That Dang Dad – The Cosmic Horror of Left-Wing Ideology

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Silicon Valley Is Drifting Farther and Farther Right ### Silicon Valley’s rising right-wing intelligentsia has plenty of money and a willingness to do the intellectual dirty work of some of the world’s most open reactionaries. * * * Silicon Valley’s rising right-wing intelligentsia has plenty of money and a willingness to do the intellectual dirty work of some of the world’s most open reactionaries. (Craig T Fruchtman / Getty Images) The offices of Arion Press, the last vertically integrated bookmaker in the United States, are tucked into a museum-like building with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a clear summer weeknight, and I’m here for a happy hour for local writers and publications — which in San Francisco typically means tech writers and tech publications. Gatherings like this one are microcosms of a wider tech culture that, over the past few years, has shifted decisively toward the political right. This trend is clear as day among billionaire CEOs, but it can now be felt even in everyday spaces like this happy hour, where left-liberals and rabid nationalists rub shoulders. Entering the lobby, I’m confronted by a wall of neatly shelved metal type for different fonts, an open bar, and stacks of the periodicals featured at this gathering: _Kernel_ magazine and _Asterisk_ magazine. _Kernel_ is a slick print outfit covering tech from a “progressive,” “techno-optimist” perspective. The typical reader is a young techie, but the kind who added on a humanities minor in college and still writes poetry on the side. This is also roughly the image of their editorial collective, which emerged in 2021 from a cluster of Stanford undergrads. One of them, Jasmine Sun, cohosts this event. Sun is a rightwardly mobile liberal who at a previous happy hour announced earnestly to the crowd, “I don’t hate billionaires.” Maybe this is because _Kernel_ has received funds from Omidyar Network (as in Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay) and the libertarian Mercatus Center, among others. But _Kernel_ itself is not a mouthpiece for billionaire interests. Its contributors, comprising programmers, artists, and investors, are enthusiasts of technology through and through, but try to reckon with its terrible failings. _Kernel_ splits the difference: on the one hand, it publishes apologetics for crypto and angsty start-up founder fiction; and on the other hand, it provides a platform for critical stories on for-profit prison phones and self-censorship on TikTok. What unites these authors is not faithfulness to any political project, but identification with the expert worldview of the technologist. "The typical reader of these magazines is a young techie, but the kind who added on a humanities minor in college and still writes poetry on the side." The other event host, Clara Collier, is here representing the effective altruist magazine _Asterisk_. For the untainted, effective altruism (EA) is a very online social movement popular in tech circles, which was originally concerned with how to get rich philanthropists to donate to the most “effective” charities but is now just as well known for its booster-doomerism about artificial general intelligence and for having had the convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried as a notorious benefactor. The leading (legitimate) financier of EA-aligned projects, however, is decabillionaire Meta and Asana cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, whose nonprofit Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has bankrolled _Asterisk_ into something like the paper of record for the EA movement. In recent issues, two AI think tank executives appeal to us to consider the “perspective and interests of AI systems” as if they were living beings, a journalist laments environmental regulations that are slowing down AI data center expansion, and a blogger wonders aloud why the rationalist community (a utilitarian philosophical movement closely tied to EA) spawns so many cults. At the same time, _Asterisk_ has devoted an entire issue to worrying about the possible extinction-level events that many in the EA world believe will befall humanity if this hypothetical superintelligence is trained without technical “alignment” to human values. Kernel and Asterisk magazines on display at the Commons in Hayes Valley. (Jimmy Wu / Bay Area Current) Mingling with the crowd, I meet various writers and journalists, a designer, an economist, a rationalist novelist, and a barrel of software engineers — a cast of characters familiar to me from my years working in tech. But then a pale bespectacled guy wedges in next to me and introduces himself as Samo Burja, editor of another magazine called _Palladium_. I try to suss out his deal, but his answers are careful. “We write about governance,” he says, “a lot of our readers are venture capitalists.” At the same time, Samo assures me, he counts Karl Marx among his personal influences, and says _Palladium_ has in fact published a Marxist. What he doesn’t mention is that they prefer to publish monarchists and white supremacists. As soon as that conversation ends, another _Kernel_ editor pulls me aside with a look of concern and says, “I couldn’t help but notice the two political extremes in the room were talking to each other.” I would later discover that _Palladium m_ agazine is widely believed to be bankrolled by Peter Thiel, the ghoulish far-right billionaire known for helming PayPal and Palantir, delivering bizarre lectures on the Antichrist, and struggling to answer questions about whether humanity should exist. Unnamed donations to the magazine since 2021 total in the millions of dollars. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. One of _Palladium_ ’s founders, Jonah Bennett, previously lived and worked out of a Thiel-funded think tank-group house in Oakland called Leverage Research, where past members have alleged cult-like experiences including abusive psychological experiments. In 2019 he was outed as a member of online white nationalist groups, though he would claim he “was never a white nationalist” and is “not proud of . . . that period of time.” The other founding editor, Wolf Tivy, suggests “maybe democracy doesn’t matter” and that societies thrive under a “coordinated and benevolent elite.” Neither Bennett nor Tivy responded to questions or provided comment. Despite telling us in an email that “monarchy is merely one viable form of government with strengths and weaknesses,” _Palladium_ editor in chief Samo Burja has repeatedly extolled the virtues of monarchy including as a recurring contributor to a neoreactionary blog, where he also gave a full-throated defense of IQ scores as a measure of intelligence. Within the pages of _Palladium_ you can find articles embracing a future “age of eugenics,” the return of child labor, and a new caste system. They urge the implementation of Trump’s “Freedom City” in the Presidio and promote projects affiliated with the Network State, a nascent movement plotting digital secession from traditional nation-states. Curtis Yarvin, leading theorist of the neofascist Dark Enlightenment (also known as neoreactionary) movement who counts J. D. Vance among his fans, calls for an ultramilitarized “Orbital Authority” that “dominates, owns and controls the whole planet.” Burja himself peddles a repackaged great man theory of history, “Great Founder Theory,” which he developed while at Leverage Research. The magazine’s reactionary-futurist aesthetic speaks as loudly as its words: glossy covers idolize Greco-Roman antiquity; Grimes, seemingly a regular at _Palladium_ parties, poses nude in one of their issues, free-floating in the middle of an exotic space colony. As for who is reading all these windbag authoritarian think pieces, frequent contributor Ben Landau-Taylor told me _Palladium_ is “geared toward elites and people at the top of their profession,” including prominent venture capitalist (VC) Marc Andreessen, Ethereum blockchain founder Vitalik Buterin, and of course Peter Thiel. I haven’t the budget or the stomach to attend _Palladium_ ’s launch parties (a limited set of invitations are extended quarterly to its $200 per month subscribers), but past photos suggest the demographics of a MAGA soiree, without the semblance of a good time. Tech worker organizers at a Lyft and Uber driver strike in front of Uber headquarters in San Francisco on May 8, 2019. (Shimmy Li / Bay Area Current) Tech writing and publishing in the Bay Area wasn’t always like this. In the second half of the 2010s, a rising tide of public discontent with Silicon Valley — the “techlash” — coincided with the first Trump inauguration to produce a mass politicization of tech workers. I was one such worker, and became a labor organizer in the tech industry alongside others who would go on to orchestrate everything from a global walkout at Google to salting programs at start-ups. Such resistance movements in tech animated, and were in turn supported by, their own homegrown publications. One of them, _Logic_ magazine, was a forum for tech criticism that was widely read by partisans of the tech worker movement. _Logic_ was where you could go to learn about racist criminal sentencing algorithms, tools for tenants to research landlords, and how to sabotage computer vision systems. My comrades published real-time histories of the tech worker movement and exposés on their employers in _Logic_ ; we showed up to their in-person events in San Francisco to meet others who thought similarly. But that now feels like a past life. Today the techlash is a receding memory, and the tech worker movement is running on fumes, the preserve of a few lonely unions. In a sign of shifting winds, _Logic_ rebranded as _Logic(s)_ in 2022, pivoting to subjects outside Silicon Valley proper, and transitioned to a new editorial