Taking care of business
Mahmoud Khalil, Clark students on strike, Kearney in the Atlantic
What’s up what’s up! Weekly serving of Worcester Sucks coming at you on a rare Friday afternoon.
We used to have saxophone buskers with dogs that wore sunglasses. What happened to us?
I pulled this from a GBH archive clip of downtown Worcester in 1993 they posted recently. It is simply hypnotic. I could watch it over and over.
The Roast of Worcester is tonight, come hang! Feeling good about my set and it’s gunna be a fun night for a great cause: All money raised is going to Trans Lifeline.
Let’s keep it short and snappy today, huh?
Week-in-a-graf:
The week opened with a train derailment, the city narrowly avoiding its own airborne toxic event. A Holy Cross professor was disinvited from Stanford on National Women’s Day because she planned to give a talk on women’s personal testimonies about the genocide in Gaza. Aidan Kearney got profiled in The Atlantic for his role in the Karen Read saga, by a British writer who used to tour with Pet Shop Boys (???). The Worcester Cultural Coalition Instagram (???) posted a fun fact about “the heart of the commonwealth” with a majestic picture of Worcester, UK in the background. The city rolled out a new public trash bin program; 150 to be placed around town and hopefully emptied once in a while. The Globe’s lead editorial on Tuesday was a demand for answers from the supposed outside investigation into the death of state police recruit Enrique Delgado-Garcia. It’s been six months now. The gold cybertruck guy everyone’s been giving shit went viral on TikTok. The city council complained about the wind on trash day and the price of medications. It’s now Irish American Heritage Month in the city of Worcester thanks to Kate Toomey. The special meeting on the DOJ report was pushed back to March 25 because the manager had a scheduling conflict on the 18th. There was a 5-5 split vote on continuing to pursue an open meeting law complaint against progressives after the city lawyer said they didn’t break the open meeting law. Amtrak launched a Worcester-Boston service. The undergraduate workers union at Clark University went on strike Thursday. UMass Chan Medical School announced a hiring freeze and a suspension of some new PHD admissions amid fears of federal funding cut impacts. A piece of stairwell broke off in a city-owned parking garage and hit a theatergoer in the head. Maureen Binienda pulled papers for at-large school committee, ending the rumors she may go for mayor. Somebody posted a drone video of demolition work on Chandler Street that’s the most “hell yeah” thing I’ve ever seen.
Truly taking care of business.
The only reason I can do this newsletter week in and week out is because enough people pay me a small amount of money monthly or yearly to do so! It’s like buying me a beer or so a month.
Mahmoud Khalil is a test case—Clark students on strike!—participatory budgeting, when?—election update—odds and ends
Mahmoud Khalil is a test case
It took four days for Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers to get in touch with him. In those four days, he was moved three times, from his New York apartment in an unmarked van to a New York ICE field office, to a detention center in New Jersey then to a private prison in Louisiana, a pointedly retaliatory transfer.
He holds a green card. He has not been charged with a crime. He is entitled by ICE’s own internal policies to speak with an attorney within 24 hours of his detainment. It was four times that before anyone heard from him.
Nothing about this is legal, and that’s the point.
The state has used Khalil to pin a notice to our doors. They are telling us they’re willing to break the law to satiate the death cult.
You’ve probably read enough takes about immigration and freedom of speech as it relates to this case by now. What’s lesser known is that Khalil’s kidnapping was the conclusion of a localized social media harassment. A day before he was abducted from his home, he wrote an email to Columbia University asking for protection, as a sustained doxxing campaign conducted by local anti-Palestinian cranks escalated, per Zeteo:
The most recent among the leaked messages was an email Khalil, a green card holder, sent to Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong on March 7. “Since yesterday, I have been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, among others, have labeled me a security threat and called for my deportation,” he began.
“Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats. I have outlined the wider context below, yet Columbia has not provided any meaningful support or resources in response to this escalating threat,” he added.
