Writer. Radical. Historian at UMD. PhD in History from GW. In Case of Emergency: https://tinyurl.com/mvmrcuvk. (he/him)
23,309 followers 3,583 following 1,867 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
The same story playing across the democratic world. Right-wing extremists trying to divide the rest of us along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, demographics, whatever. Tax the rich, stand up to bullies, freedom for everyone, solidarity. One way out.
Record-breaking levels of corruption
Think about it. "Dems were too zealous in trying to prevent the spread of the virus" is, in US politics, a greater disadvantage, a bigger problem, than "Republican lies got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed for no reason." Just a pathetic fucking country. Pathetic.
As we witness new & expanded forms of labor theft & wagelessness in AI & fascist repression, it is more important than ever that we understand that all social, economic, & cultural value is produced by Labor.
👇👇👇
What could possibly go wrong?
I don't know what the tipping point will be or when we can bring it into being, but I rest with absolute certainty today knowing that the bosses & billionaires need us desperately, that we remain infinitely powerful, & that their wildest fantasies pine for a world that will never exist.
Labor creates both the world of goods & services in which we are enmeshed, & also the communities that purchase & give meaning to this landscape of commodities. Without Labor, none of this exists.
Despite the devastating legacy of white supremacist & predatory fantasies we confront, there is no future, even for capital, apart from Labor.
As we witness new & expanded forms of labor theft & wagelessness in AI & fascist repression, it is more important than ever that we understand that all social, economic, & cultural value is produced by Labor.
On this Labor Day, let's remember that today isn't likely to offer a respite for those--disproportionately women, and especially women of color, immigrant women, and low-income women--who do the unpaid and underpaid labor of care. In fact, that labor may even be greater on days "off" like today. 1/🧵
I’m admittedly not interested, though, in the many comments quibbling over what’s normal vs abnormal eugenics bc that totally misunderstands the cacophony of racist & ableist ideas that give the term meaning.
I’ll admit, I didn’t see the original thread, so perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but that particular framing is frankly not the best.
Musk now supporting the deportation of anyone who isn’t white. *Do not* use the term “remigration”. It’s an attempt to normalise Nazi hate.
I wasn't expecting Bill Kristol to be espousing FDR's ideas on economic freedom on Labor Day, but, being short of pleasant surprises these days, I'm willing to roll with it.
Positioning eugenics as coherent &, I guess, un-wild is maybe not the best or most accurate way to describe a system of deciding who lives or dies based on who gives the legacy admission kids the ickies.
I hope people read these stories and are encouraged to take their own action: wagingnonviolence.org/2025/08/la-u...
Quite frankly, better not fight fair against those idiots, unless you want to lose. This is not a joke.
💯
Are we going to need to teach children spycraft and opsec to protect themselves when traveling internationally? Especially when they come back to the US?
Adding to the reasons why I'm staying out of the States for now...
Another thing to consider here is that the intrusive searches & data theft from international scholars at the border may subject their U.S. colleagues to allegations of having “foreign ties” & “un-American ideas,” esp those of us studying surveilled & suppressed topics like race, class, gender, etc.
#TrumpTax
Genuinely I think this is one important way to strike at the machinery of the fascist state.
I thought abt buying the same coffee maker I purchased a year ago to bring to work until I noticed that the price recently went up $80 (40%) & yeah that’s absolutely not happening.
Hey colleagues, if you decide to come over to the US I’d recommend a burner phone and backup to the cloud. Maybe leave the laptop at home?
“Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.” - Fred Hampton
Jesus. I hadn’t thought about this. Then again I completely changed the remit of my British Academy/Leverhulme grant this year so I don’t have to travel there (despite having a U.S. passport and having grown up there!).
Very good point
*on ugh
The OP in the topic. Notice the distribution of this info to American military & intelligence agencies. Like COINTELPRO on, well, ketamine.