team institutionalized at Columbia University. In the years since, the tech industry has gladly unburdened itself from the critiques leveled at it during the techlash. Nowhere is this more obvious than in tech’s involvement in building weapons of war. "Today the techlash is a receding memory, and the tech worker movement is running on fumes, the preserve of a few lonely unions." Whereas in the 2010s there was little VC money chasing after military start-ups, today’s tech sector embraces lethality. From 2019 to 2024, venture capital allocated to defense tech start-ups increased tenfold, and titans like Meta and Amazon now openly develop cloud compute or virtual-reality glasses for the US military. Accompanying the change in political economy has been a vibe shift. Corporate behemoths like Google used to face intense public backlash when they were caught working on Pentagon projects, but today tech executives flaunt their patriotism and amplify Cold War–like rhetoric to attract investment and curry political favor — threatening, for instance, that if US-based AI companies are prevented from unfettered development of large language models, China will be first to achieve artificial superintelligence. On campuses like Stanford, where students once organized against Palantir, there is now a thriving ecosystem of clubs and institutes promoting careers in military tech. Many leading VC firms prominently display “defense” as a pillar of their portfolios; Andreessen Horowitz’s website, for instance, features a comically jingoistic video promoting “American dynamism.” This militaristic nationalism finds a fervid voice in _Arena_ magazine, a print and digital outlet about “tech, capitalism, and the USA” that launched in 2024 and is led by several former editors-in-chief of the _Stanford Review_ , a whiny, reactionary rag founded by Peter Thiel when he was an undergrad there. Like _Palladium_ , _Arena_ ’s following is stacked with tech elites, but is skewed more toward start-up founders, engineers, designers, and people employed in manufacturing, military tech, and biotech — in short, builders. Though headquartered in Texas, I bumped into _Arena_ people twice in one week in San Francisco without even trying. The first instance was at an event in SoMa for Asimov Press, a biotechnology publisher with a mild bent toward EA-style concerns like human longevity, animal welfare, and AI safety. There, an _Arena_ editor, Zaitoon Zafar, explained to me that it seeks a correction to the “attacks on technology and people who actually do things” — the entrepreneurs and builders “in the arena,” as start-up heads are fond of saying. On another occasion I was approached by an _Arena_ writer and defense tech salesman named Adam Wong, who summarized the magazine as being pro-Trump and publishing articles about “sociology, anthropology, and fifth-generation warfare.” _Arena_ ’s editor-in-chief Max Meyer is less mealy-mouthed: “This magazine is 200-proof, pure distilled American propaganda,” he posts. Every copy of a recent issue includes a detachable spread advertising Anduril Industries, a manufacturer of autonomous military drones founded by former Palantir executives and backed by the “patriotic” venture capital firm 8VC (where, incidentally, Meyer has worked). Bombs and fighter jets streak across the ad, whose text reads: “REBUILD THE ARSENAL.” The remaining pages of _Arena_ are littered with glowing profiles of assorted sea, air, and spacefaring war machines; praise for fracking, uranium enrichment, and consumer eugenics services; and calls to use AI to secure “enduring dominance over our adversaries — namely, China.” The Communist Party of China lives truly rent-free in the heads of _Arena_ contributors, almost none of whom manage to write a piece without invoking or stoking the threat of Big, Bad China. > Thank you to the brilliant advertisers who make this company possible – and who contribute to the beauty of the magazine! pic.twitter.com/MV2O1RKsHB > > — Maxwell Meyer (@mualphaxi) August 1, 2025 What do niche publications like these actually want? What do they accomplish? No doubt they are often, at least in part, vanity projects for their founders and funders. But they are also functional political devices, projects and projections of class power. This is especially true of print media: Print inevitably precipitates a face-to-face community, giving it the capacity to represent and in turn catalyze real-world movements. This was the case with _Logic_ , which helped cultivate a feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist tech perspective, and a working-class movement that gave teeth to those ideas. It was imbued with a class character. So, too, are reactionary projects like _Palladium_ and _Arena_ , which cohere and embolden militaristic, revanchist, and authoritarian members of business and state — and, when possible, try to sway a broader public. Those at the helm of Silicon Valley know that their outsize influence is tenuous; it can always be challenged by movements from below. Which is why they and their adherents have a keen interest in diffusing their class interests, their way of thinking, into the common sense throughout all strata of the tech world — even among workers. “The cardinal goal of doing this crazy print publication [_Arena_],” says Max Meyer in an interview, “is to mind-infect people to work on the right things, the cool things, the pro-America things.” Kernel‘s issue five launch event in San Francisco. (Jimmy Wu / Bay Area Current) The day after the social where I met _Palladium_ editor Samo Burja, I message Jasmine Sun, the event host and _Kernel_ editor, urging her to disinvite him and any of his _Palladium_ colleagues from her future events. A few days later, Sun replied with her opinion that _Palladium_ “doesn’t seem overtly fascist” and, besides, she doesn’t want to be “in the business of defining fascism.” She “disagree[s] with the tech right and effective altruists, but they’re both influential parts of the intellectual scene here” and worries that “kicking one person would lead to others weaponizing that to try to kick others out.” The response is spineless but admits a basic truth: differentiated as they may seem from within the San Francisco tech bubble, when viewed from a distance, these ideological formations form parts of a cohesive whole. For one thing, their communities intermingle in spaces throughout the Bay Area. Show up to the public events of any of these publications, and most of the others — sometimes all of them — will be there. _Kernel, Asterisk_ , and Asimov all have contributors in common; so do _Palladium_ and _Arena_ , who shared the stage at a war-themed salon. Just as these groups can be found in the same physical spaces, so too they overlap ideologically in their common adherence to techno-optimism, the belief that technological development is an inherent good. _Kernel_ magazine’s opening manifesto explicitly names techno-optimism as its doctrine, but _Kernel_ ’s veneration of technology is arguably the mildest among them. In various guises, _Asterisk_ , Asimov, _Arena_ , and _Palladium_ all profess a deep optimism, as well as inevitability, about the limitless development and proliferation of technology as it’s currently produced — by private firms for profit. In this way, tech discourse conflates, or even redefines, “progress” as capitalist technological progress. "Contemporary tech discourse is a melting pot of ideas lacking well-defined layers. Spend enough time in this milieu, and you won’t even know where you stand." Much like the class-segregated locomotive in Bong Joon-ho’s eco-apocalyptic film _Snowpiercer_, capitalist technology represents, for these thinkers, the vital engine of human history. Some, like the right-wingers of _Palladium_ and _Arena_ , believe (Western) society is destined for greatness so long as we continue fanatically shoveling fuel into the furnace — with no regard for the misery of sub-economy class passengers in the last carriage. Others, like the liberals of _Kernel_ , want do-gooders within Silicon Valley to nudge the train in a collectively beneficial direction on behalf of the masses. But as with the ideologues aboard the _Snowpiercer_ train, none of them can imagine doing what is actually needed: putting on the brakes or, if necessary, derailing the whole thing to start anew. Because the various tech politics are so enmeshed, it’s not clear how to excise only the noxious elements. The operation of classical fascism could be described, as Hannah Arendt did in _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ , like the concentric circles of an onion: At every stage, you could point to someone more extreme than you as well as someone more of a normie than you, and it’s hard to know when you’ve gone too far. In a similar way, contemporary tech discourse is a melting pot of ideas good, bad, and ugly, lacking well-defined layers. Spend enough time in this milieu, it seems, and you won’t even know where you stand. Still, we cannot be passive observers to a slide into barbarism. Fascism doesn’t just exist in the marketplace of ideas, but in actual persons living in our cities, funding and constructing their visions for our collective future. The Bay Area is now surveilled by thousands of Thiel-funded Flock cameras that transmit our movements to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Network State–aligned projects are being built in Solano County and next to Powell Street BART. Lest we forget, the feds already patrol our streets; they are snatching up our neighbors; they have begun to criminalize anti-fascism itself. Just because any line in the sand would be in some sense arbitrary, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t draw one. I skim a copy of _Kernel_ before setting it on my coffee table. Written on the front cover is the editorial theme for issue five: _“RULES. Where do we draw the line?”_ Where indeed. * * *