This doxxing campaign provided the perfect test case for a new, AI-reliant “catch and revoke” program. Homeland Security is using AI to scrape the Internet for instances of “antisemitism” (i.e. anti-Zionism), while at the same time relying on an archaic and profoundly antisemitic law (the real kind) to prosecute offenders: The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act was last employed against incoming Holocaust survivors thought to be communists or other “subversives.” Now that same statute finds new license in a new subversive to target, as outlined in a recent piece from The Forward, a Jewish news outlet.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” states a fact sheet published on the White House website along with President Donald Trump’s January executive order on antisemitism. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction is a warning shot, a trial balloon, and a litmus test rolled up into one. Our liberal institutions, from Columbia University to the Democratic Party, have so far have failed us on all three. And, while Khalil’s case is the most drastic, it’s far from the only. An “antisemitism” AI-scraping tool led to the firing of Palestinian professor Helyeh Doutaghi at Yale recently. In a recent interview with Drop Site News, Doutaghi minced no words:
“This is not about me. It's not about Mahmoud Khalil. It really isn't about any of the individuals or the specificity of the cases and the individuals involved. It really is a very much coordinated attack on free speech and about how much the government is terrified of not being able to silence the voices that they've been trying to silence for so many years, but also especially in the past year and a half and they're failing to do so.”
Signs suggest the administration will move next to Boston, Chicago, and LA for its next round of “catch and revoke” activity. Trump’s Department of Justice on Thursday morning put up a press release titled “Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism to Visit Leadership of Four Big Cities Rocked by Incidents of Antisemitism.”
Today, the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism notified the local leaders of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston that it wanted to meet soon to discuss their responses to incidents of antisemitism at schools and on college campuses in their cities over the last two years. The Task Force, created pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order on Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, told the cities it wanted to engage with local leadership, including the mayors, district or city attorneys, and local law enforcement.
At the bottom of the release, there’s a link to file a complaint of discrimination, and an encouraging note for anyone with an “antisemitic” story to tell. Now, with the Khalil precedent established, feckless and racist anti-Palestinian activists around the country know exactly what to report to get their local Palestine supporters in the catch-and-revoke queue. All they have to say is “pro-Palestine activity” it seems.
What the moment calls for, at minimum, is encapsulated in the clip of NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani screaming at Trump “border czar” Tom Holman earlier this week. Over the shoulder of a security guard he points at Holman and shouts “do you believe in the first amendment? Do you believe in the first amendment, Tom Holman?”
It’s the thousands of people who showed up at the NYC courthouse on Wednesday and all the other demonstrations across the country. I like the way Kathrine Krueger put it in Discourse the other day, in a post headlined “Don't Give the Bastards an Inch.”
I’m naturally given to despair. Particularly in our new political reality, I slip into believing that nothing can get better and nothing ever will. But indulging in despair is the height of luxury, one that so many can’t begin to afford. So yesterday, I attended a rally to demand Khalil’s release outside the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, where his first hearing was held. Surrounded by hundreds of people, I felt, for the first time in a long time, heartened. To be in common cause with hundreds of people refusing to sit idly by during an unprecedented assault on our actual freedoms—not the “freedom” weaponized by the right wing to sell nootropics, guns, and racism—is powerful. Organizing is the best known antidote to despair, and we need it now, more than ever.
I’ll add the reason you don’t give the bastards an inch is because that’s all they’re looking for: the next inch. They have no project grander than that.
Toward that end, there’s a demonstration scheduled at Holy Cross coming up.
See you there.
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Clark students on strike!
On Thursday undergraduate workers at Clark University went on full-blown indefinite strike.
For months, they’d been trying to unionize with the Teamsters, as the graduate students did back in 2023. The administration has refused to recognize Clark’s Undergraduate Student-Workers Union, an ongoing and increasingly bitter dispute.
The demand of the strike is what’s called a card check neutrality agreement with the university. That means if the majority of Clark’s 700 undergraduate workers sign union cards, the university recognizes the union, and the union then has power to collectively bargain.
The union is demanding better pay as the university has cut hours across the board for students with on-campus jobs. From the Clark Scarlet, the school’s student newspaper:
Through unionization, students hope to secure better pay, stable hours, and safer working conditions. Clark student-workers are paid well below market rate, most making minimum wage. Student-worker hours have been slashed nearly across the board, with hours promised in job postings rarely being fulfilled. Despite many student workers having to work outside in sub-zero conditions, Clark student workers are provided no safety equipment. Collective bargaining through unionization would force the university to right these wrongs.