Another thing to consider here is that the intrusive searches & data theft from international scholars at the border may subject their U.S. colleagues to allegations of having “foreign ties” & “un-American ideas,” esp those of us studying surveilled & suppressed topics like race, class, gender, etc.
I’d repeat my “hey academics are you reconsidering research trips and conferences in the US now” but I think we have already consolidated into “yikes yes” and “lol I have nothing to fear” camps.
But this shooter should best be characterized as a 4chan regular and alt-right chud, their gender transition and apparent detransition shaped their perspective far less than their social circle of sociopathic malcontents.
FYI www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
1st part of that is getting ideas up on here and then finding one we believe can be implemented to mass effect. So far we have General Strike, Protests, Mass Financial Disruption, Boycotts. Everyone please add to the list or ask others to do so until we are in motion on ideas rather than asking 4thm
We need to win.
It's fine, really! Look up Spain's First Astronaut or the Battle of Cable Street. Everything's on the table, folks!
Most definitely
The Alabama (!) people chanting "who pays the tariffs? who pays the tariffs" and then turning to "shame! shame!" when their rep turns tail and leaves is a keeper.
At least 10 times in the last week I have thought or said this exact thing.
AKA take the fucking gloves off. Just reading about SOE agent Odette. She knew.
Fighting fairly is the way fascists want you to fight. They don't care about parliamentarism or rule of law. They only understand violence.
Be Neutral Good
Democracy never won by giving fascism equal air time.
When you're playing against an always cheat, you cheat the fuck back. You can advocate for playing yourself fairly into oblivion all you want. I'm going to continue cheering for fighters who are bringing steel chair energy to the ring!
True. Fighting fairly is what got us into this mess.
it needs to be asserted at every opportunity that the catholic school shooting is the end result of detrans grifting and white supremacy
Never mind, Chuck seems busy with more important matters.
Guys nothing happened. However, CEOs are still trying to convince you that quiet quitting is worse than wage theft, while planning on replacing you with a robot and charge you for the robot’s rent Unions know better. Happy Labor Day Weekend.
@hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social @schumer.senate.gov your attention to this matter has been requested lol.
Just saw a video of Bill Maher calling Mamdani a “straight up communist” and I continue to be struck by the depiction of policies associated with the New Deal Order as far-left extremism, which goes along with a refusal to depict Trump’s unprecedented authoritarian actions as far-right extremism.
This is a war for survival. Make no fucking mistake about it because if we fail we are on the fascists' target list
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but we don’t need to fight fairly against fascism. We just need to fight.
ICE forcing firefighters to stop battling a wildfire and make them all show their papers, then arresting some active firefighters and pulling them off the line shows there's no bottom. As @aselrod.bsky.social pointedly argues, it's nothing less than an "active assault on virtue wherever it exists."
This, ALL of this!👇
We just need to *win*
Fairness can only be anchored in an agreed rule set. Fascists reject the very notion of rules. To attempt to fight them "fairly" is to surrender at the outset. (Merely to adopt the same posture is just another form of surrender. This is liberating, tho. We make the rules, in light of their refusal.)
I love this for us!
If you ever find yourself in a fair fight, you deserve to lose.
You can’t beat a bully by playing fair. Treat the trump nazi regime like the low life people they are.
This all day
Once fascists have seized control, a fair fight is a moot point; the structures that enable fairness will have been so heavily eroded by then, and will be points of continued attack. If fighting dirty doesn’t sit well with you, fight creatively at least!
I think there were a few of them!
No such thing as a fair fight.
Yeah that’s true, the *becoming* fascist approach wouldn’t be good!
For our literal lives
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but we don’t need to fight fairly against fascism. We just need to fight.
This is good: With Trump/RFK destroying CDC, JB Pritzker's officials are exploring the possibility of buying Covid vaccines from manufacturers and distributing them in-state themselves, source tells me. Dem govs must step up and fill the void. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/1998...