Silicon Valley Is Drifting Farther and Farther Right

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Paul Coates: The US is killing people in Cuba

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Wordle - A Wordle Alternative Guess the hidden word in 6 tries. A new puzzle is available each day.

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Long Before MAGA’s White Grievance, There Was Bernie Goetz ### In 1984, a white man named Bernie Goetz shot four unarmed black youths on a New York City subway train. The tabloids hailed him as a fed-up everyman — rhetoric that permeated the culture and intensified a culture of white grievance and racist vigilantism. * * * In Reagan-era New York City, a white man named Bernie Goetz opened fire on four unarmed black youths in the New York City subway. The tabloid media hailed him as a vigilante hero, setting the tone for modern right-wing racial grievance politics. (Bettmann / Getty Images) Review of _Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage_ by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2026) On December 22, 1984, a pale, dweeby, thirty-seven-year-old white man named Bernhard Goetz boarded a subway car bound for Lower Manhattan. After taking a seat close to four rambunctious black teenagers — nineteen-year-olds Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, and Troy Canty, and eighteen-year-old James Ramseur — Goetz started glaring in their direction. One of these teenagers, Troy Canty, decided to greet Goetz. “Hey, what’s up?” Canty asked. Goetz acknowledged Canty’s greeting in a friendly, if unenthusiastic, manner. Emboldened, Canty sidled up more closely to Goetz and, with a slight smile curling up on his face, said, “Hey, man. How about giving us five bucks?” Canty’s request activated Goetz, who looked up and urged Canty to repeat his question. Canty assented. “How about giving us five bucks?” the youngster asked again. Goetz slowly rose from his seat, unzipped his jacket, and turned toward the subway car window. He then dramatically spun around, removed his unlicensed .38 Smith & Wesson from his waistband, and opened fire on the four unsuspecting, unarmed teenagers. For a few short moments, Bernie Goetz had transformed the 2 train into a combat zone, the sort of dystopian urban hellscape that so many Americans feared then and today. Miraculously, all of Goetz’s victims survived, although one, Darrell Cabey, was paralyzed from the waist down and sustained irreversible brain damage after falling into a coma. "For a few short moments, Bernie Goetz had transformed the 2 train into a combat zone, the sort of dystopian urban hellscape that so many Americans feared then and today." In the minds of many Americans, however, Cabey and his friends weren’t victims at all. In fact, they supposedly embodied the decay and criminal depravity that defined New York and most other American cities in the late twentieth century. Bernie Goetz, meanwhile, became a national icon, feted as a fed-up everyman. He was likened to a real-life Paul Kersey, Charles Bronson’s character in the popular 1974 film _Death Wish_ , who takes the law into his own hands after being victimized by street crime. Sick and tired of the crooks, hoodlums, and other evildoers who (some observers believed) ran New York City in the austere yet greedy 1980s, Goetz stood up for the law-abiding citizen and for the principles of law and order more broadly. With a quick draw and some rapid fire, the unlikely vigilante had sent a clear, succinct message to the city’s criminal underclass: righteous people like him were taking back the subways, the streets, and the country. “A FANTASY COME TRUE: DEATH WISH GUNMAN CAPTURED CITY’S IMAGINATION,” read one _New York Daily News_ headline published in the wake of the Goetz shootings. “PREY TURNS PREDATOR,” screeched another. The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson’s new book, _Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage_ chronicles, in painstaking detail, Goetz’s assault and its afterlives. According to Thompson, Bernie Goetz unleashed more than just five bullets that December day. He also unleashed a troubling new wave of white rage, one that has spawned murderous vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, as well as merchants of white grievance like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents terrorize, brutalize, and murder civilians with impunity on the streets of American cities and the fascist current in US politics grows stronger, it appears that we are still living in the long shadow cast by Bernie Goetz. # Casualties of the Revolution Goetz’s attack on Allen, Cabey, Canty, and Ramseur occurred a month and a half after Ronald Reagan utterly humiliated Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election. The Gipper’s historic reelection had reaffirmed the American public’s support for the “Reagan Revolution.” Leveraging widespread nostalgia for the rabid nationalism and unequally shared prosperity of the early Cold War period, this revolution offered deregulation and generous tax cuts for the rich, on the one hand, and austerity, organized abandonment, and discipline for the poor, working class, people of color, and queer people on the other. "Defense attorney Barry Slotnick seized on prevailing anti-crime and anti-black sentiment to portray the four shooting victims as aggressors." While historians such as Brent Cebul and Nathan Connolly have increasingly pointed out continuities between the “New Deal order” forged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the “neoliberal order” that Reagan ostensibly inaugurated, Thompson makes the case that the early to mid-1980s were, in fact, exceptional — “a sharp break with the past.” Reagan had eagerly slashed social assistance programs built to blunt the worst effects of market capitalism, deepening the poverty and suffering of those on the margins. The president and his disciples also justified, through moralizing language, the widening gap between rich and poor, the intensifying misery of queer people and people of color in the early HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the expansion of the country’s already sprawling carceral machinery. The situation on the ground in New York City was bleak. Still reeling from the 1970s fiscal crisis, the city government responded to the economic challenges of the late ’70s and early ’80s with crushing austerity measures. Amid deep cuts to the Department of Sanitation, trash and litter piled up throughout the five boroughs, and a fraying social safety net meant more substandard housing, houselessness, poverty, substance abuse, and crime. Darrell Cabey was in the thick of it all in the South Bronx. Ronald Reagan had actually visited the struggling neighborhood on a campaign stop in August 1980. In a vacant lot littered with debris — and within spitting distance of two buildings tagged, in bright orange graffiti, with the words “DECAY” and “BROKEN PROMISES” — Reagan insisted that he hadn’t “seen anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz.” Cabey lived not too far away from the site of Reagan’s cynical photo op. He shared a cramped two-bedroom, twenty-first-floor apartment in the Daniel Webster Houses with his mother, Shirley, and his four brothers. Although Shirley tried to keep Darrell and his brothers at home with “a nice TV” and a stereo, Darrell couldn’t resist the pull of the outside world. Unfortunately for him and so many other youth of color in the Reagan years and beyond, the outside world presented a wide range of dangers — from highly potent and addictive drugs to the violence of the drug trade, and from abusive and racist NYPD cops to bloodthirsty vigilantes such as Bernie Goetz. # The Goetz Family Tree In the pages of Thompson’s _Fear and Fury_ , the moment Goetz opens fire represents a catalyst, not a climax. The book begins with a brief vignette related to the shooting and returns to the incident on page seventy-eight. The rest of the five-hundred-plus-page book deals with the long aftermath of Goetz’s infamous assault. In the short term, Goetz fled to New England after the shooting, triggering a massive manhunt that only ended once he surrendered to Concord, New Hampshire, police nine days later. After Goetz had been identified, he enjoyed fawning coverage in the increasingly splashy, trashy, and racist news media, particularly in Rupert Murdoch’s _New York Post_. The tabloid rags simultaneously transformed Goetz’s shooting victims into bona fide villains, even as Cabey clung to life at St Vincent’s Hospital and later learned that he would never walk again. The lionization of Bernie Goetz and the concomitant vilification of Allen, Cabey, Canty, and Ramseur continued throughout the ensuing criminal trial. Despite Goetz’s own statements, which evinced his deep-seated racism and desire to inflict harm on the four unarmed youths, defense attorney Barry Slotnick seized on prevailing anti-crime and anti-black sentiment to portray the four shooting victims as aggressors. "Thompson argues that Goetz’s attack, and the news media outlets that sensationalized and celebrated it, laid the foundation for the white rage that has shaped twenty-first-century America." With the assistance of the _Post_ , which never missed an opportunity to demonize Allen, Cabey, Canty, and Ramseur, Slotnick’s strategy paid off. In June 1987, a jury of ten whites and two African Americans found Goetz not guilty of the most serious crimes with which he had been charged — attempted murder and first-degree assault. Though justice had been denied in the criminal trial, Darrell Cabey’s civil suit against Goetz — filed in January 1985 but not decided until over a decade later, in April 1996 — yielded a $43 million judgment on behalf of Cabey and his family. In the longer term, Thompson argues that Goetz’s attack, and the news media outlets that sensationalized and celebrated it, laid the foundation for the white rage that has shaped twenty-first-century America — from the dispiriting popularity of Fox News to Donald Trump’s election and reelection; from the terror that gripped Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 to the insurrection of January 6, 2021; and from the xenophobia that legitimates ICE’s inhumanity to the killings of Joseph D. Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, Jordan Neely, and so many others at the hands of white vigilantes. This is an important and compelling argument, one with which everyone on the US political left ought to reckon. Yet Thompson’s thesis might have been further reinforced with an even deeper examination of the historical context in which Goetz opened fire in 1984. More specifically, Goetz’s vicious assault fit within a frightening upsurge in white power organizing and racist violence in the United States. The neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce’s novel _The Turner Diaries_ was published in 1978. The bible of the white power movement, Pierce’s book went on to inspire at least forty terrorist attacks and hate crimes in the US and elsewhere. (For instance, police found clippings of _The Turner Diaries_ in Timothy McVeigh’s vehicle after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.) Membership in the Ku Klux Klan surged in the latter half of the 1970s, and previously impermeable boundaries between the KKK and other right-wing hate groups became more porous, historian Kathleen Belew has shown. These organizations grew more violent during the late 1970s and ’80s as well. Klansmen terrorized Vietnamese refugees who settled along the Gulf Coast following the Vietnam War. In November 1979, days before Reagan launched his third bid for the White House, neo-Nazis and Klansmen ambushed an anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five activists aligned with the Communist Workers Party. "Goetz’s vicious assault fit within a frightening upsurge in white power organizing and racist violence in the United States." Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed white supremacist, went on a cross-country killing spree in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Among Franklin’s many targets were Larry Flynt and National Urban League president Vernon Jordan. Flynt and Jordan both survived. Authorities suspect that Franklin murdered as many as twenty-two people. The 1979–1981 Atlanta youth murders, in which twenty-nine young African Americans were snatched and slain in the greater Atlanta area, understandably aroused fears of anti-black violence or even “genocide,” a term some commentators used to describe the killings. As historian Elizabeth Hinton has illuminated, Miami exploded in May 1980 after an all-white jury acquitted several police officers in the beating death of an unarmed black motorist named Arthur McDuffie. Within the “orgy of violence” that consumed Miami, as the _Washington Post_ characterized it, white vigilantes burned a cross in an African American neighborhood, incinerated a black-owned grocery store, and shot and killed several black teenagers and young adults. Finally, Joseph Christopher killed twelve black and Latino men and wounded seven more from September 1980 through January 1981. Thompson only mentions some of these developments, which suggest that the Goetz killings and ensuing media coverage were an escalation of a growing trend of white violence fueled by racial grievance, not a catalyst per se. This minor criticism notwithstanding, _Fear and Fury_ is a propulsive, urgent, heroically researched, and much-needed account of the 1984 subway shootings, the world that made them, and the world they helped make. * * *

Long Before MAGA’s White Grievance, There Was Bernie Goetz

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Wouldn’t It Be Nice to Live in a Society With No “Kill Line”? ### For many in the United States, life is bleak — so bleak that some look to China and see an alternative, decently functioning society that doesn’t allow its citizens to fall below a “kill line.” * * * With a sense of hope for a better future collapsing for many in the United States, China is starting to look a bit more appealing. (Jade Gao / AFP via Getty Images) This morning, the _Guardian_ ’ _s_ Amy Hawkins offers a delightful split-screen portrait of global consciousness, highlighting two trends playing out in parallel on US and Chinese social media. * On **US platforms like TikTok and Instagram** , “young people are diving into the joys of Chinese culture — from drinking hot water to playing mahjong — all under the banner of ‘Chinamaxxing,’” she writes. * On the **Chinese internet** , meanwhile, “the US is losing its decades-long grip on soft power, and is instead being replaced by a darker trend: **_the kill line_**.” Hawkins explains that Chinese social media, blogs, and academic journals have lately taken to depicting “a vision of the US as a dystopian capitalist hell,” governed by what a Chinese news presenter called “a ‘** _kill line_** ’ in American society where the middle class plummets into the underclass.” The **_kill line_** “exposes America’s dual nature: the winners achieve ultimate success, while the losers fall into an abyss from which there is no return.” The backstory: > The latest trend started in November, when a Chinese student living in Seattle posted a five-hour-long stream to the Chinese video-sharing website BiliBili. In the video, which has since attracted more than 3m views, he describes seeing hungry children at Halloween and the harsh realities of life for disadvantaged people in the world’s biggest economy. Soon, the term “** _kill line_** ” took on a life of its own. The meme has so captured the Chinese imagination that at a press conference at Davos in January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was repeatedly asked to comment on the **_kill line_** by a Chinese state media journalist. “I don’t understand the question,” he replied. (No kidding.) Bernie Sanders never tires of pointing out that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, which infuriates a certain type of online wonk for some reason. When I posted about the phenomenon last year, I illustrated the point with the chart below, which shows that while the rich in the United States have been stockpiling ever-larger cash buffers as a percentage of income, the rest of the population has been unable to follow suit: As it turns out, Americans are **uniquely** incapable of building savings buffers from their incomes. You can see this in the chart below, which plots disposable income against non-retirement financial assets for households at each decile threshold of the income and asset distributions, from the 10th to the 90th percentiles, in nine countries. (The data are taken from the Luxembourg Wealth Study, which harmonizes the numbers to make them comparable across countries. For data mavens, “non-retirement financial assets” corresponds to “financial assets” (FIN) minus “quasi-liquid retirement accounts” (RETQLIQ) in the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances.) All data are from 2018 or 2019 (except for France, which is from 2014). So, for example, while the median Australian household has 12 percent less disposable income than its American counterpart, it has 60 percent more in financial assets. In Canada, the numbers are 5 percent less income and 43 percent more assets. In Denmark it’s 19 percent less income and 74 percent more assets. In France it’s 28 percent less income and 41 percent more assets. One clue as to why this may be the case is supplied by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) technical manual for disposable income statistics, which I quoted from in my last post: > As the manual puts it, disposable income excludes “goods and services provided by government that benefit individuals but which are provided free or at subsidized prices,” which “generally include education, health, social welfare, transport and cultural services” . . . > > This omission “presents difficulties when the provision of such services differs greatly” between countries because in countries where such public expenditures “are relatively sparse, **a higher income will be required to support a particular standard of living than in a country where a wide range of benefits are provided** , all other things being equal.” But statistical exegesis is of little comfort to America’s destitute and house-bound TikTok teens, who can only gaze longingly at Chinese _savoir-vivre_ through their tiny internet portals: > While internet users in China are gawking at the idea of a US riven by poverty and chaos, for their American counterparts it is quite the opposite. > > With “Chinamaxxing”, American teenagers are reveling in traditional Chinese lifestyle hacks such as drinking hot water or wearing slippers indoors. The trend’s slogan? “You’ve met me at a very Chinese time in my life”. * * *

Wouldn’t It Be Nice to Live in a Society With No “Kill Line”?

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An Oscar Night of Sentimentality and Amnesia At a time of profound unrest and the launch of an insane new war, Hollywood stuck to its “keep politics out” mandate.

An Oscar Night of Sentimentality and Amnesia

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Thousands of Colorado Meatpacking Workers Are on Strike A strike in Colorado shows what happens when thousands of workers confront one of the most concentrated industries in the American economy.

Thousands of Colorado Meatpacking Workers Are on Strike

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**Get fearless, uncompromising truth in your inbox. Subscribe to The Real News.** Sign up _This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _Mar. 15, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._ The government has largely won its first case bringing material-support-for-terrorism charges against protesters alleged to belong to “antifa,” which President Donald Trump designated as a domestic terror group in 2025 despite the fact that no such organized group exists and the president has no legal authority to designate organizations as domestic terror groups. A federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas agreed on Friday to convict eight people of domestic terrorism because they wore all black to a protest outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas on July 4, 2025, at which one of the protesters shot and wounded a police officer. Legal experts say the verdict could bolster attempts by the administration to stifle dissent. “A case like this helps the government kind of see how far they can go in criminalizing constitutionally protected protests and also helps them kind of intimidate, increase the fear, hoping that folks in other cities then will think twice over protesting,” Suzanne Adely, interim president of the National Lawyers Guild, told The Associated Press. The administration promised it would be the first such case of many. > “The US lost today with this verdict.” “Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities—not under President Trump,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement Friday. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.” The trial revolved around a nighttime protest at which participants planned to set off fireworks in solidarity with the around 1,000 migrants detained inside the Prarieland ICE facility. Some participants brought guns, which is legal in Texas, as The Intercept reported. Sam Levine explained in The Guardian what happened next: > Shortly after arriving at the facility, two or three of the protesters broke away from the larger group and began spray painting cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. Two ICE detention guards came out and told the protesters to stop. A police officer arrived on the scene shortly after and drew his weapon at one of the people allegedly doing vandalism. One of the protesters was standing in the woods with an AR-15 and hit him in the shoulder. The officer would survive. At first, the federal government charged those arrested after the event with “attempted murder of a police officer,” according to NOTUS. However, that changed after Trump’s designation of antifa as a terror group in September and the release of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which directs federal law enforcement to target left-leaning groups and activities. The next month, the government’s case expanded to include terrorism charges. “This wouldn’t be a terrorism case if it weren’t for that memo,” one defense lawyer told NOTUS on background. The prosecution argued that the fact that the protesters wore black clothes to the protest was enough to convict them of material support for terrorism. “Providing your body as camouflage for others to do the enumerated acts is providing support,” Assistant US Attorney Shawn Smith said during closing arguments, as The Intercept reported on Thursday. “It’s impossible to tell who is doing what. That’s the point.” The defense, meanwhile, warned the jury about the free speech implications of the charge. “The government is asking you to put protesters in prison as terrorists. You are the only people who can stop that,” Blake Burns, an attorney for defendant Elizabeth Soto, said, according to The Guardian. > “When the villain is a made-up boogeyman then the target becomes ‘anyone who disagrees with Trump’—and this is the result.” Ultimately, the jury decided to convict eight defendants of material support for terrorism as well as riot, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and use and carry of an explosive. However, they dismissed attempts by the state to argue that the protest constituted a pre-planned ambush and charge four people who had not shot at the police officer with attempted murder and discharging a firearm during a crime. Only Benjamin Song, the alleged shooter, was charged with one count of attempted murder and three counts of discharging a firearm. The jury also convicted a ninth defendant, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, of conspiracy to conceal documents. Sanchez Estrada, who was not at the protest, had simply moved a box of zines out of his wife’s home after she was arrested for the protest, according to The Intercept. “The US lost today with this verdict,” Sanchez Estrada’s attorney, Christopher Weinbel, said, as AP reported. Support the Prarieland Defendants said in a statement, “Everything about this trial from beginning to end has proven what we have said all along: This is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top.” However, the group commended the solidarity that had sprung up among the defendants and their allies and vowed to continue to support them. **“** We have a long journey ahead of us to continue fighting these charges along with the state level charges,” they said. “What happens here sets the tone for what’s to come. We are here and we won’t give up.” Outside observers warned about the implication for the right to protest under Trump. “Remember all the people who dismissed the alarm over NSPM-7 because ‘ANTIFA isn’t even a real organization’? We told you that didn’t matter. When the villain is a made-up boogeyman then the target becomes ‘anyone who disagrees with Trump’—and this is the result,” said Cory Archibald, the co-founder of Track AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. Content creator Austin MacNamara said: “The Prairieland trial was given almost zero media coverage because of the blatant lies by DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and Police. This verdict now sets a precedent for criminalization of dissent across the board. Noise demos, Black-Bloc, pamphlets/zines/red cards, all of this can be used to imprison you.” Academic Nathan Goodman wrote that convicting people of terrorism based on clothing was a “serious threat to the First Amendment.” The verdict gives new poignancy to what defendant Meagan Morris told NOTUS ahead of the jury’s decision: “If we win, I think it shows that Trump’s mandate is not working, that the people understand that you can’t criminalize, you know, First and Second Amendment-protected activities. And I think if we lose, then… a lot of the country is OK with what’s going on. And it will be a much darker time, it’ll just signify a much increased crackdown on political opposition and free speech.” ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # ‘Serious threat to the First Amendment’ as Trump admin wins first antifa terror charge by Olivia Rosane, The Real News Network March 16, 2026 <h1>‘Serious threat to the First Amendment’ as Trump admin wins first antifa terror charge</h1> <p class="byline">by Olivia Rosane, The Real News Network <br />March 16, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on </em><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-admin-antifa-terror" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Mar. 15, 2026</em></a><em>.</em> <em>It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">The government has largely won its first case bringing material-support-for-terrorism charges against protesters alleged to belong to “antifa,” which President <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donald Trump</a> <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-antifa" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">designated</a> as a domestic terror group in 2025 despite the fact that no such organized group exists and the president has no legal authority to designate organizations as domestic terror groups.</p> <p>A federal jury in Fort Worth, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/texas" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Texas</a> agreed on Friday to convict eight people of domestic terrorism because they wore all black to a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/protest" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">protest</a> outside <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/immigration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Immigration</a> and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas on July 4, 2025, at which one of the protesters shot and wounded a police officer. Legal experts say the verdict could bolster attempts by the administration to stifle dissent.