Solidarity Without Exception

Throughout 2025, the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela has faced growing and violent pressure from the United States, with President Trump’s administration deploying naval fleets in the Caribbean, ordering lethal and illegal strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels departing from the Venezuelan territory—and, most recently, seizing a massive oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. In response, Maduro has invoked emergency powers, mobilized militias, and signaled that his regime is preparing for military confrontation rather than compromise with the US, all while Trump and Maduro face waves of popular dissent and unrest within their own countries. In this urgent episode of Solidarity Without Exception, co-host Blanca Missé speaks with Venezuelan journalist and researcher Simón Rodríguez Porras about the decades-long path that has led us to the brink of war between the US and Venezuela, and about the need for working people around the globe to oppose Trump’s imperialist aggression and stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people without excusing or ignoring the political crisis within Venezuela itself.  Guests: Simón Rodríguez Porras is a Venezuelan journalist, researcher, and editor at Venezuelanvoices.org.Credits: Pre-Production: Blanca MisséAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

From military invasions, occupations, and annexations of Mexican territories in the 19th century to the post-NAFTA capture of Mexican industries, resources, and labor markets by American companies and investors, US-Mexico relations have always been defined by American imperial domination. “Mexico's economy has been economically dominated and incorporated as a kind of subsidiary or an extension of the US economy,” labor activist and scholar Justin Akers Chacón says, and that relationship of domination “determines the politics of Mexico” to this day. In this episode of Solidarity Without Exception, co-host Blanca Missé speaks with Chacón about the colonial roots of US–Mexico relations, how that relationship has evolved over the past two centuries, and how it continues to shape the politics, economics, and immigration policies of each country today.Guest:Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, labor unionist, and Professor of Chicana/o History at San Diego City College who lives in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. He is the author of The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border and Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class; he is also the co-author, with Mike Davis, of No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border.Credits:Pre-Production: Blanca MisséAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

Israel’s US-backed genocidal destruction of Gaza has exploded the fiction of the “rules-based” international order and exposed the violent, people-destroying, land-grabbing imperialism it was always based on. Over the last two years, the US and Israel have carried out a genocidal war in Gaza, officially killing over 60,000 people, bombing Gaza’s cities to smithereens, and displacing 90% of its 2.1 million people. Their blockade of almost all aid has caused a famine that threatens to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced plans to invade and occupy all of the territory while he greenlights more repression and colonial settlement in the West Bank.In this episode of Solidarity Without Exception, Palestinian scholar-activist Eman Abdelhadi speaks about how we reached this grim threshold, and what comes next. Abdelhadi details the history of imperialist support for Israel’s colonial conquest of Palestine up to the current genocide, the Palestinian people’s steadfast resistance, and the urgency of global solidarity with their freedom struggle.Guest:Eman Abdelhadi is a Palestinian academic, activist, and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.Additional resources: The Real News Network, Israel’s War on PalestineBrett Wilkins, Common Dreams / The Real News Network, "‘Colossal level of destruction’ as Israel ethnically cleanses Gaza City neighborhoods"Spectre Journal, Building the Palestine Solidarity Movement - An Interview with Eman AbdelhadiSpectre Journal, Palestinian Liberation: “We Teach Life” - An Interview with Rafeef ZiadahCredits:Hosted by Ashley SmithStudio Production: Ashley SmithAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

Today, Taiwan is caught in the crosshairs of two imperial rivals: the US and China. This is nothing new for the island nation, which has been a battleground for competing empires for centuries, but what is new is the critical role Taiwan plays in the 21st-century world economy. For example, Taiwan manufacturers 90% of the world's most advanced microchips—the key component in everything from consumer electronics to the US military’s F-35 fighter jets. In this episode of Solidarity Without Exception, co-host Ashley Smith speaks with Brian Hioe, journalist and editor of New Bloom magazine, about the history of Taiwanese struggles for self-determination, the country’s position in the contemporary US-China rivalry, the increasing threat of imperial war, and the urgency of building solidarity among working-class people in Taiwan, the US, and China.Guests:Brian Hioe is a freelance journalist, translator, and one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine featuring radical perspectives on Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, Hioe has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018 and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Nottingham's Taiwan Studies Programme, as well as board member of the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents' Club.Additional resources:New Bloom website, Facebook page, X page, and InstagramEli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, & Ashley Smith, Haymarket Books, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial RivalryBrian J. Chen, Boston Review, “Semiconductor Island: The colonial making of Taiwan’s chip supremacy”Credits:Pre-Production: Ashley SmithStudio Production / Post-Production: TRNNMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

