Speak out! Tom Alter, MAGA McCarthyism, and the fight for free speech

The U.S. is experiencing one of the largest waves of political repression in its history. Academics, socialists, leftists, intellectuals, Palestinians, Muslims, labor organizers, trans people, queer folks, migrants, immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the working-class, the poor are all under attack. The state’s efforts to repress free speech are part of a larger campaign to silence and stamp out dissent of all kinds, and move the U.S. further towards authoritarianism. Recently, Tom Alter, a tenured historian, was fired from his job at Texas State University, simply for speaking as a Socialist.

We must fight back. Join us for this 90 minute Speak Out! with activists, organizers and writers who will share ideas about the meaning of MAGA McCarthyism and how we can together resist.

When: Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST

Where: Online, YouTubeOnline, YouTube

How: Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the live-streamed video on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and captioning will be provided.

Speakers:

Tom Alter. Tom Alter is a scholar and activist who was recently fired by Texas State University. He is the author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas. He is a member of the Texas State Employees Union, the American Association of University Professors, and Socialist Horizon.

Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer, and writer based in Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States and has been cited by NPR, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and other outlets. She co-wrote the revolutionary sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions Press, 2022). She writes a regular column on Palestine and politics for In These Times magazine. Her essays have appeared in Jacobin, Truthout, Zeteo, and other publications.

Jodi Dean is Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her most recent books are Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging and Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, both published by Verso.

Catarina Kissinger is an organizer with the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU / CWA Local 6186), where she helps lead the union’s campaign in defense of Dr. Tom Alter and works to build collective power among faculty, staff, and student workers in higher education.

Karim Mattar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education. He is currently at work on “Writing the Catastrophe: Trauma and Responsibility Across Generation,” a monograph that interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to Palestine. Karim is co-chair of the CAHE Palestine Caucus and Faculty Editor of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom.“

David McNally has taught history and political economy at the University of Houston and York University in Toronto. He is currently director of the Project on Race and Capitalism. David is the author of eight books including most recently, Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History published earlier this year by the University of California Press.

Dave Zirin is a writer at The Nation and hosts The Edge of Sports podcast. He is the author of many books including The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing TheWorld.
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This event is sponsored by Committee to Defend Tom Alter, Texas State Employees Union/CWA Local 6186, and  Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.

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