So I just wanted to say that I don’t know exactly how to deal with the way this thing is reflected inside the Pacifica process itself, but certainly I think that all of us who are capable need to be involved in advancing the struggles against colonialism. Which is the majority of the people of the world live under colonial domination, colonial oppression. And so this is the foundation for the whole system, the whole capitalist system, that’s from the foundation, a base of colonialism.