I think that’s exactly right, though I argue in my work that U.S. policy itself was designed to break up this alliance & limit Black freedom. To that end, I think we actually totally misunderstand the postwar state & the regime of rights it concocted.
Not quite on this topic, but Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry gets at the underlying issues in this convo & is maybe the best book I’ve read on the Civil War proper. I’m reviewing another great one right now that will hopefully transform the field, but it won’t be out for another year.
This all day every day, which racist f*cked up shit are they going to pull today is so exhausting.
Not only did Lee commit treason, but West Pointers in the Union Army seriously debated overthrowing the Lincoln admin & to install a dictatorship. Gen. George B. McClellan, their leader, "joked" that people are "calling on me to save the nation—alluding to the Presidency, Dictatorship &c."
Thread.
"Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe." www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/hitl...
Great thread 🧵
Looks like I’ll be down the college football/Civil War West Pointers rabbit hole this weekend. Wow.
Lol yes exactly!
Dude's project of revolutionary racial hierarchy was doomed from jump & there's no reason to believe he grasped those dynamics, fanning the flames of Black U.S. enlistment with his slave-catching bands in PA or depleting manpower that might have enabled a different strategy.
Even Jefferson Davis, when Lee proposed conscripting Black troops, was like "bruh, do you not get why we're fighting here?" I understand we're swimming against a significant current of white nostalgia here, but I just don't think we need to play that game.
Look, the fact that we're having this discussion at all is a triumph of Lost Cause propaganda, but I don't think it even makes sense w/o starting from the premise that the Confederacy itself was a fool's errand, tasked as it was w/operating both a police state & insurrection.
It kinda makes you wonder how we should think of the state (& its relationship to liberal democracy, for that matter) for which they struggled. I don't think the current triumphalist narrative fits the facts.
People still don't understand we are still fighting the Civil War in this country. It's not over.
Disgraceful.
But dopey West Point reactionaries did have a special talent for making him look good in one-off battles.
Lee also consistently misunderstood the larger political & strategic dynamics governing the war he waged. Whether we look at Seven Days, Antietam, or Gettysburg, he misunderstood the manpower deficit of white supremacy & its unpopularity outside of the enslaving class.
Sorry I should have been clearer in the OP; the McClellan quote above is from his correspondence, not from the article, which I think kinda misses the point of the actual role that West Point played in the Civil War. Tried to squeeze too much into too small a space.
That's right. McClellan viewed Pope's ascent as a demotion.
“..the Trump admin has decided tht Ashli Babbitt..deserves a military funeral. Babbitt..has been transformed in2 a martyr by Repubs & Trump supporters..Lee & Babbitt are now being held up by our gvrnmnt as moral exemplars for West Point & other military academy graduates 2 emulate” My Morning Read:
It was in response to Pope's support for Fremont's earlier policy of emancipation, which inspired more West Point coup grumblings even when Lincoln overturned the policy. McClellan gloated in the aftermath of the battle at having ensured Pope's defeat.
“It was no accident..the [United Daughters of the Confederacy] welcome [at West Point] coincided w/ the return of the 1st African-American cadets in roughly 50 years..” “Taking the country back” to its white supremacist roots, history, & inclinations. Which American voters KNEW b4 voting FOR this😶
Worse still, it appears that McClellan did in fact try to orchestrate the total annihilation of John Pope's more radical Union forces at Second Manassas.
All of the "good" West Pointers were genuinely terrible. Grant, meanwhile, who was better at general-ing & democracy-ing was horrible at West Point-ing.
Bingo! This was an overwhelmingly reactionary institution & pearl-clutching over whether to honor those graduates who committed literal treason glosses over the ways that so many of those who remained hated democracy & equality, & fought vigorously to suppress it.
Continued after McClellan, too. In writing to Joe Hooker placing him in command of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln dealt explicitly w/ Hooker's musings about a possible dictatorship. It's an interesting letter.
The other main Civil War history takeaway is that the triumphalist nationalism stuff is almost always bullshit.