The university’s argument against recognizing the union rests on the idea that they are students, not workers, and thus ineligible. The union says this stance violates a 2016 National Labor Relations Board decision that says students may unionize. Seems pretty cut and dry to me. The going theory is that Clark is banking on the Trump administration’s reflexive hostility to labor, which also seems reasonable. Not a great look, Clark!
The Scarlet’s strike coverage has been impressive. Here’s a good example:
At 8:30 a.m., three city council members, Thu Nguyen, Khrystian E. King, and Etel Haxhiaj, joined the picket line.
At the Maywood Street line, workers are chanting, “on admitted students day, give us better wage.” This strike location is located directly across the street from the admissions building.
Around 9:45 a.m., an Amazon delivery truck broke the picket line with the help of Worcester Police, moving the strikers out of the way. When the truck left at 10:15 a.m., the police helped move the strikers out of the way. Two more delivery trucks arrived this morning; one went past the picket line, and another was delivered from the curb.
At 10 a.m., the Graduate Student Union announced they stand in solidarity with the undergraduate workers...
Good to see student journalists doing the damn thing, and solidarity with the students on strike!
The SYC Mutual Aid Fund For Strikers and other resources. The union’s Twitter and Instagram.
Must be nice!
Couple times a week I walk down to the liquor store by my house for a pack of butts. They keep copies of The Baystate Banner, a free local weekly out of Boston that focuses on the issues most pressing to the city’s Black community. Black-owned, too. It’s better in my opinion than the Globe’s city desk. (Weird that a Worcester place carries it because the paper doesn’t cover Worcester at all. I appreciate it though.) The other day the paper’s A1 story caught my eye so I grabbed a copy on my way out the door. “City announces winners of first participatory budgeting round.”
Six projects were selected out of a cohort of 14 proposals developed through workshops run by the city and voted on by residents in a month-long period from mid-January to mid-February. In total, the city will spend $2 million on funding the six ideas.
Needs funded include: food insecurity, rodent-proof food storage, youth mentorship and skills training, rental assistance for formerly incarcerated youth, community gardens, new benches at high-volume bus stations.
Must be nice! Even nicer: the city ran workshops to help community members come up with 14 different proposals, then there was an open voting process with nearly 4,500 ballots submitted.
Reading about the workshops especially reminded me of the way the city of Worcester handled the complex application process community organizations had to go through to access ARPA funds: namely, “you figure it out.” Then they accepted or rejected applications based on the ability to figure it out. So naturally the most well-heeled organizations, with access to grant writers and accounting teams, took home most of the money.
There is an alternate universe in which Worcester, like Boston, held workshops to encourage and develop proposals, then had an open process for selecting the winners. That, of course, is not our universe. On Tuesday the council met for two hours to complain about recycling on windy days, litigate petty beefs via bad-faith OML complaints, and otherwise whine ambiently. The idea of that body, with its six-crank controlling majority, getting us to participatory budgeting is... it’s just not going to happen.
Of course it’s not all rosy in Boston. The growth machine is much more powerful there, and does as any growth machine does, with the help of captured bodies like the Zoning Board of Appeals. The second lead story in the March 6 issue of the Banner is headlined “Zoning Board dismisses project to bring Roxbury birth center, nonprofits.”
The proposal, called Community Movement Commons, would have converted four lots in the Nubian Square area into a birth center with attendant community and office spaces. The first subhead reads “A victory for homeowners” and quotes a member of the local neighborhood association.
The homeowners get what they want, even in a city with participatory budgeting. But especially in a city without it. We’re not even close to confronting that reality, as I spent much time on in the last post.
Thank you for all the good feedback on that one by the way! Seems to have resonated in an encouraging way.
Election update
We have a few newcomers to add to the list of paper pullers, working off the most updated list as of this morning. Here’s the first update, in case you missed it.
Most notably, Maureen Binienda has pulled papers to run again for her at-large school committee seat and—also notably—not for at-large council. The rumors she was considering a mayoral run proved to be just that: rumors. There’s another new name (to me) as well: Natalia Lopez. Don’t know anything about her but I would like to! (If you’re reading this send me a line: billshaner@substack.com)
In District 1, Joseph Rubino pulled papers. But he also pulled papers last year and never returned them. Also, we interviewed D1 candidate Keith Linhares the other day for Outdoor Cats. We’ll be putting that up on Sunday (or that’s the plan at the moment).