During its reign as the dominant global superpower, the US imposed its will and wreaked imperialist havoc around the world. But as the power of US empire declines and the global order is restructured, hypernationalism and violent competition between imperial and regional powers are surging around the world, like they did before the great world wars. Can an internationalist, working-class movement of movements for peace, prosperity, and self-determination help humanity avoid a future of imperialist plunder, planetary destruction, and escalating violence?In this episode of Solidarity Without Exception, cohosts Blanca Missé and Ashley Smith speak with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez about the dire need for such a movement in our terrifying new age of global disorder, and they discuss movement-building lessons that have emerged from the conversations they’ve hosted on the podcast so far in Season One.Additional resources:Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, & Ashley Smith, Haymarket Books, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial RivalryUkraine: A people’s peace, not an imperial peace (joint declaration by ecosocialist, anarchist, feminist, environmental organisations, and groups in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and for a self-determined social and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine)Credits:Audio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

For the last two years, the civil war in Sudan, the largest contemporary war in Africa, has ripped the country apart. As Beverly Ochieng, Wedaeli Chibelushi, and Natasha Booty report at the BBC, “The war, which continues to this day, has claimed more than 150,000 lives. And in what the United Nations has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis, about 12 million people have been forced to flee their homes. There is evidence of genocide in the western region of Darfur, where residents say they have been targeted by fighters based on their ethnicity.”In the latest installment of Solidarity Without Exception, we examine the roots of Sudan’s social and humanitarian crisis today, the domestic and international dimensions of the political revolution that swept Sudan in 2019, which led to the overthrow of Omar Al-Bashir, and the violent counterrevolution that, since 2023, has been led by two military factions (and their international allies), deepening the oppression of the Sudanese people and enabling genocidal actions by said military forces. Cohost Blanca Missé speaks with: Nisrin Elamin, assistant professor of African studies and anthropology at the University of Toronto and a member of the Sudan Solidarity Collective, who is currently writing a book on Gulf Arab capital accumulation and land dispossession in central Sudan; and Ibrahim Alhaj Abdelmajeed Alduma, a Virginia-based human rights advocate for Sudan and a communication and disinformation specialist with years of experience working in NGOs with a focus on community development, youth capacity building, and strengthening the role and impact of civil society institutions.Credits:Hosted by Blanca MisséAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

Since 1565, the Philippines has been in the grip of one imperialist power after another. Even after independence, the archipelago remains a kind of functional US colony. Now, territorial conflict in the South China Sea could turn the Philippines into a battleground for US-China war. Josua Mata joins Solidarity Without Exception to discuss the Philippines long history of colonization and resistance.Credits:Pre-Production: Ashley SmithAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

Puerto Rico first became a US colony in 1898—and remains so well into the 21st century. Today, that colonial relationship is structured through PROMESA, an unelected board that controls the island’s budget and has unleashed a vicious cycle of debt and privatization that has mired Puerto Ricans in poverty, unemployment, and underdevelopment. Rafael Bernabe joins Solidarity Without Exception to discuss PROMESA’s role in perpetuating colonialism in Puerto Rico, and the longer history of the island’s oppression under US rule.Rafael Bernabe is a Puerto Rican activist, sociologist and historian. He was one of four island-wide representatives of the Movimiento Victoria Cuidadana (MVC) who won office in the 2020 elections. He is the author of Walt Whitman and His Caribbean and co-author of Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 with César J. Ayala.Read the transcript of this podcast here. Credits:Hosted by Blanca MisséPre-Production: Blanca MisséAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

Editor's note: This episode was recorded on March 4, 2025.In Syria, Assad is gone, but the country's challenges remain. Over a decade of civil war and foreign intervention has devastated the country's economy and politics, but a fragile optimism still exists. Joseph Daher and Ramah Kudaimi join this second episode of Solidarity Without Exception for a discussion on Syria's long journey from the 2011 revolution to today, and what solidarity with the Syrian people should have looked like then, and could look like now.Credits:Hoisted by Ashley SmithPre-Production: Ashley SmithAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