</p> <p>“A case like this helps the government kind of see how far they can go in criminalizing constitutionally protected <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/protests" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">protests</a> and also helps them kind of intimidate, increase the fear, hoping that folks in other cities then will think twice over protesting,” Suzanne Adely, interim president of the National Lawyers Guild, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/prairieland-detention-center-shooting-antifa-trial-5650d9c3db0592671a1d5b5b27a47d2d" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told</a> The Associated Press.</p> <p>The administration promised it would be the first such case of many.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p>“The US lost today with this verdict.”</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>“Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities—not under President Trump,” Attorney General <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/pam-bondi" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pam Bondi</a> <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/antifa-cell-members-convicted-prairieland-ice-detention-center-shooting" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> in a statement Friday. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/trump-administration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trump administration</a> systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”</p> <p>The trial revolved around a nighttime protest at which participants planned to set off fireworks in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/solidarity" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">solidarity</a> with the around 1,000 <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/migrants" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">migrants</a> detained inside the Prarieland ICE facility. Some participants brought guns, which is legal in Texas, as The Intercept <a href="https://theintercept.com/2026/03/13/ice-protesters-terrorism-prairieland-antifa/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>.</p> <p>Sam Levine <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/texas-terrorism-trial?CMP=share_btn_url" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">explained</a> in The Guardian what happened next:</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>Shortly after arriving at the facility, two or three of the protesters broke away from the larger group and began spray painting cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. Two ICE detention guards came out and told the protesters to stop. A police officer arrived on the scene shortly after and drew his weapon at one of the people allegedly doing vandalism. One of the protesters was standing in the woods with an AR-15 and hit him in the shoulder. The officer would survive.</p> </blockquote> <p>At first, the federal government charged those arrested after the event with “attempted murder of a police officer,” <a href="https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/texas-antifa-trial-trump-terrorist" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to</a> NOTUS.</p> <p>However, that changed after Trump’s designation of antifa as a terror group in September and the release of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-war-on-critics" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">directs</a> federal law enforcement to target left-leaning groups and activities. The next month, the government’s case expanded to include terrorism charges.</p> <p>“This wouldn’t be a terrorism case if it weren’t for that memo,” one defense lawyer told NOTUS on background.</p> <p>The prosecution argued that the fact that the protesters wore black clothes to the protest was enough to convict them of material support for terrorism.</p> <p>“Providing your body as camouflage for others to do the enumerated acts is providing support,” Assistant US Attorney Shawn Smith said during closing arguments, as The Intercept <a href="https://theintercept.com/2026/03/12/antifa-ice-protest-texas-trial-terrorism/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a> on Thursday. “It’s impossible to tell who is doing what. That’s the point.”</p> <p>The defense, meanwhile, warned the jury about the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/free-speech" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">free speech</a> implications of the charge.</p> <p>“The government is asking you to put protesters in prison as terrorists. You are the only people who can stop that,” Blake Burns, an attorney for defendant Elizabeth Soto, said, according to The Guardian.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p>“When the villain is a made-up boogeyman then the target becomes ‘anyone who disagrees with Trump’—and this is the result.”</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>Ultimately, the jury <a href="https://prairielanddefendants.com/court-notes/federal-trial-verdict/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">decided</a> to convict eight defendants of material support for terrorism as well as riot, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and use and carry of an explosive. However, they dismissed attempts by the state to argue that the protest constituted a pre-planned ambush and charge four people who had not shot at the police officer with attempted murder and discharging a firearm during a crime. Only Benjamin Song, the alleged shooter, was charged with one count of attempted murder and three counts of discharging a firearm.</p> <p>The jury also convicted a ninth defendant, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, of conspiracy to conceal documents. Sanchez Estrada, who was not at the protest, had simply moved a box of zines out of his wife’s home after she was arrested for the protest, according to The Intercept.</p> <p>“The US lost today with this verdict,” Sanchez Estrada’s attorney, Christopher Weinbel, said, as AP reported.</p> <p>Support the Prarieland Defendants <a href="https://prairielanddefendants.com/updates/the-federal-trial-is-over-what-will-this-verdict-mean-for-dissent/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> in a statement, “Everything about this trial from beginning to end has proven what we have said all along: This is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top.”</p> <p>However, the group commended the solidarity that had sprung up among the defendants and their allies and vowed to continue to support them.</p> <p><strong>“</strong>We have a long journey ahead of us to continue fighting these charges along with the state level charges,” they said. “What happens here sets the tone for what’s to come. We are here and we won’t give up.”</p> <p>Outside observers warned about the implication for the right to protest under Trump.</p> <p>“Remember all the people who dismissed the alarm over NSPM-7 because ‘ANTIFA isn’t even a real organization’? We told you that didn’t matter. When the villain is a made-up boogeyman then the target becomes ‘anyone who disagrees with Trump’—and this is the result,” <a href="https://x.com/CMArchibald/status/2032789123593904229" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Cory Archibald, the co-founder of Track <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/aipac" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AIPAC</a> [American Israel Public Affairs Committee].</p> <p>Content creator Austin MacNamara <a href="https://x.com/gremloe/status/2032829840324260280" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>: “The Prairieland trial was given almost zero media coverage because of the blatant lies by DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and Police. This verdict now sets a precedent for criminalization of dissent across the board. Noise demos, Black-Bloc, pamphlets/zines/red cards, all of this can be used to imprison you.”</p> <p>Academic Nathan Goodman <a href="https://x.com/nathanpgoodman/status/2032575028575748202?s=46" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a> that convicting people of terrorism based on clothing was a “serious threat to the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/first-amendment" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">First Amendment</a>.”</p> <p>The verdict gives new poignancy to what defendant Meagan Morris told NOTUS ahead of the jury’s decision: “If we win, I think it shows that Trump’s mandate is not working, that the people understand that you can’t criminalize, you know, First and Second Amendment-protected activities. And I think if we lose, then… a lot of the country is OK with what’s going on. And it will be a much darker time, it’ll just signify a much increased crackdown on political opposition and free speech.”</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/threat-to-first-amendment-trump-admin-wins-first-antifa-terror-charge">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342038&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/threat-to-first-amendment-trump-admin-wins-first-antifa-terror-charge", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

‘Serious threat to the First Amendment’ as Trump admin wins first antifa terror charge

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Bruno Kreisky, a Social Democrat From a Different World With his pro-worker reforms and pacifist foreign policy, Bruno Kreisky was Austria’s greatest chancellor. His successes weren’t just a product of his own talent but of the powerful labor movement that shaped him.

Bruno Kreisky, a Social Democrat From a Different World

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#Fascism #Fail for #LNP is a gain for #PHON.

Don't get complacent. This is the plan. It's what #ClimateCriminals and the #Oligarchy want.

We must have a real #Left opposition to beat this.

#trump #maga #trumptrain #donaldtrump #narcissism #trumpmemes #authoritarian #trumpforprison #liberal #left #gaslight #lefty

The “Epstein Class” Investigates Itself The investment portfolio of the interim US Attorney for the Southern District of New York shows financial stakes in Epstein-associated financial institutions and Venezuelan oil interests. The Trump appointee stands to win big from his own investigations.

The “Epstein Class” Investigates Itself

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Jürgen Habermas Showed What Philosophy Could Be The death of Jürgen Habermas has left philosophy and the Left poorer. Central to his work was a profound critique of irrationality in all its forms. Taken seriously, his philosophy provides an indispensable guide in the struggle against oppression.

Jürgen Habermas Showed What Philosophy Could Be

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Wordle - A Wordle Alternative Guess the hidden word in 6 tries. A new puzzle is available each day.

#LeftWordle 1,730 3/6 ( #Left #Wordle )

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A Message for Iran Regime Apologists YouTube video by The Free Press

Message for #Iran #Regime #Apologists.

Elica le Bon explains how #far #right & #far #left found common cause,
how shaping global #information #war around #Iran,
the #privilege of living in a #liberal #democracy,
how that can #cloud people’s #judgment about #dictatorial #regimes.

How a Political Killing Took Over French Municipal Elections ### The death of French far-right activist Quentin Deranque one month ago has cast a shadow over elections typically focused on local concerns. * * * A half-torn sticker featuring the portrait of far right activist Quentin Deranque is pasted on a map of the Lyon metropolitan area. (Matthieu Delaty / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images) Typically, municipal elections tend to remain local affairs. Safety and security, cleanliness, city budgets, and access to services such as health care and education top the list of civic concerns in selecting mayors. This year in France, days before its thirty-five thousand cities and towns vote in the first municipal elections since 2020, another top-line order has been added, subtly shifting electoral dynamics in local races across the country: the shadow of political violence. On February 14, neofascist activist Quentin Deranque died, succumbing to injuries sustained two days earlier during street skirmishes between far-right groups and anti-fascists in Lyon. Video footage shows Deranque, a member of several neofascist groups, being beaten by members of the anti-fascist movement La Jeune Garde, some of whom were later revealed to be linked to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’smovement, La France Insoumise (LFI). Taking place almost exactly one month before elections, Deranque’s death and its political repercussions have had the effect of a fragmentation bomb, sending tiny pieces of shrapnel across the country. In the weeks after his death, France’s National Assembly observed a moment of silence for the young identitarian activist; LFI, already demonized by much of the French political class, was legally qualified as a “far-left” party and had to evacuate its Paris headquarters in a credible bomb scare; bouts of retaliatory violence against left-wing institutions occurred in cities across the country from Lille in the north to Toulouse in the south; and Nazi salutes were thrown as far-right groups marched in his memory in Lyon and across the country. This atmosphere has shifted the terms of debate in municipal races that normally focus on bread-and-butter issues onto the complex topic of political violence. From Marseille, thirty-one-year-old theater production assistant Baptiste Colin tells me that “local debates have taken a back seat, which is a shame.” “It seems to me that we’ve hardly succeeded anywhere in running [the 2026 municipal elections] as truly local elections,” he explains. “We really only have discussions at the national level — for or against Emmanuel Macron, for or against Mélenchon, for or against [former interior minister Bruno] Retailleau.” In the Phoenician port city, a televised debate between leading candidates veered into unplanned sparring over Deranque, leading the incumbent left-wing mayor Benoît Payan to lament in French daily _Le Monde_ that, “The half hour on Quentin wasn’t among the planned topics. . . . We wanted to talk about Marseille. “Instead of debating local policy, some candidates may be pressured or decide willingly to position themselves within a broader ideological struggle,” Rim-Sarah Alouane, a legal scholar and researcher in public law at the Université Toulouse Capitole, tells me. In Lyon, this struggle took place on the walls of city property. Days after the killing, businessman Jean-Michel Aulas, running under the banner of a coalition of right-wing parties and currently leading in the polls, took out a tribune in a local paper calling on his competitor, Green Party mayor Grégory Doucet, to display Deranque’s picture on city hall. While Deranque’s portrait was not ultimately put up there, it was shown on a nearby building belonging to the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of which Lyon is a part — and which is run by the Right. To Alix, a twenty-eight-year-old public policy student who lives in Lyon, Aulas’s call for an homage to Deranque was a “political error.” “He wasn’t a choirboy,” Alix — who insists that he’s more interested in hearing about urban planning than political violence in the municipal elections — tells me of Deranque. Nonetheless — as the Marseille debate showed — it seems that taking a stance on the killing, and often assigning fault, has become a prerequisite for this year’s municipal elections. “Today is not the time for controversy. It is a time for solemn reflection, respect, and solidarity,” Thierry Tsagalos, a candidate for the far-right National Rally in Montpellier wrote on X after Deranque’s death. “Let us remain united. Let us remain dignified. And let us not forget Quentin.” The post was nonetheless accompanied with several hashtags, including the names of LFI politicians Raphaël Arnault (cofounder of the Jeune Garde anti-fascist group) and Rima Hassan (who had spoken at a conference the day the violence broke out in Lyon) and, in all caps, the word “ASSASSINS.” The French far right has sought to capitalize on the killing to make inroads in cities where they previously struggled to exist, suggesting — despite historical statistics that prove otherwise — that it’s the Left and not the Right that’s responsible for political violence in France. In Tours, a city in the Loire Valley, a meeting for the far-right National Rally held after Deranque’s death was “packed,” with some attendees forced to sit on the floor, Pascal Montagne, a local photojournalist, tells me. “It was very successful, whereas before that wouldn’t have been the case.” A “Quentin bump”? Not necessarily, Montagne cautions — the far right was already rising locally before the killing. As Philippe Marlière has written in _the Guardian_ , the consequences of the Deranque death have also played out in local left-wing alliance-making in advance of the municipal elections — important, too, because city councils help determine the make-up of the French Senate. Despite being part of a broad left-wing coalition in snap elections held in summer 2024, LFI has found itself isolated — and physically threatened, with multiple aggressions of campaign staff signaled across the country. In Paris, a spokesperson for LFI’s Sophia Chikirou tells me that, contrary to media reports and some polling, the attacks against the left-wing party have actually “mobilized widely” in favor of the party. “A lot of new party activists have signed up. On the ground we have the impression many people are going to vote.” In Paris’s diverse tenth arrondissement, LFI list head Marion Beauvalet says that despite initially worrying about the impact it might have on her campaign, Deranque’s death “is not at all a topic that comes up.” “For many people, the issues that are important are local ones,” including housing, childcare, and the cost of living. Colin, the theater producer in Marseille, who situates himself on the left, insists that these local issues matter. “A town hall that pivots right will make a difference for associations like mine,” many of which are subsidized by municipal governments. “A town hall that pivots to the far right, that makes an even bigger difference.” He brings up a recent football competition between Marseille, where he lives, and Lyon, where he grew up, as an example of France’s division. At the match, Lyon fans carried signs with Deranque’s face. Marseille fans responded with a different sort of message: “Marseille against racism.” * * *

