PallasRiot

Autonomy and liberation without concession.

Transphobia is patriarchy, Marxism-Leninism is spicy liberalism, analysis is not advocacy, I have no patience for boneheaded contrarianism.

WARNING: I am extremely sparing with the Content Warning feature. I use it pretty much exclusively for the most graphic things and as required by moderators. I have firsthand experience that CWs lead to people who would like to read things not seeing them and have found the overall effect to be mostly negative. I discuss politics, bodily autonomy issues, queer issues, and all sorts of difficult, messy, sometimes depressing but important topics. I do not believe that these topics should be censored. There are no hard feelings whatsoever if you would prefer to mute or block me to not see my content. I will always give consideration to requests to CW something but in the majority of cases will not do so.

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2026-08-18T12:24:41Z

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Last Notes

2026-09-11 12:13:58 UTC

25 years later it continues to be more and more clear that al-Qaeda was wildly successful and they really did unrecoverable damage to the US, effectively hastening the political destruction of the world's foremost superpower. The politics of fear and authoritarianism that sprung up like weeds in the wake of the attack has only grown more dire over time, and now no one can argue that the US hasn't been diminished and humiliated as a result. Mass surveillance, politically active militarized police, and the politics of white supremacy have all grown fat and strong on the perpetual insecure anxiety of the American psyche.

2026-08-28 13:44:18 UTC

Ukraine and Palestine together represent like a total collapse of the US liberal and neocon foreign policy ideologies. Fundamentally it's been demonstrated that the US can't reliably function as a safeguard of liberal democracies because the US has been a totally unreliable partner to Ukraine, and it's been shown that the US will act to perpetuate exactly the sort of crimes it accuses other states of through US participation in the genocide in Palestine. Obviously these aren't the first or only examples, but in a very short time the US has totally invalidated the justifications for US militarism, mainly that the US must maintain a global military superpower status in order to preserve the rules based international order and to foster American values around the world.

2026-08-20 14:51:23 UTC

The extent to which TERFs* are deluded about their own politics is impressive, they really have almost no understanding of their position as useful idiots for patriarchy despite the fact that the only parts of their ideology that get any traction are the areas of overlap with explicitly patriarchal movements. When you delve into TERFism within its own movement spaces you find a lot of stuff that literally gets no traction whatsoever in public, despite the incredible overrepresentation of TERFs in media and public discourse. A good example is that it's not uncommon for TERFs analysis to argue that female* non-human animals are part of the same female-specific oppression of female humans, that the oppression of non-human animals is an extension of the oppression of female humans. Not like a related or intersecting thing, but just like a contiguous manifestation of the same female-oppression. Unironically the position of movement TERFism is for the most part that female chickens have more common struggle with female humans than female humans have with trans women(a dichotomy that also doesn't make sense but one thing at a time). But this level of TERF analysis literally never makes it into broad public view despite the positions of power and prominence held by TERFs. The parts of TERFism that make it to the public are just....Catholic gender politics basically.
*TERF here in a very strict sense. I normally use TERF more broadly as the "movement" has ended up being fuzzily connected to the broader far right in ways that dilute it, but for this post I'm being very strict in talking about only the orgs and groups and affinities that base their ideology in a radical feminist analysis. These are not Rowlingite culture warriors who are basically garden variety fascists, these are specifically people whose whole mode of analysis of the world is mediated through a lens of female oppression, everything from capitalism to carnism being just fronts in the war on women.
*female in the TERF sense, which is a bit complicated but can be boiled down to a kind of pseudo-materialist category for anyone that TERFs believe should hypothetically be able to be pregnant or should have been able to be pregnant if reality was different, i.e. infertile cis women. It's nonsensical, biology and society don't work that way, and to the extent that "female" is even a coherent concept, many trans women are female and the majority of trans women have at least some female biological characteristics.

2026-08-19 21:33:45 UTC

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@nprofile…glyx The White Power movement of the 80s and 90s thrived because of the involvement of women: women were crucial to the social club aspects, and were very much active participants in planning, recruiting, etc. Even in the context of rigidly patriarchal extremism, women's involvement was vital to the movement. I think some of the smarter folks in the modern incarnation of extremely aware of that.

2026-08-19 19:32:12 UTC

The grim killing of Jason Arday is especially evil because the guy who got the ball rolling is a smirking little Chris Rufo nazi, and like Rufo he knows he can just say everything out loud and it doesn't matter because the press will do his dirtywork anyway.
It should be actually totally irrelevant if Arday was a plagiarist, because that sounds like a normal ass job issue that could be sorted out at work. It also can't be irrelevant because the smirking nazi is right, and you really can just "he was no angel" a random Black professional at any time and people *will* be very invested in the irrelevant details

2026-08-18 14:27:37 UTC

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"I've been working nights and weekends at the right-wing terrorism factory and all I got was right-wing terrorism"

2026-08-18 14:23:56 UTC

Oh my god that Atlantic essay from Julia Curlee is like the worst thing I've ever read
Like, important and useful in the fight against transphobia, definitely good to spread, but holy shit what a monster

2026-08-18 11:06:31 UTC

It's just objectively true that "woke 1" was an electoral winner for Democrats and a good organizing structure for Americans lol, like all these pundits who have been complaining about defund the police and whatnot are all acting like there weren't historically massive protests that swept the Democrats into power

2026-08-14 23:06:41 UTC

I feel like every couple years there's a story about an amazing innovation that some kid has invented for a science fair or something, and then I just never hear about that thing ever again

2026-08-08 16:58:28 UTC

Farmers will continue to mostly stick by Trump because A) "farmers" in the American context means farm owners, not people who farm and B) what farmers wanted from Trump was to get rid of the anti-slavery reforms that Biden did to the H-2A visa system, and Trump did that.
Biden oversaw the largest anti-slavery enforcement operations in something like a century and introduced a broad swathe of anti-slavery reforms to the H-2A system, a system that exists basically only to create slaves for US farmers which is why farmers hated Biden.

