The North Carolina Green Party condemns in the strongest possible terms the violent repression of university protests across the nation, and especially at UNC-Chapel Hill. Students protesting at universities are exercising their right to public dissent from the foreign and domestic policies that oppress people both within and outside of the United States

College administrations that would rather see students jailed and expelled than expose their complicity with the imperialism of the United States, which means their complicity in war, rape, and genocide across the Global South, Africa, and the Middle East. The arrest and expulsion of students follows a long history of government suppression of ideas inconsistent with the aims of US imperialism. Neither of the major political parties is innocent in this repression, and they are simply following in the footsteps of elected officials who used military force and hired thugs to break strikes, set dogs on Civil Rights protestors in Alabama, and shoot students to death at Kent State. US police forces, many trained by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), are poised to recreate that brutality on students protesting the genocidal behavior of the IOF in Gaza. 

Today's students are recognizing, as did the students at Kent State, that Martin Luther King, Jr was right in his speech at the Riverside Church in 1967. He called out the United States government as the biggest purveyor of violence in the world. King connected the Vietnam War with labor oppression, economic inequality and poverty. Fifty-six years later, the United States now accounts for 40% of all worldwide military spending, and it remains as unable to address poverty and economic justice as when King spoke one year before his assassination. 

The North Carolina Green Party remains committed to the cause of Palestine, and demands, along with the courageous students and protestors across the country, that the US “disclose and divest”. Define how money invested in many companies across the US and the world, especially the weapons industry, helps dictators and fascists across the globe suppress their populations and perform ethnic cleansing. Divest these funds from those companies in order to start the US on a path to humanity instead of oppression, direct democracy instead of our gamed and ineffective farce of “representation”, and the refusal to see the money and resources only in light of personal profit for the economic elites.