Another new name in District 5 as well: Elizabeth Marie Monahan. Don’t know anything about them
Some action in the district school committee seats: Ashley Spring for Molly McCullough’s District A; Ronald Waddel for Vanessa Alvarez’ District B.
District D, held by Alex Guardiola, and District F, held by Jermaine Johnson, remain uncontested. There’s no pressing need to challenge Johnson but can someone please please please look up whether you live in District D and then, if so, pull papers to run against Tim Murr—sorry, Alex Guardiola.
In the last update I said I didn’t know who District 3 candidate Jason Diaz is. Turns out he’s what they call a “Turtle Rider,” the in-group nickname for Aidan Kearney groupies. He owns Taste Great Cakes on Hamilton Street, where he’s hosted Free Karen Read fundraisers. No thanks!
Speaking of!
The Atlantic turns turtle rider
“Turtleboy will not be stopped” reads the headline of an almost 10,000 word feature in The Atlantic set to appear in the magazine’s April issue, complete with a professional feature photo spread. You may remember the Boston Magazine brand-massaging profile on Kearney from last May. This Atlantic profile is that story, just many times magnified.
The author is Chris Heath, a British journalist who made his career in the 1980s touring with Pet Shop Boys—cool as hell, objectively! And now he’s doing... this.
As the Brits would say, it’s rather bizarre.
I read as much of it as I could bear. It’s well written and deeply reported, making it all the more strange. The detached and uncritical lens combined with the quality of craft and an extra splash of some of that uniquely British hostility to the gender diverse makes for whiplash paragraphs like this one:
That week, Kearney was preoccupied with what, back then, was fairly typical Turtleboy fare. He’d faced down what he called “An Antifa Child Drag Queen Mob”; he’d interposed himself in a dispute involving parents who had claimed that their child was facing racist abuse at a cheer gym; he’d set up the latest installment of his annual Turtleboy Ratchet Madness competition, in which his followers would vote, round by round, to name the worst of the “ratchets”—hypocrites, spongers, and other miscreants—his blog had identified in the previous year; and he had documented, or intervened in, sundry other disputes, while also describing how he had been swatted twice that week, with the police arriving at his home to follow up on bogus reports from Turtleboy haters that Kearney was suicidal.
That was what Kearney’s life was like.
First of all, only a Brit could envision in earnest that a grown man would have to “face down” a “child drag queen” antagonist! Second of all, “was” is doing a lot of work in that last line there.
The kicker is the best part of the piece. It’s too long to quote but I would highly recommend the last four paragraphs for fans of the ‘dipshit makes wildly self-important claim’ genre.
My position on the Karen Read thing is either the cops lose or Kearney loses—a win either way. Add a third win with this Atlantic profile: if Kearney doesn’t fuck up this time and actually parlays his attachment to this made-for-TV courtroom drama into a national media career, that means in a way that we can finally be done with him. He leaves Massachusetts once and for all to float around in the sea of culture war slop with the rest of his ilk.
With any luck Steven Crowder will be whipping Kearney’s cow-costumed bottom by this time next year.
Odds and ends
One more subscriber pitch for the road!
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Make sure you check out our interview with Joanne McNeil if you haven’t yet! It’s really great.
A police officer in Boylston shot and killed someone and the town isn’t releasing any more information than that. The off-duty Worcester cop who got in a fight at a youth soccer game has been charged but the Northborough police still aren’t releasing his name.
There’s a new weekly farmer’s market on Brussell’s Street, behind Rotman’s Furniture. Starts this summer!
Putting a pin on this map of Worcester’s environmental justice areas that Colin Novick shared for a future post. One of the more ghoulish focus areas of Trump’s slash and burn.
Watched Flow the other night. Holy moly. So good.
Did you know the guy from Pissed Jeans has a newsletter of music reviews? It’s called Yellow Green Red and it rocks. Discovered Michael Beach that way today. What a heater of a track this one is
Ok I gotta run my set for the roast one more time. Talk soon!
Re: the UMass hiring freeze etc...the mood is bleak here, at least in the research departments. Layoffs started quickly. Despite my dept's budget being in good shape overall, the NIH stalling on grants and renewals means my job of 7 years is going away within a few months.
Good piece 👏