The Mamdani Peace Dividend?

On March 5, 1770, a crowd of Boston colonists gathered to protest British soldiers quartered among them, taxing them without parliamentary representation, occupying their city like a conquered territory. When the redcoats fired, the first man to fall was Crispus Attucks—a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent, possibly an escaped slave, certainly a man for whom the freedoms being contested that night would not be extended. Certainly, Crispus Attucks did not embody the founding myth that the commemorative plates portray. The Boston Massacre ignited the spark of revolution, leading to the eventual emergence of the First Amendment. James Madison, refusing to include it in the Constitution and threatening to withhold his signature until a Bill of Rights was enshrined, enshrined the principle that press freedom and the right to protest were not privileges the state could revoke on a bad morning but foundations without which the republic had no legitimate claim to its name. History is not short on irony. However, its humorous approach has consistently sparked controversy.

Over two and a half centuries later, the empire that those documents aimed to scrutinize has evolved into the very entity they rebelled against. Of course, the point lies in the systematic elimination of journalists who could document this transformation. Nick Turse’s Costs of War report, “News Graveyards: How Dangers to War Reporters Endanger the World,” published by Brown University’s Watson Institute, makes the case with damning specificity: the war in Gaza has killed more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s, and Afghanistan combined. By 2024, a journalist or media worker was being killed every three days. Not collateral damage. Policy. The Israeli government banned foreign reporters from Gaza and then made sure there would be fewer Palestinian reporters left to say so.

Chris Hedges has extensive experience in wars, allowing him to distinguish between performance and reality. His new documentary, Resistance 101: Forging a New Movement for Palestine in Italy, unequivocally captures this reality. He finds the dock workers of Genoa and other Italian port cities who have settled on the only accountability left when courts acquit, governments fund, and cameras look away: refusing to load the ships. The Italian workers are not just holding signs outside a corporate headquarters. They are costing someone money, which in this world is the only language that gets a reply. However, the response they receive is often a frenzied and aggressive one.

The Forward recently reported that by fall 2024, 43% of Americans aged 18 to 29 described Hamas as a “resistance group” rather than a terrorist organization—nearly double the rate among Americans over 30. Cue the editorial panic, the think-piece hand-wringing, and the solemn Senate hearings about what went wrong with the kids. What went wrong was that they watched the uncut footage of Gaza burning on their phones, without the presence of a network anchor to clarify what they were actually seeing, and subsequently formed their own conclusions. The American state has managed its image through information control for so long that it forgot what happens when the management breaks down. In Gaza it broke down hard: too many journalists The killing was too visible, too much footage was distributed too widely, and the entire narrative apparatus strained past the point of anyone believing it.

In early 2025, the New York Attorney General investigated Betar US—an organization labeled extremist even by the Anti-Defamation League, which is not exactly known for radical solidarity—and found that its members had been approaching people perceived as Muslim or pro-Palestinian and attempting to force pages on them. The gesture was explicit: a reference to the Israeli operation that used explosive pagers to kill Hezbollah members in Lebanon, a wink-and-nod death threat pressed into your palm on a public street. One Betar member shoved it into the pocket of a Jewish academic. Another followed hijab-wearing students across a university campus. The group had threatened to put Jewish activists on lists to be shared with foreign authorities—the kind of thing that got many Europeans killed in the 1930s and 40s, in case the historical rhyme is too faint to hear. This is fascism at the smoldering stage, before it goes fully thermal.

The present is precisely the moment when journalism should take on the role of Paul Revere. This is not the mythologized Revere of the commemorative plates, but the real Revere—riding hard in the dark, warning people that the threat is real, moving, and closer than they think. Journalism’s job is to name the pager for what it is, to count the journalists killed in Gaza, to connect the Espionage Act prosecution of Assange to the RICO charge against the bail fundraiser to the bomb on the press tent—and to do it loudly enough that someone in the back can hear. When the ride goes silent, the redcoats are already in the kitchen. Paul Revere did not wait for institutional permission. Neither did the Italian dockworkers. Interestingly, Crispus Attucks also did not wait for institutional permission.

This leads us to Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, Muslim, and, as of 2025, the mayor of New York City, who was elected on the platform of free buses, universal childcare, a rent freeze, and city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani, who confronted ICE director Tom Homan on the floor of the Albany legislature with “Do you believe in the First Amendment?”, represents something the peace dividend crowd has been waiting thirty years to see: a domestic politics that asks what the war money could have bought instead. Brown University’s Costs of War Project puts the post-9/11 tab at a trillion. Eight trillion dollars. That’s a lot of free buses. A lot of childcare. A lot of everything that Lockheed Martin and Raytheon lack, and that the weapons being offloaded at Italian docks will never be.

Hedges wants to believe the Italian way spreads. The dock workers are a model, not a promise. However, Mamdani’s victory, the generational shift reflected in the Forward survey, and the workers standing at the gangplank with their arms folded are convergences, not coincidences—the same refusal manifested in different cities under different clothing. The official story has collapsed. The institutions have failed. What remains is conscience, which turns out to be surprisingly durable. Crispus Attucks was a dockworker too—a sailor and rope-maker who showed up one night in King Street because the occupation had become intolerable and somebody had to go first. He was the first to fall. Those who followed him brought about profound, beautiful, and incomplete changes to the world, which is the only way change ever occurs. We are not at 1770. But we are closer to it than the people running the beeper campaign would like us to think.

Chris Hedges spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, serving as Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkans Bureau Chief, and was part of the team awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. An ordained Presbyterian minister who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, he is the author of fourteen books. His most recent, A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine (2025), draws on seven years of reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.

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