2026-08-05 22:14:57 UTC

People knew Jim Crow was being imposed as it happened, like it wasn't done by ambush. Some of the last remaining elected radical Republicans desperately called on their party to pass voter protections, because it was pretty clear that widespread disenfranchisement was one of the pillars of Jim Crow, alongside pogroms and economic devastation of Black communities. Smart, studious people articulated plainly what was at stake
The emaciated Republican party, tied deeply to robber barons and industrial interests, reduced to simply another club for wealthy elites, was too anemic to rise to the occasion. The necessary laws weren't passed, there was no more vigor to defend Reconstruction, and the US was passed into decades of savage darkness once again, at the hands of the Klan, the Planters, and the Industrialists.

2026-07-27 16:48:01 UTC

A major failure of US liberalism is a total blindness to enemies. Republicans routinely work hard to reduce the political power of their opposition, quite flagrantly: gerrymandering and the suppression of voters of color is an obvious one, but attacks on science and education also degrade important power bases for the Democrats, reducing the money and resources that can be marshalled for the Dems. Passing laws that make life difficult for queer people has the effect of making queer people move and degrading the resources of queer people, again degrading the power of a Dem aligned bloc.
Democrats could very well pursue some weird technocratic stuff that would be hard to recognize as attacks on enemy blocs by most Republicans, but would be very effective. End most farm subsidies, open up community-owned slaughterhouses, legalize direct sales from car manufacturers, regulate supplements into the ground and create massive civil liabilities for supplemental companies, start passing data privacy laws, etc etc. All of these target powerful Republican aligned blocs, blocs that back Republicans basically everywhere at every level, and puts worlds of hurt on them. These are already highly activated blocs, so you're not making news enemies: you're hurting the enemies you have. And this stuff hurts these enemies by protecting the people they're preying on!

2026-07-24 17:42:01 UTC

Important pollinator content!!
Most wasps are way less aggressive than people think and they're doing a lot of important work in our shared environment. A wasp nest that's built directly on your home may unfortunately need removing, but if they're settled a good ways away from you, or you just encounter them foraging, you can just leave them be and they probably won't bother you.

2026-07-18 19:27:41 UTC

I've never felt so vindicated as I have by Mamdani proving my major thesis about how the Biden administration failed prior to October 7th. Before Genocide Joe destroyed his presidency with his love of Mediterranean Rhodesia, his administration was the most progressive since at least LBJ and possibly FDR(the LBJ comparison is especially fitting). The Biden administration accomplishments were a long and varied list of good governance reforms and legitimately powerful, if largely procedural, fixes that were well targeted to help build political power among the coalition of the modern Dems. Stuff that made life materially better for everyday Americans in a lot of ways, many quite significant. And it basically didn't buy them a dram of popularity or an ounce of political capital. Biden's administration was politically limping long before he fully embraced genocide as national policy.
Now we've got the Mamdani administration, which in many ways is almost literally just the good parts of the Biden administration but on a municipal level, doing the same kind of fairly modest reformism with the same kind of focus on good governance and trying to build power among the Dem coalition. But Mamdani is very popular and his administration's policies are seen as hugely appealing, at once innovative and common sense. So what gives? Is Mamdani just so charming and handsome?
Public communication is the answer; Mamdani's video content is the modern fireside chat, which is literally the thing I said over and over the Biden administration was failing to do. You can't just do good things, you need to constantly be telling the public that you're doing good things, what the good things are, and what it means for them. You need to involve the public, and do *non stop* education. You need to act like every single day you're talking to someone who doesn't know literally *anything* about politics or policy, because you are absolutely doing that.

2026-07-16 14:27:30 UTC

Urban liberals: rural conservatives are poor lost lambs, we can return them to the fold if we get a masculine enough dude to send then money for their hospitals
Rural liberals: my conservative neighbors are Biblical demons, all I'm asking of the cities is another Sherman

2026-07-13 14:45:46 UTC

A litmus test for whether a US liberal can be meaningfully ideologically opposed to fascism is whether they use comparisons to the lead up to the Civil War to illustrate what we must avoid.
Fundamentally the Civil War was preferable to the continuation of chattel slavery. Anyone who doesn't start from that position will crumble when push comes to shove.

2026-07-10 19:48:19 UTC

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@nprofile…qkvg Yeah absolutely, but on some level I think it's still worthwhile to attack the justification on it's own terms

2026-07-10 18:29:17 UTC

Hey so I know this is uncomfortable but teenagers see porn and that's fine, it's not a new thing, teenagers have been furtively enjoying porn for as long as porn has existed. The idea that any exposure to any kind of sexual material will damage young people is, frankly, just an excuse to actually harm young people in profoundly domineering ways.

2026-07-06 18:44:55 UTC

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Until the 1900s, most national borders were the same as any other political borders, like the borders of towns, cities, or provinces: administrative boundaries that demarcate administrative authority. Militarized borders were rare and considered despotic, with Tzarist Russia as an example.

2026-07-06 18:36:29 UTC

I am once again reminding you that militarized borders are a modern invention, like a century old. Before the 1900s, "immigration" was just people traveling a place.

2026-07-05 00:03:37 UTC

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Activists spend their whole lives in dangerous toil to make Nazis afraid to march openly. It's not the police or state intelligence or whatever else: it's antifascists. Antifascists infiltrate then, research them, identify them, counteract them, etc. Please for the love of everything good recognize that real people are fighting this fight and have been for decades.

2026-07-05 00:00:44 UTC

US Nazis wear masks because they are afraid of antifascist activists. It's not because they secretly believe that what they're doing is shameful or whatever else, it's because of the constant and vigilant work of antifascists. If at some point they believe they have nothing to fear from antifascists then they will march without masks.

2026-07-01 21:15:30 UTC

As a labor organizer I can't overstate how important the Americans with Disabilities Act is to organized labor. If you have ever gotten your job to cut you some slack because of a physical disability or injury, or a mental health issue, or a learning disability, the ADA is what gave you force of law even if you didn't know it. I've been able to save the jobs of quite a few workers because of the Reasonable Accommodation process of the ADA
The ADA was passed because disparate affinity groups and organizations of disabled people fought tooth and nail to make it so. Activists lead by Patricia "the General" Wright played a hard inside game, lobbying to agencies and legislators and using as much formal electoral muscle as they could leverage, while more direct groups carried out demonstrations like the legendary Capitol Crawl, forcing lawmakers to directly confront them.
Disabled people, as is so often the case with marginalized organizers, fought for everyone while fighting for themselves. It's true that very nearly all of us will be disabled at some point in our lives, but also the ADA is a lifeline and safeguard to dignity for every American throughout their life, no matter how temporary their disability. And so one of the tentpoles of US labor law was built by disabled activists struggling for a better world for all of us while demanding their rightful place in it.
Happy Disability Pride Month, and thank a disability activist for fighting the good fight

2026-07-01 20:19:23 UTC

The Dem right seems to be settling on a line of attack against the DSA and it seems to be "it's actually racist to primary right wing Democrats"

2026-06-29 12:01:36 UTC

European homes aren't weatherized because the kind of society-wide push that makes mass weatherization a reality requires spending that the austerity-obsessed governments of Europe can't stomach. They would rather boil a thousand of their children and elderly every heat wave than spend on making weatherization accessible and prevalent.

