A lively discussion took place during the Q&A at a May 31 public meeting in London hosted by the Socialist Equality Party (UK), “Trump’s war on free speech: The case of Momodou Taal.”

Taal, a British-Gambian dual citizen and student at Cornell University, was threatened with deportation for protesting the Gaza genocide. He was forced to leave the US to escape detention by ICE officers after he challenged the legality of executive orders by Trump banning pro-Palestinian protest and speech by international students.

Taal spoke about his case alongside his lawyer, Eric Lee. They were joined on the platform by Joseph Kishore, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States.

The discussion included contributions from students at University of London’s SOAS, who have faced state repression for opposing the Gaza genocide. Additional audience questions and contributions were responded to by the speakers.

Responding to a question about the “unitary executive theory” and how this relates to US President Donald Trump’s executive decrees, Eric Lee explained that it asserts that the president “basically has total authority, at least over the executive branch” and was bound up with broader arguments that the executive branch is the most important branch of government.

Former justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Antonin Scalia, “was writing memos about this in the ’80s internally… and now there’s an audience for it.” Lee said the theory states that, “The president is in charge of every single decision that every executive agency makes, and he has total discretion to do whatever he wants.”

It was based on the theories of Nazi judge, Carl Schmitt, “It’s very consciously Schmittian… Stephen Miller is somebody who studied fascism in Germany. To the extent he knows anything about anything, it’s how Hitler came to power because he’s trying to do it again.”

Replying to a question from a SOAS student about the influence of liberal Zionism, Momodou Taal replied, “We cannot allow people to have a revisionist take on history. And Zionism, from its inception, you have documents from the 1920s where they talk about colonizing the land of Palestine. Whether it’s Zionism, liberal Zionism, left-wing Zionism, any form of Zionism, it is what it is… we see what the mainstream media is doing today by making Netanyahu, the Likud party, Smotrich and the four bad guys, so then you can get rid of them and Israel continues as an expansionist state.

“The problem is Israel. The problem is not Netanyahu. The problem is not the Likud party. The problem is the Zionist entity… We’re fighting fascism. I don’t think people should be afraid to fight that line.”

Responding to students from SOAS, who explained the extent of repression they have faced, including a student being charged under the Terrorism Act for supporting the right of the Palestinian people to resist the genocide, Lee called for the broadest mobilisation in their defence.

He stated, “It’s not possible to fight these policies in just one country. This is part of a broader global effort by the governments of the major powers to suppress all opposition to their client state, Israel, and its genocide against the population of Palestine… once you lose the right to speak freely and to criticize the government, and to criticize a foreign government, there are no other rights… Everything flows from that. That’s the reason why it’s the First Amendment in the United States, in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution.”

SEP UK National Secretary Chris Marsden replied, “Look at the similarities between Starmer and Trump. It’s a big shock to a lot of people, even those who had no time for the Labour Party… just how right-wing this government is. People have been languishing in jail for 10 months, waiting for a date in court which may not come for a long time, and they’re facing 14-year prison sentences.”

Recalling Starmer’s role as Director of Public Prosecutions in the persecution and imprisonment of Julian Assange, Marsden said: “Since he’s come to power, Starmer’s carried out the biggest forced march to the right of any political party in Europe without exception.

“We’ve said the Starmer Labour government is the mechanism through which the right-wing shift that we’ve seen in America under Trump is being carried out here in the UK. And the working class is on a collision course with the Labour Party. Now the issue then is, can it be pressurised? Can it be pushed back to the left?”

Marsden noted a recent Guardian column by Labour “left” John McDonnell, “He said he’s suddenly discovered that we’re in danger of losing the Labour Party to Keir Starmer! Well, excuse me, this is a man [McDonnell] who became an MP in 1997 under Tony Blair, and he’s been pretending to be in opposition to the right-wing ever since.

“This is a man who, under Jeremy Corbyn, held the second position in the party as the shadow chancellor and spent his time courting the City of London, and who, along with Corbyn, allowed his own supporters to be witch-hunted out of the party as antisemites, and adapted themselves wholesale to the Blairites and then handed the party over to Keir Starmer.

“There is no possibility of reforming this party. It is on a warpath against the working class. It’s the most jingoistic, anti-migrant tendency imaginable. And it’s fighting to keep the pot boiling on war in Ukraine, and continues to defend Israel’s genocide up to and including going to court to deny that one is taking place… The issue is to build a new workers’ party. And we say, unambiguously, that party is the Socialist Equality Party.”

An audience member asked about the emphasis on anti-Marxist concepts like identity politics in the universities, which are used to divide the working class, “What is the best strategy for convincing youth and students that they must unite with the working class to fight genocide and war?”

Momodou Taal replied, “When we invoke the term identity politics, in its inception, it was not what it is today. It was born out of the likes of the Combahee River Collective and other black radical feminists… It isn’t the liberal co-option of today where it means that you must privilege identity over everything else and not pay attention to class. What it meant in its inception was that regardless of your identity, it doesn’t mean you cannot have solidarity.”

Kishore replied, “I think one might argue that just as there’s no liberal Zionism, there isn’t a progressive identity politics.”

Kishore quoted from Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin Morgan, that the Combahee River Collective “asserted that ‘I haven’t the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfil since they are the very embodiment of reactionary vested interest power.’

“This was in 1974, a period of immense class struggle in the United States, including enormous battles in the coal mines, which were predominantly white men involved in major class battles. And 1974 was the high point of the class struggle in post-war America in terms of the number of strikes and the number of workers on strike. 1978 saw major coal strikes.

“Then the 1980s was a period of the systematic demobilization of working class struggle by the trade unions. And a certain conception developed, which our politics is very opposed to, that the working class is reactionary, that it’s not the capitalist class that is ruling, it’s white men… And it became a mechanism for denying the fundamental role of class, of class oppression.

“That’s the problem. You saw this develop with the George Floyd protests, mass demonstrations, motivated by opposition to police violence.

“There was certainly racism involved. It’s not a question of denying that. The police are packed with racists and Trump appeals to that, and they utilize racism. But police violence is a class question. And there were protests involving people of many different racial ethnicities against horrific police killings, which have escalated over the past four years under Biden.

“But it became a question not of the police as an instrument of the state, but the police as an embodiment of white rule. And that included white workers… And for us, the issue is class.”

The Combahee River Collective also “argued that ‘the most profound and potentially most radical politics comes directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.’ Well, what have we all been doing for the past year? Or what have masses, millions of people all over the world been protesting, except in opposition to the oppression of another population, the Palestinians? Millions. Not because somehow they’re identifying their identity—racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, or anything else— but because they recognize that the repression of the Palestinians, the murder of the Palestinians is part of a common oppression of the whole imperialist capitalist system. And that’s what has to be fought.”

Lee explained the fight being waged by the International Committee of the Fourth International for the release and freedom of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who has “been rotting in a jail in rural Ukraine for over a year because he opposes both the Ukrainian government and the Russian government, and because he’s not buying into the claim that waging a nuclear war against Russia over who gets possession of the minerals of the Donbas is something that socialists should support.”

Public opposition to Bogdan’s imprisonment by groups such as the SOAS students and others facing state repression was vital. “The silence of the media on this free speech case, which is of fundamental importance on an international level, has got to be broken down,” said Lee.