Summer Issue Front Cover

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Public i

SOLIDARITY WITH CUBA!

“Carlota y Fermina,” original artwork by Lili Bernard. Carlota and Fermina were two enslaved Yoruba women who led a slave rebellion in 1843 Matanzas, Cuba. Used with permission of the artist

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Cuba Si, Bloqueo No

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Bryan Maxwell

The crisis of Trump’s second term in the White House is increasing the suffering of communities at home and abroad. In few places is this crisis felt more severely than for those living in Cuba. The people of Cuba are enduring food shortages, lack of medicine, and power grid blackouts, all driven by US sanctions that the Trump regime has made more cruel.

The current US sanctions are some of the worst Cuba has seen, largely due to the cutoff of oil shipped from Venezuela. Venezuela was one of the last countries willing to ignore US sanctions on Cuba, and this vital flow of fuel ended after the illegal kidnapping of Maduro by the US government. The current sanctions are especially harsh, but are only an escalation of the economic warfare Cuba has endured for more than 60 years. Continue reading →

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Conscientious Objectors: How to Not Support War in a Culture of Endless War

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Kimberlie Kranich

US Air Force veteran Meg Miner, protests the US war against Iran on March 21, 2026, left; Karen Medina reaches out to military personnel on April 4, 2026. Both women participate in weekly protests near the Market Place Mall in Champaign. Photos by the author

A longer version of this article appeared on Kimberlie Kranich’s Substack page on May 18, 2026.

Americans live in a country that celebrates Veterans Day, sends military recruiters into high schools, and considers members of the military patriots.

Social media has laid bare and made easily accessible the horrific images, and the costs of war to children and other civilians, whose casualties far outnumber the deaths of those in uniform. Some active military personnel who watch these images become opposed to killing in wars they don’t believe in. Some are afraid of dying in these same wars. I interviewed three veterans from the US military, all in their twenties, who decided they’d seen enough and left their service early as conscientious objectors. All three were honorably discharged. These young veterans are not isolated examples. Current US wars on Iran, Gaza, Venezuela, and on migrants seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border have increased the number of military personnel seeking early discharge.

Conscientious objectors (COs) are people who object to participating in war in any form, or the bearing of arms, because of religious training and/or belief. Conscientious objectors are a tiny percentage of military personnel compared to the number of people in the military. Since the late 20th century, the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights has recognized “the right of everyone to have conscientious objection to military service as a legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion as laid down in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Continue reading →

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The Zionist Lobby and Repealing Illinois’s Anti-Boycott Law, HB2723/SB2462

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Dua Aldasouqi

President Harry Truman was the first world leader to recognize the theft of the Palestinian lands of 1948 as Israel; he did so eleven minutes after its creation. When discussing the topic, he’s quoted to have said, “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents,” and referred to the Zionist pressure as “unwarranted interference.”

The Zionist lobby in America has been alive and well since before the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe that led to the violent displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians—half the population at that time—and the massacre of more than 15,000 in the time leading up to the creation of Israel and shortly after. The largest Zionist lobbies in America today are Christians United for Israel, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. There are many other prominent and almost as large organizations, like J Street, Zionist Organization of America, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism, and Republican Jewish Coalition.

We see the lobby’s effect in how Palestinians specifically and Muslims more broadly are dehumanized in the US, how misinformed Americans are on Palestine, and how much of our tax dollars are used to fund the Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestine.

Today, though, we are at a point of no return. Continue reading →

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Data Centers in Champaign County: A Conversation with UIUC Computer Science Students

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Amy Young

A data center in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Photo by Geoffrey Moffett, used under free Unsplash license

What do computer scientists think about data centers coming to Champaign County?

I recently had coffee with three computer science (CS) students at the University of Illinois. I was intrigued that they are being expertly trained in CS, while having a critical stance about the proposed data centers in Champaign and nearby counties in Illinois.

Bhavana Bheem and Andrea Watkins are graduate students. Samuel Gerstein is graduating this month with a BS in CS.

In my view, these three students are quite atypical, because Bhavana, Samuel, and Andrea are intentionally informed about the impacts of data centers: water use, pollution, and massive amounts of waste heat. They also talk publicly about the harms of AI in education and in daily life. Continue reading →

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Can the Hungarian Regime Change Show Us the Way?

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Zsuzsa Gille and Richard Esbenshade

Young Hungarians on election night, April 12, across the Danube River from the Parliament in Budapest, anticipating Tisza’s victory. Photo by Péter Ungár, used with permission

The May 9 transition of power to new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party after their landslide April 12 election victory has many who believe in the rule of law thrilled with the potential development of a model for a democratic transformation—one that could serve as a model here, and across the world. US leftists and progressives might be skeptical of the former member of the right-wing Fidesz Party (see Richard’s article on the election campaign in the April Public i) who sent Trump buddy Viktor Orbán packing after 16 uninterrupted years in power. But there is much hope to be gained in examining his initial steps toward dismantling an entrenched “illiberal” autocratic system.

Despite Fidesz’s heavy use of the full toolkit of underhanded measures afforded to it by entrenched authoritarian rule—threats and scare tactics, Russian-facilitated AI manipulation, media restriction, electoral tampering, targeted economic enticements, and the like—Tisza won 141 of the 199 seats in Hungary’s parliamentary system, more than enough for a two-thirds supermajority that allows it to push through constitutional changes to undo the damage done to the rule of law, civil society, human rights, all of the country’s basic institutions, and international relations. Turnout was a record 80 percent, with a massive mobilization of younger voters, some two-thirds of whom voted for Tisza. Tisza got over 55 percent of the vote overall, to less than 40 percent for Fidesz. Continue reading →

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Gaza Denialism and the Wider War

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Janice Jayes

In the early months of the war on Gaza US foreign policy paid less attention to the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians than the possibility that the war might spread into a regional conflagration. The US administrations (first Biden’s, then Trump’s) spent more time silencing condemnation of Israeli actions by bullying universities and international organizations, bribing foreign governments with sweet trade and military deals, and arresting critics at home than it did addressing its role in enabling the Israeli violence. This passed for “statecraft” and was celebrated in Washington as successful containment of the crisis.

This is the latest chapter in the hallucinatory worldscape the US has built for itself, where US aggression is reframed as defense, atrocities are dismissed as exceptions, and where US proxies, assassinations, and ethnic cleansings are never acknowledged. Maintaining the accompanying fiction that Gaza was successfully managed requires not only denial of the ongoing genocide but also of the regional destabilization unfolding. Gaza is not the cause, however, but one battlefield of the “wider war” that has been here for decades and now spills across new geographical, technical, and cultural fronts with dangerous new norms for all. Continue reading →

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Epstein’s Global Role

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Paul Mueth

If someone updated Israel Shahak’s seminal 1982 book Israel’s Global Role: Weapons for Repression, they would no doubt have to add an extra chapter for Jeffrey Epstein’s activities. Or perhaps an entire extra volume would be needed.

With that as a caveat, I’ll survey some aspects of the nefarious dealings of Epstein and his cohort. This will include the Iran-Contra episode; a little about marketing Israeli surveillance technology to variety of countries, particularly in West Africa; and his money laundering and illicit money transfers, which go beyond the disgusting human trafficking that is commented on by the corporate press. Continue reading →

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Latrelle Bright, Changing the World through Theater

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Janice Jayes

Scene from a performance of Quantum Voyages, which premiered in 2018 and was reprised in 2025

Latrelle Bright came to UIUC in 2009 as assistant program coordinator for Inner Voices Social Issues Theatre. Over the following years she worked to bring underrepresented voices and perspectives before area audiences while directing shows at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, the Station Theatre, and Parkland College. Bright also pursued innovative partnerships, such as The Water Project (2017), with the Prairie Rivers Network; and Quantum Voyages (2018), with Smitha Vishveshwara and the University of Illinois Physics Department. In 2020 Bright became a teaching professor in the UIUC theatre department. Along with Vishveshwara and Rebecca Wilftong from Physics, and Stephen Taylor from Music, she co-founded a campus-wide,  interdisciplinary community,  CASCaDe—Collective for Art-Science, Creativity and Discovery, etc.

Bright’s creativity was interrupted by a diagnosis of breast cancer, and she passed away September 21, 2025. She is survived by her husband, Rex Bennett; her mother, Anita Johnson; her stepchildren, Maxwell and Yekaterina; and her artistic legacy in the community and among her students. Below are remembrances from colleagues and co-creators. Continue reading →

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Summer Issue Back Cover

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Public i

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April Issue Front Cover

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Public i

A version of a Norouz (Persian New Year, March 21) greeting card, created by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, with the help of AI; used with permission

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Alex Pretti and the Death of Western Liberalism

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Alen Romero

On Saturday, January 24, 2026, an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti was wrestled to the ground on the streets of Minneapolis, disarmed of the pistol he was legally carrying, and fatally shot by ICE agents.

He is the second person fatally shot by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) operating in Minneapolis that month. Video of the incident taken by bystanders went viral, and again directly contradicts Kristi Noem’s and DHS’s narrative. In fact, a report by CNN outlined DHS’s development of an internal database of protesters’ personal information. A source told CNN that “Pretti’s name was known to federal agents,” a fact that flies in the face of the prevailing narrative, created by DHS, that officers have been defending themselves during the course of their legal operations. Continue reading →

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Are Data Centers Responsible Economic Development?

