Los Angeles — 50501 is a relatively new organization, having emerged only a few months ago, yet it claims to have already organized 50 protests across all 50 states. Its mission, as stated on its website, is to confront what it sees as the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on constitutional rights and the expansion of executive power at the expense of legislative democracy.
In Los Angeles County, the group has gained traction, drawing significant crowds. On April 5, thousands joined a march from Pershing Square to City Hall, signaling a growing base of support.
Looking ahead, 50501 is planning further actions that include appearances by prominent Democratic politicians, with particular focus on figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are expected to arrive in Los Angeles in mid-April.
However, the enthusiastic participation of the Democratic Party in these events raises important questions. While it’s true that Trump-era policies incited widespread anger, the Democratic Party itself has long-standing contradictions that complicate its role in any genuine anti-war or anti-imperialist movement. Historically, both Democratic and Republican administrations have supported the expansion of NATO and U.S. military interventions abroad. Under President Obama, for example, the United States carried out mass deportations — more than any other administration — and participated in NATO-led operations that devastated countries like Libya.
These contradictions were apparent on April 5 in Los Angeles. The Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice had endorsed the protest and planned to send a speaker, this writer. However, the center’s representative was removed from the speakers list after refusing to support continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine and voicing opposition to NATO.
And the exclusion came as a surprise. But then a flyer was circulated with the event’s materials that included “Hands Off NATO” as one of the rallying demands. Had the Harriet Tubman Center been aware of this, it might not have endorsed the event at all. Given that the disinvited speaker was Black and representing an organization named after a person embodying the fight against slavery, the irony was difficult to ignore. NATO, after all, played a key role in the 2011 destruction of Libya — once Africa’s most prosperous nation — leading to mass poverty and even the return of open-air slave markets.
When questioned, organizers claimed they could not platform a speaker who wasn’t in solidarity with Ukrainian refugees. Yet this narrow definition of solidarity excluded the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass region, many of whom opposed the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine.
In 2022, as a Senate candidate and writer for Struggle-La Lucha, I traveled to Ukraine and Russia between May 1 and May 12 on a fact-finding mission organized by what is now known as the Struggle for Socialism Party and the Harriet Tubman Center. We sought to uncover stories suppressed by Western media — stories that challenged the prevailing NATO narrative of the war in Ukraine.
In the Lugansk People’s Republic, I was guided by Alexey Albu, a leader of the socialist organization Borotba (Struggle) and a survivor of the May 2014 massacre in Odessa. During the Maidan coup, which installed a far-right regime aligned with Western imperialist interests, violence erupted across the country. In Odessa, neo-Nazi mobs firebombed the House of Trade Unions, killing nearly 50 anti-fascists — some burned alive, others beaten or shot while fleeing the flames. Alexey narrowly escaped and later fled to Crimea for safety.
In March 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ukraine was responsible in this massacre, yet Western media barely covered the verdict. The court’s findings confirmed the Ukrainian government’s complicity, through inaction, in enabling these atrocities.
While in Lugansk, I visited the Rubizhne shelter and the villages of Sokilnyky and Krymske, where recent fighting had driven out extremist militias like the Right Sector and Azov Battalion. Swastikas scrawled across walls, shell fragments, and testimonies from civilians painted a grim picture of life under these ultra-nationalist forces.
The people of Donbass responded to the 2014 coup by declaring independence, forming the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. In referenda, 89% of Donetsk and 96% of Lugansk residents voted for self-rule. Rather than honoring this, the Ukrainian government, backed by the U.S., labeled them terrorists and launched brutal military operations.
By early 2022, 150,000 Ukrainian troops were massed on the Donbass border. The death toll since 2014 had already reached 14,000. In desperation, the breakaway republics called for Russian assistance to protect their people.
If we want to understand what could have happened without that intervention, we need only look at Gaza. With U.S. support, Israel’s military continues to devastate the region, killing or injuring 100 children per day. That same U.S. military-industrial complex fuels Ukraine’s war machine.
Consider Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov Battalion and current commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps. In 2010, Biletsky infamously stated that Ukraine’s mission was to lead the “white race” in a crusade against “Semite-led Untermenschen.” Untermenschen is an unscientific term used by Nazi Germany, implying an ethnic designation. They are supposedly inferior people who fall into a category of basically anyone not “accepted” by the German Nazis.
White supremacy morphs to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism. NATO and U.S. wars are never about democracy or freedom. They are about maintaining global dominance, fascism, poverty, and the subjugation of our international working class – starting with the Global South, Black and Brown, Palestinian, and anyone getting in the way of U.S. imperialism and its IMF and World Bank.
We must be wary of progressives who sidestep these issues, especially those who avoid discussing Palestine, minimize police brutality, or demonize countries like Iran, Cuba, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the DPRK, and Russia. Of course, no state is without contradictions — but we must focus on the largest contradiction of all: the unchecked violence of U.S. imperialism.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” To vilify nations resisting U.S. hegemony while ignoring our own country’s war crimes is not just hypocritical — it’s dangerous and the greatest contradiction. That cannot be tolerated.
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