2026-06-27 13:26:32 UTC

I wouldn't take a trillion dollars if it meant I had to be Elon Musk

2026-06-22 18:23:35 UTC

Wow it's crazy how much the public hates this prime minister just for being bad at the job, extremely unlikable, having gotten into power via internal party coup, and having been plagued by scandal. People are really going to struggle to explain this one!
~Neoliberal pundits for some reason

2026-06-19 14:01:21 UTC

Slavery remains enshrined in the US Constitution.

2026-06-18 14:13:34 UTC

Increasingly of the opinion that pro nuclear energy sentiment is largely the result of a propaganda campaign by the oligarchs who see it as a path towards eroding regulatory tools that regular people use to fight corporate projects

2026-06-18 12:51:39 UTC

The Trump regime's repressive attack of those 15 activists in Minnesota is horrible and repugnant...
...and pretty pathetic right? Thousands upon thousands of people in Minnesota have been carrying out resistance against the feds, and they can cook up bullshit charges against barely more than a dozen people? Seriously?
Early in the Trump administration an activist (I think Chelsea Manning) commented that the silver lining of all this was that the gutting on US spy institutions might make it harder for the regime to actually carry out effective repression in some ways

2026-06-15 02:13:58 UTC

Every June a bunch of chuds ask "when is straight pride?" and honestly that's a really good question?
How come the straights, the cissies, the allos, etc, don't seem to have any pride whatsoever? They seem pretty content to let us queers fight their battles for them. It doesn't seem to bother them that the government wants to spy on their sex lives and potentially prosecute them for it. It doesn't seem to bother them that their genders are increasingly dictated to them by law, complete with requirements to dress and act certain ways in order to not run afoul of the law. The straights don't even seem to take enough pride in their families to want to fight back against the government staking a claim on the genitals of every child. Queer people fought for medical privacy, for intimate privacy, for the right to dress and act how one wishes, because we queers have enough pride and dignity to fight for this stuff.
So where's the straight pride, why aren't they fighting too?

2026-06-12 19:53:49 UTC

So if there is actually a deal being struck to end the US-Iran war, I will point out that it's actually very normal for an aggressor who lost to pay reparations. The US attacked Iran, and pretty clearly could not achieve its strategic objectives. That's an aggressor who lost.
If a deal looks really imminent we're going to see a lot of Lockheed Liberals trying to scuttle it by saying it's unacceptable weakness from Trump and it's a giveaway for Iran.

2026-06-12 10:35:20 UTC

If nothing else I think the Platner campaign gives us a really good chance of getting some funny twitter exchanges when Republican operatives run their "the Dems are running a Nazi!" stuff and the Nazis in their base are like "sir don't insult our noble struggle for the white race by lumping us in with this gay hipster communist"

2026-06-10 18:49:15 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Hegseth is already making life harder for Catholics and Mormons in the military, we can see the club become smaller and smaller in real time. Anyo

2026-06-09 13:06:36 UTC

So how does the Platner campaign happen?
Progressive election strategists have realized that under current conditions it's actually really hard to succeed with an insurgency campaign, even with a lot of people power, unless you can do fundraising by appealing to a national audience and you get in the race early enough to catch the insiders flat footed. So progressive groups are increasingly trying to do candidate recruitment very early. If you want to do early candidate recruitment, and you're looking for outsider candidates that are less structurally vulnerable to internal party machinery, your options are likely people with no or limited experience in public office. You're going to rely on their presence and connections to other forms of politics: they should be connected to orgs you trust, they should have some kind of organizing experience, they should be involved in active political struggle, etc. Because you can't look at a voting record, you're looking at their other kinds of political engagement.
So progressive electoral activists go to Maine with an eye on the Collins race, and they talk to a bunch of orgs and activists, and Platner is the guy they end up with. He gets brought up by multiple orgs, he's well known in activist circles, people know he shows up, he's charismatic, he's got a compelling personal backstory, the people doing politics on the ground trust him. It's not totally clear what kind of vetting the proto-campaign did, but at this point we know that Platner and his partner volunteered info they thought would be damaging, and the person who was supposed to deal with that stuff ending up being someone with a history of taking corporate money to sabotage progressive causes.
The Platner campaign kicks off way before anyone else, and they focus on organizing, like real on the ground organizing with people actually doing stuff. They help organize with legislators in Maine to force Mills to sign legislation she was trying to quietly kill, they rally to protect new Mainers from ICE, they help with mutual aid work aimed at unhoused Mainera, etc, and this builds a lot of credibility among orgs, so much so that once scandals come out everyone is pretty willing to just meet with Platner and hash it out rather than dropping him.
Meanwhile, as a bunch of candidates are eyeing the Collins race, the DSCC is trying to get Schumer reinforcements. The senate Fight Club is gunning for Schumer, they want him out and they want to break the DSCC. The unpopular and divisive governor of Maine, Janet Mills, doesn't have a lot of positive qualities as a candidate....but she's a staunch ally of Schumer. Over her governorship Mills has managed to anger Maine legislators by routinely killing enough of their legislation in shady backroom deals that many legislators in the state complain that the legislature might as well not exist. They can't rely on any promise from Mills, since she'll just end up meeting with lobbyists and killing bills they have hard lines on. Mills has spent her governorship attacking Indigenous sovereignty, vetoing legislation that would restore treaty rights and routinely undermining what legal rights they do have: it's actually so severe that Mills can't really do in-person events because anywhere she physically goes is swamped in protestors. Mills has made herself an enemy of organized labor, siding with the corporations as all of Maine's traditional industries have been turned into independent contract work and Mainers in those industries have been economically devastated as a result, all while undermining unions. Mills is an incredibly weak candidate, but for the DSCC from their vantage point in DC, everything looks rosy: she's won a statewide race sparring with Republicans, and she's a committed Schumer ally, so good enough.
The DSCC recruits Mills and then pressures other candidates out of the field: pretty much everyone who was thinking of running gets the message that they'll face an extreme uphill battle with political consequences if they don't make room for Mills. There's not a lot of fledgling campaigns that have the infrastructure to take on the party like that, so most of those candidates move over to the governor race. But Platner has already been campaigning for like a year, and once it's clear that it's going to be Platner vs Mills, every group that Mills has wronged lines up against her. Labor, Indigenous groups, etc, they all want to make sure Mills isn't the pick, and they're already familiar with Platner at this point. Similarly, the senate Fight Club has an opportunity to bloody Schumer really badly, and they jump on it. Now, the Platner campaign isn't just being supported by activists and progressive orgs, there's so powerful institutional buy-in.

2026-06-09 01:52:08 UTC

Certainly open to being proven wrong, but my sense is that the latest Platner scandals don't significantly change his polling.
I think basically there's kind of three scandals that actually matter: the totenkopf, the diplomatic security work, and the abuse of his ex. My sense is that for the most part the abuse has basically been processed as more of the same, and wherever folks landed on Platner after the first two is essentially where they end up on the third.
There also the other camp, the people from the Democratic right and the Republicans who are of the opinion that Platner's scandals are actually being pro-Palestinian and anti-oligarch, and they're just looking for ways to damage his campaign.

2026-06-07 17:03:44 UTC

I say this as a non-vegan: anti-vegans are literally the most annoying people on earth

2026-06-04 01:01:46 UTC

Also in today's outrage from the right: apparently Hasan Piker enjoys heterosexual sex. This is scandalous, apparently.
Dawg these people are literally more reactionary than literal witch burners five centuries ago what are we doing

2026-05-30 16:29:10 UTC

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Home ownership is basically the only real wealth that most working people can even vaguely hope to have, and it's a huge deal, right? Like obviously there's a lot more stability in owning versus renting, but also having a big expensive asset lets you access different financial tools. The ability to take out loans backed by your house can mean that even a fairly poor person can potentially take out tens of thousands of dollars of loans on really favorable terms; it opens up some pretty significant possibilities. In a real sense home ownership is what lets a working person actually use some of the kind of financial tools that businesses have.
This means that home owners have an incentive to want property values to go up, which ties their interests with landlords and real estate companies and developers and basically a rogue's gallery of the worst people in society. That also means that home owners end up with incentives to want tax cuts, because if property values go up that means property taxes go up, and suddenly they're being squeezed even though their singular meaningful asset is becoming more valuable.

2026-05-28 12:23:32 UTC

One of the issues with the US' commodified housing market is that property taxes are a vital tax base in the US, so when corporations use property investment as a big casino and drive up property values, the tax hike wipes out impoverished home owners, especially the elderly.

2026-05-22 11:45:52 UTC

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To clarify, the Trump slush fund is being reported as a 2 billion dollar settlement fund, but that's not actually what's in the administration's documents or order. What they're trying to set up is a fund that Trump has control over which draws from the DoJ's settlement funds: those settlement funds are an "ongoing appropriation", meaning it's not a set amount of money that's determined by Congress as part of a budget, but instead Congress lets the DoJ pay for settlements as needed, with not cap. It's an unlimited amount of money.
Trump is setting up a way for unlimited taxpayer money to be spent at his discretion, under his sole control. That's what that is. That turns the US government into Trump's personal treasury, full stop.

2026-05-22 11:40:51 UTC

Genuinely the Trump slush fund is the greatest act of corruption in US history and blows so far past Orban that I'm rethinking my previous analysis that the US is entering competitive authoritarianism, because it's so far into warlord or dictator stuff. If Trump is able to actually carry it out there will be no comparison that can be made to literally any other act of corruption in US history.

2026-05-22 01:00:50 UTC

I haven't kept up with The Boys in years and have no idea what the show has been up to.
However
The only way that an artist knows they're appropriately satirizing fascism is if fascists feel humiliated and disgusted by your depiction of them. And it seems like by that measure the show has really succeeded?

2026-05-20 11:11:20 UTC

There are two kinds of right-wing content creator:
"I am a professional n-word sayer and my life revolves around shakey cell footage of me getting shared around Facebook with links to my GiveSendGo. Please buy my shitcoin."
And
"Western civilization has fallen. Families don't speak to each other. Ba'al fornicates with demons in schools and town halls. We must support Chuck E Cheese for the sake of the risen Christ."

2026-05-19 19:22:21 UTC

There have been Muslims in the US since the founding of the nation.
Many, if not all, of the Muslims who were here at the founding were here because they were trafficked onto this continent. Kidnapped into bondage. Africa is a massive and diverse continent with many religions, but Islam was among the faiths flourishing there during the horrors of the trans Atlantic slave trade.
White supremacists waging a stochastic crusade against our friends and neighbors after their ideological forebears trafficked Muslim people into this land proves what we have always known: white supremacy is a death cult, and they can't be appeased because their only goal is death. You can't meet them in the middle, you can't treat their concerns as real, it's all a facade over the worship of death.

2026-05-13 18:44:06 UTC

Under a fascist regime everyone is a criminal, which is perhaps a truly hopeful and even aspirational thing.
We are all criminal, so not keeping others' secrets risks self-incrimination.
We are all criminal, so giving the authorities anything is never worth it.
We are all criminal, so we all hang together or be hanged together.
We are all criminal.

2026-05-04 16:12:18 UTC

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Anarchists among immigrants provide a strong intellectual, cultural, and organizational infusion to American anarchism and American labor organizing more broadly. Anarchists made a point of organizing among and with every kind of person on all kinds of issues. Anarchist newspapers in German, Czech, Yiddish, and more circulated broadly. In fact, the depiction of anarchist as bearded bomb-throwers likely stems from anti-worker newspapers depicting Johann Most, a German anarchist and polemicist who was so influential in US politics that his visage became the icon of anarchism for generations of liberal critics.
As worker exploitation became more savage, anarchists were increasingly the people most willing to directly resist exploitation. Throughout the 1870s, workers in general found their efforts for labor relief frustrated at every turn. Strikes were met with incredible violence from private security and the police alike, worker parades and demonstrations faced threats from business owners and court challenges (the first gun control law in the US that went to the Supreme Court was a law restricting the right of working people to form community defense groups with longarms), and voting efforts were defeated by political machines or enacted only toothless laws. Anarchists, with their willingness to engage in direct confrontation, became more appealing than the moderates to many workers: when moderate means are getting you killed the radicals make a lot of sense.
In the early 1880s, union workers pushed their unions to convene meetings to push towards a general strike for an 8 hour work day. May 1st 1886 was picked, giving organizers a couple years to prepare. While many anarchists were initially skeptical it became clear that there was massive support among working people, and anarchists quickly moved to organize for the fight that was wanted. After all, anarchists don't believe in lording over people, so even if the 8 hour day sounded too modest to many anarchists, who were they to tell their fellow workers to pick a different fight?

2026-05-04 15:10:52 UTC

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Throughout the 1860s and 70s states and municipalities pass 8 hour workday laws, but they're largely unenforceable in the face of the increasingly concentrated power of the capitalists. Throughout the US workers organize for their mutual aid and protection, and the bosses respond with security crackdowns, harsher worker conditions, and more union busting. In business districts the small business owners frequently form their own militias to shoot at protesting or parading workers. The Know-Nothings move from a secret society of racist anti-immigration zealots to an important bloc in formal politics. Meanwhile, unions in the US West refuse to organize with Chinese workers, dividing worker power. In the East, unions often refuse to organize with the Irish and Germans. Across all of the US, Black workers are excluded from unions. Even the Marxist International Workingmen's Association splits worker power by insisting that women's struggles be secondary.
In this backdrop, anarchism comes to the fore in American organizing.

2026-05-04 14:49:28 UTC

Tech entrepreneurs run roughshod over their workers to churn out technologies to deskill and displace other workers. Across the nation labor laws stand as increasingly dead letters while forced overtime and gigwork leads to 12-16 hour work days 6-7 days a week. Right-wing paramilitary groups and lone gunmen menace US cities, threatening immigrants and shooting people in "defense" of property. Anti-immigrant sentiment is used as a wedge to expand surveillance and control by the state, with businesses and even churches in many states coming under attack for not aligning with reactionary causes.
It's the mid 1800s, and the fight for the 8 hour work day is heating up.

2026-04-30 20:25:03 UTC

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It is a celebration of the ineffable dignity of the human spirit that refuses to bow to state power, whether that power manifests through the murderous logic of borders, the threat of state strike breakers, the twisted consumption of bodily autonomy for state needs, or whatever else. To be human is to seek liberation, to seek the liberation of all is anarchic, and so May Day reminds us that through anarchism we assert our humanity.

2026-04-30 20:09:30 UTC

May Day memorializes anarchists executed by the state for labor organizing, mostly immigrants. It's a day of solidarity against authoritarianism, to build a united front of the liberatory against the forces of authoritarianism. We must organize alongside and among immigrants, queer folks, people of color, and take every struggle as our own.
Now more than ever we need to build towards robust, unapologetic, and resurgent anarchism. Where there are borders we will erase them. Where there are bosses we will uncrown them. Where there is imperialism we will answer with internationalism.

2026-04-27 18:06:14 UTC

Technology has never, not a single time, been liberatory in and of itself. Every labor saving device will be used to extract more surplus value *unless* organized power can force it to be used to reduce work and increase safety. Every communication technology will be used for mass surveillance and propaganda *unless* organized people force it to be used to share knowledge. Etc etc
When the Radium Girls were suffering awful deaths and industrial medical orgs were fighting to shut down the radium industries, some of the people fighting to keep the factories open were workers and their families who would die faster from poverty than from radiation.
Science and technology aren't sufficient to improve the general welfare on their own

2026-04-14 20:29:12 UTC

One would assume that "if voting could change anything they would make it illegal" would have the corollary "they're illegalizing voting because elections still matter"

2026-04-11 22:34:52 UTC

The US labor movement was heavily driven by anarchism, from the Haymarket Martyrs to the IWW and beyond. It's hard to separate the resistance of the US labor movement from Propaganda of the Deed, which was an influential part of anarchist theory at the time.
People often say that Propaganda of the Deed didn't work, but would union members have physically resisted mine guards and Pinkertons without demonstrations of militancy within the milieu? The actual point of Propaganda of the Deed is to show that the elite aren't untouchable, that the people killing us bleed, that their castles are penetrable, and that these mortal men with their mortal means can in fact be resisted. The labor truce that liberals brokered with the New Deal came out of anarchist-informed radicals with a sense that their enemies weren't untouchable. Propaganda of the Deed can open these mental horizons, as long as we push to organize with the opportunities opened.

2026-04-10 13:34:07 UTC

I think Belle of the Ranch is probably right that if Iran keeps control of the Strait of Hormuz that's got functionally the same deterrence value as having nukes, but frankly even more politically effective because it doesn't come with the negative consequences of being a known nuclear power

2026-04-08 20:32:54 UTC

It's kinda funny how often white supremacist arguments are basically "well a white guy got famous for doing classical music which is basically like me doing classical music if you think about it"

2026-04-05 13:49:03 UTC

It's pretty crazy that Pete Hegseth is avowedly anti-Catholic to the point of open and flagrant anti-Catholic discrimination and that's not a bigger story.
Admittedly also very funny to have Crusader tattoos and be anti-Catholic, like pick a lane lol

2026-04-03 14:12:17 UTC

The basic reason I think it's worthwhile to push back on the "America has always been fascist" talking point is that it creates the impression of a sort of acausal, inevitable present. But America's current fascism has been the culmination of work by a surprisingly small number of groups and people, with plans and goals and means, which often enough we can identify. And that means we can understand it and fight it from a position of understanding.
America's anticorruption laws had to be totally fucked to get here, and they were, on purpose. America's election laws had to be totally fucked to get here, and they were, on purpose. Etc etc. The basic premise of pluralistic democracy embodied by a post Civil Rights era US has been under attack basically since it was born, and if America was always just like this the fascists wouldn't have needed to do all that.
That hardly redeems the many failures and inequities of the US as the height of its democratic health, but we can still sensibly distinguish one thing from another

2026-04-03 09:16:05 UTC

Very good analysis of tankies and their effect on the Western left
https://youtu.be/Dbkkh6GWn5Y

2026-04-02 18:33:05 UTC

I said that Noem's firing was significant because Trump II had a firm "no scalps" policy that they had held onto for like a year. Bondi getting fired pretty well confirms it, Trump's personal capacity to stick to that policy has been shattered.
Minneapolis broke Trump as an administrator and as a man.

2026-04-01 14:19:28 UTC

So the Supreme Court didn't actually rule that conversion torture is constitutionally protected.
It's so much more insane than that.
They ruled that licensed medical professionals have a first amendment right to expression even in the context of professional intervention. So a therapist has a constitutional right to express whatever they want during therapy. Or "therapy" I guess since this functionally renders apeech based therapeutics impossible to regulate?
The implications here are like unimaginable. If a doctor anywhere in the country decided to start telling patients that their problems are caused by ghosts in their blood and they must repent by consuming a pound of Chex Mix every hour, there's a real question now if that's constitutionally protected speech. That doctor may be protected from consequences to their license. More realistically, if a doctor tells a patient that them being fat is a moral failing, or a therapist tells a patient that being dead would be better than being an atheist, those are potentially constitutionally protected speech.

2026-03-30 20:11:03 UTC

We've got to defeat transphobia but in the nearish term I think maybe a *little* transphobia is useful. You know like there's a whole cohort of cishet dudes who really want pathologically submissive women who dress like 50s house wives with crushing self esteem issues, and the fact they're not willing to date trans women is a blessing tbh.

2026-03-26 02:33:32 UTC

Regular reminder that if you send proof of canceling your NYT subscription to Current Affairs they'll give you a free year subscription to their much better publication

2026-03-25 10:52:04 UTC

For years and years I've tried to convince people that the rich are literally stupider than average and I want to thank Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen for making that inarguable

2026-03-22 12:58:33 UTC

Robert Mueller's cowardice and ineptitude makes a lot of sense when you learn that he built his life around chasing the high he got from butchering Vietnamese resistance fighters when he was a kid

2026-03-08 16:41:35 UTC

Jesus Christ, apparently Nancy Mace wrote the bill that would have made the records of sexual misconduct in congress public, and she did such a slapdash job that it would have *legally required* doxxing victims. There's literally no depths that woman won't sink to

2026-03-07 19:57:20 UTC

Very sharp analysis of the NYT from Lily Alexandre, really worth a listen
https://youtu.be/ztQJ7XGuPhc?si=R3dmIjHB6UmGHlo2

2026-03-04 19:38:03 UTC

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And I saw folks arguing recently that it's justified for some people to wear Meta glasses because of their disability and like...I'm sorry but if that's you I think you need to know you're a rube. Every single time these tech barons invent a new perversion to rob people with they argue it will help disabled people. Not only does it never work out but also none of these tech companies bother doing even basic things to accommodate disability. You really want to argue that disabled people should be subjected to Zuckerberg's panopticon? For the sake of what poorly put together bullshit exactly?
Tbh at some point if you're arguing that the tech barons are helping disabled people I kind of suspect you just don't care for disabled people very much. Please take to heart that this is always a scam argument.

2026-03-04 18:46:51 UTC

When I go to union actions it's pretty reliable that retirees will show up. It's pretty reliable that they're the most radical too. I've seen squeamish, fence sitting local executive board members get shocked into silence by retired union guys very seriously suggesting getting into fights with cops on the picket line.
#nevent1q…z7hl

2026-03-04 18:27:10 UTC

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If you've gone to the bathroom wearing Meta glasses chances are that some desperately poor worker in India or Africa has been subjected to footage of your junk.
I don't know man I think wearing those things is a moral crime without excuse and the creation of them is the sort of evil that should see everyone involved formally exiled from the human race and interred living into the tainted chasms below Yucca Mountain.

2026-03-04 18:16:10 UTC

Hey so like we all know that everything those Meta glasses see gets sorted through by sweatshop workers right?

2026-03-03 12:57:11 UTC

It turns out that blowing up an 86 year old man with likely terminal cancer who chose not to go into hiding when threatened with assassination isn't a genius move and doesn't lead to the kind of instability that Trump thought. Tbh this is probably a huge gift to a regime that has been struggling to deal with decades of organizing and resistance from the Iranian people. A frail old man dying from cancer would have provided opportunities for resistance, but a courageous martyr dying at his post at the ends of the most powerful empire in history does the exact opposite.

2026-03-03 01:10:57 UTC

Undoubtedly Hegseth is nervously typing "are wars hard?" into unsecured ChatGPT on his personal phone right now

2026-03-02 15:31:30 UTC

Journalism appears to have some sort of autoimmune disorder where whenever some outlet gets caught acting extremely unethically and without regard for truth a bunch of journalists go on the offense against whoever pointed out the issue

2026-03-02 01:46:42 UTC

The Iranian regime is evil but rational. Throughout a few years of consistent aggression from the US and Israel they've been very measured in their responses and very specific about what signals they want to send with retaliatory strikes and then taking off ramps. I worry what happens if they conclude the US regime isn't rational.

2026-03-01 20:24:41 UTC

There's not many """leftists""" who will argue that Ireland should be ruled by the Brits because the Brits are the dominant regional power. They will not say that it was a mistake for other nations to lend support to the Irish independence movement. Similarly there are few nominal leftists that will argue that the US was *too* supportive of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
So when some of these so-called leftists argue that Taiwan should rightfully be controlled by China and any kind of international effort to prevent that is inherently right-wing you should be skeptical of how they reached that conclusion that's so inconsistent with other beliefs they profess.

2026-03-01 15:01:32 UTC

Trump has robbed the Iranian people of the possibility of tearing Khamenei apart bodily after overthrowing him, and has instead turned him into a martyr.

2026-03-01 06:50:22 UTC

Someone should probably explain to Hasan Piker that either nations will seek out security partners or they'll try to get nukes, and also that appeasement doesn't work.

2026-03-01 00:09:10 UTC

Have any even vaguely credible sources said that Khamenei is dead?

2026-02-28 14:20:57 UTC

Trump is obsessed with the idea of the "short successful wars" that the US carried out in the late 1800s, the era that he considers to be America's political golden age. The series of imperialist smash and grab operations turned the US from a continental empire to a European style colonial power, with colonial holdings abroad. To Trump's mind these wars also glued together the US polities and facilitated the supremacy of the robber barons.
This is one of the many problems with Trump not facing sufficient consequences for Venezuela: he feels he succeeded wildly and the world let him do it so he has every reason to keep doing it. Appeasement once again doesn't work. He is ideologically committed to war, or maybe libidinally committed. He has spent his entire life getting want he wants by simply taking it and then seeing if anyone can make him suffer. For him there is no difference between stealing the labor of contractors, forcing himself sexually on children, or undertaking an illegal war, because these are simply all things he wants to do and has the power to do and people aren't stopping him.

2026-02-27 20:07:07 UTC

Do you ever think about how the US government spent a huge amount of effort hiding the rich history of anarchism in the US and abroad and then readily embraced Leninism as the defining form of socialism?

2026-02-27 15:12:02 UTC

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@nprofile…l2dj It constantly amazes me how every single US cop is somehow more bloodthirsty and fragile than the literal monarchist colonial gendarmie that is constantly committing brazen murders of indigenous people up north.

2026-02-27 11:45:50 UTC

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You may hate cops now but when you're in trouble who is going to beat up your kids, run a propaganda campaign about how scary and ethnic they are, and demand that merry-making be outlawed like characters from the Scarlet Letter? You ever think about that punk?

2026-02-27 11:43:59 UTC

*Amazing* story out of NYC:
Cops go to a big public snowball fight, immediately the cops act like cops and start threatening people, menacing them with weapons, etc. The public snowballs the cops, everyone is still having a fun time. Cops freak out, get even more violent, the crowd starts concertedly snowballing them. Cops leave under the constant snowballs, tails between their legs because even they know they can't shoot someone for this.
Cops have now had a multi-day screaming crying snotty public breakdown demanding arrests and prosecutions, they're calling it assault, they're saying officers were hospitalized. The pig union is giving this the full treatment, screaming lives were at risk. "What if it was rocks?!" The NYPD's 86 full time PR staff are pumping out doctored images of Black kids with their skin darkened and making them look older, trying to find the scariest action shots of snowball fights.
Mamdani has responded "We're not outlawing snowball fights." Bragg has already dropped the most severe charges from the one arrestee.

2026-02-23 18:36:57 UTC

You have to push back on "it's not left vs right, it's the bottom vs the top" because that's literally how the right builds false consciousness
Or to put it another way: that's the trick the fucking Nazis were using when they called themselves socialists for fucks sake

2026-02-19 02:25:46 UTC

The lesson we must learn from Epstein is that there are clearly other Epsteins.
These bourgeoisie freaks all answer each others calls, they are unbothered by what they all know they are all doing, and the procurement and abuse of children is no more troubling to them then running slave mines or Amazon warehouse deaths. What we see isn't a conspiracy, it's a social circle. A network of relationships and acquaintance and mutual benefit. This is how this class operates, and so we can know that this isn't the sole acts of a single man or even a conspiracy of people. There are other Epsteins in other bourgeoisie social circles.

2026-02-13 14:31:25 UTC

Minneapolis has broken ICE. Not permanently, but to the point that they have to redeploy and change strategy completely. They will likely have to get even more secretive and move even more quietly. They'll have to take pains to avoid drawing the attention of a lot of potential witnesses. They'll need to try to starve the resistance of flash points that can keep mass mobilization going. They'll likely give more attention to trying to go after specific activists and community resources.
All of this slows them down, and Minneapolis forced that. The kind of massive dragnet operations that would let the regime seize huge numbers of people can't be accomplished with that tactics now available to ICE. It's far from over, but the victory is significant.

2026-02-11 13:04:32 UTC

Last year I got to listen to a speaker from the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos do ABC, the metalworkers union that Lula da Silva came out of. For the unfamiliar, Brazil's democratic government was overthrown in 1964 and the country was ruled by military dictatorship for about 20 years, until basically 1985 (though Brazil didn't formally return to democracy until a couple years later when the new constitution was adopted). Trade unions were a vital part of overthrowing the dictatorship, and even a few years ago when a right-wing president tried to perform a self-coup after losing the election, trade unions once again provided a backbone of resistance that gave the elected government the power to actually take office and hold the would-be dictators to account.
The event I was at was a big union conference, and the speaker was both totally blunt with the American audience and also optimistic. He laid out plainly that the fight for democracy would mean getting as many people in civil society activated as possible, that people would need to take risks and suffer consequences, that authoritarianism will always lead to ever greater atrocities the longer it's allowed to go. But he was optimistic that the people of the United States could be roused. I often think about how he explained that you have to fight as early as possible, because no matter how hard the authoritarians crack down they will do worse down the road the more certain their power: what they're forced to do in the open as a reaction to resistance is never as bad as what they will do if they can act unseen and unopposed.
Members of SMABC have been sheltered at times by US unions. For all the faults of the history of the US labor movement and their role in US imperialism, the modern US unions are often more internationally minded. They have literally given protection and refuge for labor leaders from around the world being targeted by their governments at time, and some have projects to build unionization in areas of sweat shops and slave mines. That's a part of what this speaker saw as the hope of a roused US people: the imperfect and often unapologetic scions of imperialism who none the less, raised to believe in the virtues of liberty, strive to build a better world and by striving are made themselves into something better.

2026-02-05 02:16:41 UTC

By the by, the fed response to the murder of Renee Good goes to show why cops are often eager to have body cams. Ross and fellow travelers released his body cam footage explicitly to muddy the information space. Body cam footage will get used for surveillance, for PR, for exonerating cops, etc, far more than it will be used to reign cops in, because cops and not-exactly-cops-but-adjacent control the footage.

2026-02-02 16:15:57 UTC

SNL did a sketch about a family dealing with their Trumpist mom coming to term with Trump being awful, and it's really striking to me how liberal media is very consistently concerned with the humanity and dignity of right-wingers. Like another example that comes to mind is King of the Hill, which is kind of a liberal fantasy of militantly decent conservatism. It's especially striking because of how obsessed right-wing media is with depicting anyone left of Franco as a disgusting Satanic pedophile Stalinist.

2026-02-02 14:56:34 UTC

This is your regular reminder that "qualified immunity" isn't a piece of legislation or the result of legislation, it's something the Supreme Court made up during the Civil Rights era to undermine the laws the US passed to suppress the Klan. It's literally just an idea the justices invented to rewrite the explicit purpose of US law because they wanted to protect the police who were beating Black civil rights protestors.