Three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, roughly 20% of the Ukrainian territory remains occupied by Russian troops. Before the invasion, there were 41 million people living in Ukraine; today, the UN Refugee Agency estimates that 3.7 million people still in Ukraine have been displaced from their homes, while almost 7 million refugees had to flee abroad. The war has severely damaged the Ukrainian economy and the living conditions for people in Ukraine.Like everywhere else in the world, there is a class divide in Ukraine, and the impact of the war has not been equally felt: while the average Ukrainian was forced to migrate, lose wages, and fight on the front, the wealthy were able to escape conscription and put their money abroad. While economic elites reportedly took $35 billion out of the country since the start of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnky not only refused to expropriate and nationalize their assets but, instead, chose to impose harsh anti-labor measures on workers and unions and make further cuts to social services using the national emergency laws. The fight to ensure Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination is not just about removing all Russian troops from Ukrainian territory and allowing the Ukrainian people to decide their own fate without fears of coups and invasions. It also has to do with stopping and reversing the encroachment of Western corporate and US imperial interests that seek to further exploit the country. However, prospects for this are growing darker by the day as President Donald Trump’s new administration engages in bilateral negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and without Zelensky, to end the war, all while suggesting that the US take ownership of 50% of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. Solidarity with working people in Ukraine and their fight against Russia’s invasion never meant support for the Zelensky government, the US government, NATO, or the designs of rival imperial powers, but lack of international solidarity has left Ukrainians in an impossible situation.   This is Solidarity without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network, in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network, hosted by Blanca Missé and Ashley Smith. In Episode One of this series, released on the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we analyze the current state of the war and the last three years from an internationalist, working-class perspective. Cohost Blanca Missé speaks with Denys Bondar, a native of Ukraine, professor of Physics at Tulane University, and one of the coordinators of the Ukraine Solidarity Network in the US; and Hanna Perekhoda, a researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, a founder of the Switzerland-based Committee of Solidarity with the Ukrainian People and Russian Opponents of the War, and an ethnic Ukrainian who grew up in the Russian-speaking the city of Donetsk in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine.Credits:Hosted by Blanca MisséPre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Blanca Missé, Kayla Rivara, Ashley SmithStudio Production: David HebdenAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork

As we cross the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia has launched its largest drone attack in Ukraine to date, and Israeli tanks are rolling into the Occupied West Bank for the first time in decades. US President Donald Trump has issued repeated threats to “take over” and “own” Gaza, “buy” Greenland, and “absorb” Canada as the “51st state.” Even the fiction of the US-enforced “rules-based international order” has collapsed, and a new, terrifying world disorder—one that more closely resembles the geopolitical periods preceding World Wars I and II—is emerging. This new era is characterized by heightening inter-imperial conflicts between great powers like the US, Russia, and China, and emerging regional powers, the rise of far-right and authoritarian governments around the globe, and the accelerated drive of those governments to annex and take over other countries, deny their populations the right to self-determination, and plunder their resources. But this tectonic shift in 21st-century geopolitics has, in turn, provoked growing struggles for self-determination and national liberation. From Palestine to Puerto Rico, from Ukraine to Xinjiang, how can working-class people in the United States and beyond fight for a different future and an alternative world order founded not on imperial conquest, war, and capitalist domination, but on solidarity without exception among all poor, working-class, and oppressed peoples who yearn to live freely and peacefully? This is Solidarity Without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network, in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network, hosted by Blanca Missé and Ashley Smith. In the inaugural episode of this series, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joins Missé and Smith to dissect how the world order has changed in the three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and how the simultaneous unfolding of the war in Ukraine and Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Palestine has revealed both the centrality of anti-occupation struggles for self-determination in the 21st century, and the need for global working-class solidarity with all oppressed peoples waging those struggles.Credits:Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Blanca Missé, Kayla Rivara, Ashley SmithStudio Production: David HebdenAudio Post-Production: Alina NehlichMusic Credits: Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk |https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusicMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/solidarity-without-exception--6535723/support.Become a member and join the Solidarity Without Exception Supporters Club today!Follow Solidarity Without Exception on Spotify or Apple PodcastsSign up for our newsletterFollow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetwork