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Kevin McGuire

@kevmcguire.bsky.social
118 followers 8 following 2.4K posts

Marxist historian, political activist, revolutionary journalist

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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The only social force capable of carrying it out is the working class, organized independently of both big business parties and fighting to reorganize healthcare on the basis of social need.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Those defenses will not be restored by the state that is dismantling them. Their reconstruction is a political task.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The woman who died at Hershey refused nothing. She died because the social defenses that stood between her and a preventable virus had been taken apart over decades, and because the agency charged with rebuilding them is now run by officials who count that destruction as an achievement.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The federal government is building an apparatus to find injuries compensated once in a million doses, in the same months in which it has declined to count at least three of Pennsylvania’s five measles-associated deaths.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Kennedy built a career on the claim that vaccines injure children, and the destruction of public health is the conscious aim of the administration he serves.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The anti-vaccine movement is a reactionary tendency fostered by sections of the ruling class, and the working class must oppose it.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The collapse of confidence in vaccination has been cultivated from the top, by a fascistic right that spread anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and now directs federal health policy.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
www.wsws.org/en/articles/... The measles vaccine is safe and effective, and mass immunization is an elementary requirement of public health and of the self-defense of the working class.
wsws.org
As measles kills a fifth Pennsylvanian, New York declares a state of emergency
A 20-year-old leukemia patient who could not be vaccinated is among Pennsylvania’s five measles-associated deaths. The CDC still acknowledges only two deaths nationally, and New York has declared a di...
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The struggle against war, dictatorship, and state killing is inseparable from the fight for world socialism, which will end the subordination of human life to private profit and lay the foundations for a new and higher culture.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Only the working class, in the United States and internationally, acting independently of every capitalist party, can halt the descent into fascist barbarism.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Its turn to such methods expresses the historic crisis of world capitalism, which can no longer reconcile the wealth of a handful of billionaires with democratic forms of rule.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The firing squad at Fort Hood captures the reactionary essence of the American ruling oligarchy, whose counterparts from Germany to Chile are cultivating the same fascistic forces.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
As of this writing, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani have said nothing on the planned execution. True to form, they will wait until enough right-wing figures have made opposition respectable before adding their voices to it.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
and even a Fort Hood survivor have criticized the livestream, and Vice President JD Vance has suggested it may not happen. Their concern is for the reputation of the military and the stability of the state, and nearly all of them defend the death penalty.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
This sentiment has compelled sections of the political establishment to speak out. Republican and Democratic lawmakers, a former Army judge advocate, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops,
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The plan to livestream Hasan’s execution has met with broad popular revulsion and been denounced across social media. Support for the death penalty itself has fallen to 52 percent, near its lowest level in half a century.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The state that waged those wars now makes the deaths of its own soldiers the pretext for a public killing, amid a frenzy of executions across the country. Last week, Tennessee injected Christa Pike with 2 lethal doses of pentobarbital, which failed to kill her and left her arms burned and blistered.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Hasan’s killing of 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, was a reactionary crime. But as the World Socialist Web Site explained in 2009, the massacre was collateral damage from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which directly killed nearly a million people.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Hegseth’s livestream is the lynching postcard of the internet age, with the state itself behind the camera.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
In Waco, some 60 miles from Fort Hood, a mob of over 10,000 tortured and burned alive Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old Black farmhand, on May 15, 1916. A local photographer sold pictures of the burning as postcards.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The last public execution in the United States, the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, in Owensboro, Kentucky, drew up to 20,000 spectators.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Trump’s repeated threats to annihilate Iran’s civilian population are also war crimes. The execution of Hasan also draws on the darkest traditions of the American Jim Crow South.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
In the first attack, after Hegseth reportedly ordered that no one survive, a second missile killed two men clinging to the burning wreckage. The war on Iran is a war of aggression, what the Nuremberg tribunal identified as “the supreme international crime.”
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The men overseeing Hasan’s execution are unindicted war criminals. Since September 2025, on Hegseth’s orders, the military has blown up boats in the Caribbean, killing more than 200 people without trial.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The Army of 1945, whose soldiers believed they were fighting fascism, kept the killing hidden. Hegseth, who models himself on Himmler, wants the world to watch.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The Army told Slovik’s wife only that he had died in the European theater, and the truth emerged with William Bradford Huie’s 1954 book, made into a film in 1974.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Even the one American soldier shot for desertion in World War II, Private Eddie Slovik, was executed in secret. A firing squad from his own regiment killed him in France on January 31, 1945, after General Dwight Eisenhower approved the sentence amid the Battle of the Bulge.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
An administration preparing to turn the military against the population is showing every soldier what awaits those who refuse its orders, and the population what awaits those who oppose its fascistic policies.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, one by going overboard, yet Hegseth dismissed reports of conditions aboard as “completely misrepresented,” and Trump declared the deployment “not nearly long enough.”
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Regimes resort to exemplary executions when their armies begin to break. Hegseth gave his interview aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it returned from a 321-day deployment in the war against Iran, a tour he had twice extended.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 32 percent, the lowest of either of his terms, and fewer than three in ten approve of his war on Iran. It is precisely because the administration lacks popular support that it is turning to the armed forces.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Trump, Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and others in the regime are fascists who aspire to copy Hitler, but they are not yet in a position to do so. They confront mass opposition to their policies and their wars.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The aim is to bind the soldiers to the regime through complicity and to select and cultivate within the military a layer prepared to carry out such work.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
His firing squad will be made up not of a professional executioner but of ordinary soldiers, ordered to shoot a paralyzed man before a mass audience.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Hegseth is a product of the all-volunteer military, a force increasingly insulated from the civilian population, and he aims to widen that divide.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
As Secretary of War, Hegseth has made a “warrior ethos” the watchword of his tenure and purged generals and the military’s top lawyers.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Hegseth’s search for such men did not begin at the Pentagon. In 2019, as a Fox News host, he lobbied Trump to pardon soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, insisting they were “not war criminals, they’re warriors.” Trump obliged.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The Nazis built Himmler’s Waffen-SS as a party army outside the Wehrmacht, sworn personally to Hitler and selected for ideological reliability.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
But Hegseth is no isolated psychopath. He is the Secretary of War, chosen by Trump and confirmed by the Senate. Hegseth is modeling himself on Heinrich Himmler, with Trump as his Führer.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
At a livestreamed Pentagon prayer service... he asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Hegseth would have been at home in the Nazi battalions that machine-gunned partisans and Jews across occupied Eastern Europe, and he would have relished the work.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
His tattoos include the neo-fascist slogan “Deus Vult,” Latin for “God wills it,” the battle cry of the medieval Crusades against the Muslim world.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The man staging the public execution is a sadist. Hegseth belongs to a church network co-founded by the self-described Christian nationalist Doug Wilson.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Its broader purpose is to brutalize the population and implicate it in state killing.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
It is staged, first, for the most backward and degraded layers of American society, whom Trump cultivates at rallies that have sunk to new lows, if that were possible. Speaking in San Antonio on Wednesday, Trump boasted to the crowd that “we are going to deliver final justice to an evil killer.”
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
while the Nazi occupiers carried out mass public hangings across Poland and the Soviet Union, photographed and circulated as warnings. That is the “mentality” Hegseth admires and seeks to emulate.
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The US Army of that war hanged most of the soldiers it executed, many of them at the hands of a single Army hangman, and rarely used the firing squad. Hitler’s Wehrmacht relied on the firing squad to enforce obedience, shooting over 18,000 of its own soldiers,
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
www.wsws.org/en/articles/... With Trump’s approval, Hegseth chose the unorthodox killing method of the firing squad, stating, “Well I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II.”
wsws.org
Hegseth’s plan to livestream an execution and the fascist barbarism of the ruling class
The announcement by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that the Pentagon will livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan marks a new stage in the descent of the American state into fascistic barb...
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
www.peoplesworld.org/article/trum...
peoplesworld.org
Trump giving seniors $90 checks to help with Medicare costs ahead of midterms
For further reading:  Democrats plan to add vision, hearing, dental to Medicare As rural hospitals disappear, nurses say Medicare for All is only hope Warning: Republicans hiding plan to slash $491 bi...
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
www.wsws.org/en/articles/...
wsws.org
White House discussed plans to attack Iran before elections
The Trump administration is preparing a major new bombing campaign against Iran, according to reports published Wednesday and Thursday by The Atlantic, Axios, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal and the...
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Kevin McGuire @kevmcguire.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
www.wsws.org/en/articles/...
wsws.org
US economy and Wall Street increasingly dependent on AI amid concerns over circularity
It has been estimated that investment in AI will total $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032 and that “never before has the US economy been so dependent on the build-out of a single industry.”
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