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Lori McKiernan

Photo from Atlantic Council

Responsible economic development must balance financial benefits with harm and risk to the community. Many residents of Illinois feel like the risk of electricity rate increases, potential harm to health and quality of life, and noise and air pollution from data centers outweigh the promised tax revenues and temporary jobs.

AI data centers are large buildings (millions of square feet in some cases) filled with computer processors that are built to handle enormous amounts of data and computing power. These differ from traditional computer processors, possessing the graphical, analytical, and learning capabilities of the computer processors used for AI. These highly specialized processors generated more heat and use much more electricity and water than traditional processors. Continue reading →

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“Revolution” in Iran? Doomed If It Succeeds

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Lucy Jane

This essay was written before the February 28 beginning of the US–Israeli war on Iran. It is an edited version of one that appeared in The People’s Voice, the chapter newsletter of YDSA ISU, on February 18.

An oft-repeated sentiment in leftist spaces in the US is that Iran’s current regime must be tolerated because of its anti-Western/anti-imperialist stance. As an Iranian leftist, I’ve found this argument to be too black and white. The cost of this leftist support for Iran is paid by the Iranian people. Asking protesters to cease their revolt and insinuating that they are in the wrong for trying to remove the current regime completely excuses the theocratic fascism upheld in Iran. Iranians live under an extremely oppressive theocratic regime that silences voices against the government, kills protesters in the street, and enforces extremely strict religious laws. Most recently human rights groups estimate that the death toll of the 2026 protests has reached more than 7000, ranging from protesters to bystanders, many of whom were under the age of 18. Getting an accurate number is extremely difficult because the Iranian government enforced an internet blackout during the protests, leaving communications heavily censored or completely disabled.

On the other hand, Iran’s current government has made Iran one of the most important anti-imperialist countries of the Middle East. They have openly offered material support for resistance groups in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. Iran’s support has been key to the struggle of these nations against Western imperialism.

It is good to remember here that the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. Just because many want to see a change in the government in Iran does not mean that Donald Trump’s call for an end to the current regime is necessarily going to lead to a brighter future for the Iranian people, or for others in the region. Continue reading →

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Champaign’s Attempt to Criminalize Homelessness Fails after Swift Public Outcry

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Brian Dolinar

The closed downtown Champaign viaduct. Photo by the author

This is an edited version of an article originally published in Smile Politely on January 26, 2026.

On December 2, 2025, after two and a half hours of public comment from some 40 community members, Champaign City Council voted 9-0 against an ordinance banning public camping, with Mayor Deb Feinen admitting defeat at the end of the night.

The Champaign Continuum of Service Providers to the Homeless (CSPH), made up of over 40 organizations, including the City of Champaign, prepared a statement saying they had no “prior communication” about the ordinance, and were “shocked and dismayed” to find out about it the day of the vote.

What the public witnessed as a last-minute vote on December 2, just before the holidays, was actually a plan six months in the making, according to nearly 200 pages of emails I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Continue reading →

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Jesse Jackson: A Black Power icon

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Jesse Jackson at a 1975 rally for full employment in Washington, DC. From the U.S. News & World Report collection at the Library of Congress

 

This article first appeared in the author’s regular column “Real Talk: A Black Perspective” in the Champaign News-Gazette, on February 22, 2026. It has been lightly edited for style.

 

On February 17, Jesse Jackson joined the ancestors. He now resides in our memories alongside our most revered warriors. He stands beside our most hallowed figures from the 20th century onward: Ida B. Wells Barnett, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) as one of our most brilliant and dedicated fighters.

 

Jesse Jackson was the last mass leader of the Black Liberation movement; he was the last national leader of Afro-America. He understood the drylongso—the everyday, ordinary working-class Black person. Perhaps more than anyone since Shabazz and King, Jackson channeled the aspirations, attitudes, and axioms of the African American people. He felt the people’s moods and shifted strategies to align himself with them.

 

And like King during his last years, Jackson took Black folk’s liberatory message to other oppressed darker nationalities, and even to working-class white folk exploited by global capital. He genuinely worked to build a rainbow coalition of “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.” Continue reading →

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Toward a Reparative Culture

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Sharon Irish

In May, 2023, about ten people gathered around a table at New Covenant Fellowship in Champaign to launch the Champaign-Urbana Reparations Coalition (CURC). Dr. Jeffrey Trask, already leading New Covenant’s efforts toward reparations for African Americans, led the meeting. Dr. Trask has continued to direct CURC as the group has grown in size and goals over the past three years.