2026-02-01 20:29:06 UTC

Trump's hatred of Thomas Massie is pretty revealing in and of itself right? Because Massie is a lunatic extremist. The man is basically a segregationist, he hates the US Constitution and regularly writes to the Roberts Court to ask them to change plain text, he's ideologically entirely committed to Jeff Bezos' divine right to own your children, literally the *only* position that Massie has that's an issue for Trump is that Massie (surprisingly) hates pedophilia. It's the one thing.
Massie isn't a squishy negotiator who is willing to break bread with Dems and find common ground on all sorts of issues. He's not even a Mitt Romney type, a hardliner who at least believes in legislation as an ideal and therefor is committed to process. Massie is exactly the kind of blood cultist that Trumpism demands, a guy that fits in well with the Republicans. Trump is just entirely incapable of coexisting with anyone that opposes pedophilia.

2026-01-31 15:59:43 UTC

One of the problems of trying to argue against specific parts of a person's justifying ideology is that often the specifics don't really matter to them.
Let's take an example and talk about US racism. Suppose you were truly convinced that race is biologically real, that racial differences are biologically determinative of a variety of human capabilities, and that in particular some races are more intelligent than others. We're really just giving the scientific racists everything right, just for this moment we can say we'll accept all of their key claims basically. Ok, why would you arrive at the particular policy prescriptions that racists do from those conclusions?
No, really come with me on this journey. Suppose, I don't know, the Polish race is truly inferior to WASPs in terms of intelligence. You *could* argue that means that as a society we should be spending more resources to determine specific academic programs that might benefit that group more, that greater investment in schools with large Polish populations is necessary and good to help make up the difference, etc etc, like straightforwardly we could start from the position that Polish people as a cohort are somehow racially less capable in some specific regard and then from there have policy prescriptions based in the idea that our Polish American compatriots should and will get more support so that the tapestry of American life leaves no one behind. The arguments frankly make themselves; it's obviously beneficial to everyone to help any cohort of people achieve the greatest and fullest life they can because we all necessarily rely on one another, it clearly hurts the vast majority of us to relegate any group of people to squalor, etc.
So why don't racists basically ever end up there? It's simple; because all of the specific claims of racist ideology are interchangeable and unnecessary, the racism comes first and the justifications get backfilled. When someone argues that Black people are mentally deficient and therefor we must kick them out of white schools, the policy prescription isn't some natural and inarguable follow on from the fact-claim. A hypothetical racist could say that Black people are mentally deficient so we must ensure integration at every level and maximize education spending so that everyone in our society has the best individual chance possible, but essentially zero people do that because the racism itself is ideology and all the justifications are invented afterward.

2026-01-29 15:08:33 UTC

"Barack Obama doesn't owe you shit"
Actually bonkers, please report for remedial civics. For as long as the man remains a political presence he quite literally owes the people his service in return for the trust and power he asks from them. The people are the owes that owe him nothing. The relationship here is literally backwards

2026-01-27 18:15:09 UTC

Federal Dems could, should, and from reporting might be adopting a strategy in regards to ICE of trying to force Republicans to sign on to some major restraints, since legislative possibilities are limited until there's a Democratic majority. But in addition to significant restraints, they should also use their skill in destroying agencies through frittering away budgets on stupid shit. The people who have helped to means test programs into near uselessness could employ similar strategies towards ICE: require onerous *and pointless* training (for instance force field agents to take lengthy courses on typing or driving safety or something, give them hours and hours of time wasting videos to click through), make the agency duplicate paperwork as often as possible by hand. Force the agency to spend money on things that give them nothing, such as forcing them to lease from private entities rather than using existing federal infrastructure for their offices. The Dems need to get the biggest restrictions they can and then think like saboteurs

2026-01-25 17:07:50 UTC

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The truth is that public panic is extraordinarily rare, communities tend to respond rationally to crisis, self-organized efforts after a disaster are generally well informed, and the supposed madness of mobs is essentially a Victorian pseudoscientific myth. Highly stratified societies are worse at dealing with crisis because elite panic becomes a greater issue, because when power and authority pool into fewer hands those hands are less competent and have fewer interests within the community. State power is not the only way to organize response to crisis, and it comes with a lot of downsides.

2026-01-25 17:03:03 UTC

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Disaster sociologists have observed how elite panic is ultimately used to consolidate further authoritarian power; the rational mechanisms that communities use in the face of disaster are purposefully targeted and broken down, reducing faith in the community among community members, while the extraordinary measures that elites employ during the crisis are normalized. That's especially dangerous when the disaster is a crisis of authoritarian crackdown and breakdown in the consent of the governed. Even more so than in most disasters, the elite panic in this case threatens to serve as extraordinarily useful to the most powerful elites.

2026-01-25 16:56:47 UTC

What we're seeing from the state apparatus of Minnesota is called elite panic. The elites are responding to disaster as if the threat were civil disorder rather than the disaster itself, and their response is hampering the actually rational and competent responses by the people. Regular people in Minnesota aren't just acting heroically, though they are very clearly doing that, but they are also responding with incredibly sophisticated, complex, rational, and effective efforts that are meaningfully addressing the dynamic crisis unfolding around them. The elites are doing the opposite; they have entirely lost all worldly sense and are responding with entirely irrational efforts that are contrary to their own goals and self-preservation.

2026-01-24 19:30:53 UTC

I don't tell people to watch videos of people dying but you need to go watch the video of ICE executing that guy in Minneapolis, right now. It's full cartel execution kind of stuff, right wing death squad stuff, and you need to see it if you're in the US. Don't just read about it, don't take my word or anyone's.
You need to see the nine or so agents all beating on the guy, you need to see that they are in control, you need to see the ICE guys just dump shots into him, you need to see them decide to leave, pull their masks up higher, etc.

2026-01-18 13:58:53 UTC

If I told you that a particular politician was conservative you would probably understand that their specific ideology and views are dependent on their particular time and place. A conservative in Australia and a conservative in the US aren't going to be exactly the same. None the less, there are enough similarities that we can describe both as conservative and have some sense of what that means, their ideological lineage, etc.
That's also how fascism works, that's how all politics works