CURC’s short-term goal is to establish and fund a Champaign County Reparations Commission for African Americans to study the need for reparations and bring recommendations for action to the public governing bodies and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). We’ve made good progress toward that goal. The city of Urbana (on June 9, 2025) and the Champaign County Board (on October 23, 2025) have already committed funds to this effort. We propose an 11-person commission. At least 51 percent of the commission is to be composed of community members, to ensure that the leadership and recommendations authentically represent African American residents of Champaign County. We await a decision about support for this commission from the city of Champaign and, possibly, the village of Rantoul. Continue reading →

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On Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Elissa Blake

Simone Weil, 1942. Image from Wikimedia Commons

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

Simone Weil

Born in 1909 to a secular Jewish family in Paris, Simone Weil is known for her independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity: “estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematizer,” according to an essay by Christy Wampole.

In her posthumously published book The Need for Roots—commissioned by the Free France government to help plan for the renewal of Europe after the scourge of Nazism; and written in 1943 shortly before her death of heart failure, brought on by refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations allowed for German-occupied France—she wrote,

“Uprootedness occurs whenever there is a military conquest. . . . It reaches its most acute stage when there are deportations on a massive scale . . . or where there is any brutal suppression of all local traditions . . . Even without a military conquest, money-power and economic domination can so impose a foreign influence as actually to provoke this disease of uprootedness. . . . For people who are really uprooted there remain only two possible sorts of behavior: either to fall into a spiritual lethargy resembling death . . . or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so. . . . Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted . . . doesn’t uproot others.” Continue reading →

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The Hungarian Elections: A Blow to European Right-Wing Populism?*

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Richard Esbenshade

One of the ubiquitous Fidesz campaign posters, on a main Budapest avenue. It shows mugshot-type-photos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and opposition candidate Péter Magyar; the text reads “DANGEROUS!” above, and “LET’S STOP THEM! ONLY FIDESZ, APRIL 12 [the date of the coming election] below.” Photo by Ábel Esbenshade

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been name-dropped by practically everyone on the American Right lately, from Donald Trump to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, as a trailblazer and model for the conservative nationalist authoritarian state they covet—not to mention by MAGA’s European and even global allies. But after 16 consecutive years in power, he faces his starkest challenge yet in parliamentary elections on April 12. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party is holding an average 10-percentage-point lead over Orbán’s Fidesz in independent polling—a lead that has held steady for the past 15 months. Magyar is himself a Fidesz defector, running against the corruption, cronyism, and social-service and general economic decline of the country. Although he preaches reconciliation with the EU and restoration of Hungarian civil society, his traditional, Christian, patriotic profile is a sharp departure from that of the left-liberal cosmopolitan one of past opposition figures.

Could a prospective Orbán loss be a turning point for the fight against the populist Right in Europe and worldwide? Or just another tilt of the ship on the current stormy economic and political seas, that will inevitably tilt back the other way somewhere else (or even in Hungary)? There is a narrative afoot that the populist wave has perhaps crested: first with the loss of Orbán’s protégé the Polish PiS party in 2023 parliamentary elections; then the victory of the centrist mayor of Bucharest over a Trump-aligned candidate in the May, 2025 Romanian presidential elections (Orbán supported the losing ultranationalist, despite his strong anti-(ethnic) Hungarian positions, in turn costing the Hungarian leader support among the 1.2-million strong ethnic Hungarian community in Transylvania—who can also vote in Hungarian elections); the sharp drop in support for Geert Wilders’s favored anti-immigrant Party for Freedom in the Dutch parliamentary elections last October; and the triumph of the Portuguese Socialist António José Seguro over a right-wing populist in presidential elections last month. But the failure of the centrist Civic Platform candidate to consolidate that coalition’s control in the Polish presidential election last June is a cautionary tale, as are the victories of the right-wing Czech and Slovak prime ministers Andrej Babiš and Robert Fico last October and in September, 2023, respectively (both returning to office after previous stints). As far back as 2017, the Guardian felt compelled to headline an article “Populism Isn’t Dead”—so we’ve seen this movie before.

Continue reading →

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Just Five

Posted on 04/10/2026 by Matthew Murrey

I am more than fifty years past
being just five, but I’m trying
to remember how strange
the grown-up world was, how
the huge ones told us, “Do this.”

“Get over there.” “Right now!”
Some kids were reduced
to tears; some put a blank face
on fear. I remember that.
I remember someone pounding

on the door one night. At least
my mother was brave—not me.
I remember black and white
TV: children, uniforms, and wars,
but I was never forced to stand

in the cold without my father
while a man in a mask held me
from behind as I stared into
the salty black surface of dread.
Now I am old enough to know

history has no mercy for children—
when those in charge speak gun,
burn, and deportation, cameras find them
hands up from the ghetto, burned
by napalm, facing an unmarked car.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026) and Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019). He was a public-school librarian for more than 20 years and lives in Urbana with his partner.

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