How a Political Killing Took Over French Municipal Elections

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Socialists Need a Distinctive Economic Policy Agenda ### As democratic socialism returns to the US public eye, socialists need to make clear how their vision differs from the liberalism most Americans are familiar with. Here are five crucial distinctive elements of a socialist policy agenda. * * * The popularity of Zohran Mamdani’s baby steps in the directions of democratic socialism attests to their political viability. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images) It’s increasingly difficult for US political commentators to neglect the centrality of socialism to the country’s affairs. We now see a spate of polling results and other commentary testifying to the popularity of socialist ideas, if not the label, as well as to the prospects of rising political stars like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Katie Wilson in Seattle, and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis. Whenever democratic socialism has a moment in the mainstream media, as it is having now, pundits and reporters ponder what “democratic socialism” really means. Those on the Left speculate on how, if at all, it differs from “social democracy” — generally taken to refer to the more egalitarian economic arrangements observed in the Nordic countries, and to a lesser extent across Western Europe. The relationship between democratic socialism and social democracy is a matter of dispute on the Left, but in general, democratic socialists imagine a more far-reaching transformation of economy and society than they expect from social democracy. I would contend that democratic socialism and social democracy are more alike than different, and so the term “social democrat” can be kosher again. The important justifications for seeing a close connection between democratic socialism and social democracy are twofold. First, in practical political terms in the here and now, they are identical. Take Medicare for All (M4A), for instance. Whatever you think M4A is or should be, there is nothing inconsistent between M4A advocacy, social democracy, and democratic socialism. Second, the European nations whose policies most Americans are comfortable with — and that American socialists like Bernie Sanders point to as models — often are led by governments and parties that self-identify as social democratic. It’s the word “socialism” that tends to scares Americans, not the content offered by most socialist politicians. Yet while the terminology of “socialism” still scares many people, “social democracy” is unfamiliar and foreign-sounding, so it is not a very politically effective label either. Clearly, Mamdani, Wilson, and Fateh, among others, are finding a language that appeals, without running away from the socialist label. "The chief means for conquering alienation is increasing democratic control of the economy." In the immediate term, then, the difference between the two concepts may not matter too much. Unless you think the capitalist state can be replaced wholesale, in one fell swoop, you are interested in politically feasible reforms achieved through our maddeningly dysfunctional democratic processes. The “socialist reforms” that many are finding digestible are not categorically different from the common and old advances of social democracy in Europe, so by all means, let’s have more of it. And the popularity of figures like Mamdani, Sanders, Fateh, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are due to the prospects they offer for reforms, not to a revolutionary smashing of the state. Some on the Left, including fellow _Jacobin_ contributors, want to stress the difference between the status quo and socialists’ desired end state. In so doing, however, there is the risk of glossing over the essential, inescapable path from here to there and narrowing socialists’ political appeal and accomplishments. My contention is that socialism is as much about the steps toward the goal as the goal itself. Neither means anything without the other. Socialism is an important brand, but it is something more: it reflects a particular objective — in a nutshell, the reduction of alienation in the Marxian sense. The chief means for conquering alienation is increasing democratic control of the economy. Following Karl Marx, the central democratic decision is the disposition of the aggregate accumulation of “surplus value,” including the composition, distribution, and level of net investment. National economic planning would be opened up to popular input. At the enterprise or business-firm level, workers would take over management of day-to-day operations. This is all foreign to liberalism but not to social democracies around the world (though the extent of worker management in social democratic countries is still rather limited). When Sanders broke the national political ice on the word “socialism” in 2016, I recall sappy messages to the effect that “socialism is nice; even your public library is socialist.” But that’s wrong — socialism is so much more than that. Here I want to describe some economic policy projects that might define a distinctively socialist (or social democratic) approach to policy in the United States today, one that pushes beyond the frontiers of liberalism. These are differences in kind, not of degree. For the principal US social democratic projects, I suggest the following breakdown: 1. Labor power 2. Industrial policy 3. Social insurance 4. Social ownership 5. Anti-federalism There are traces of all of these in the history of liberal social policy, but I want to highlight the categorical distinctions between liberal and socialist approaches to each element. Such distinctions can give rise to political themes and to explicit campaigns. (Socialists also crucially differ from liberals in our commitment to internationalism and our opposition to the United States’ militaristic imperialism. But I focus here on the distinctive elements of socialists’ domestic policy agenda.) # Labor Power The great liberal John Kenneth Galbraith proposed or at least popularized the idea of “countervailing power” as a justification for elevating trade unionism. The implication was the desirability of a “fair” political competition between labor and capital. Who needs fair? As anarchists say, “No gods, no masters!” We want to stack the deck in favor of the working class — or at least unstack it from its contemporary extremely biased state. This is one distinction between socialism and liberalism. There has been plenty of thinking done about how to do this, but the objectives are clear: remove constraints on union organizing and agitation. "Liberalism has been historically unfriendly to industrial policy, in obeisance to the mythical free market." The Obama administration disgraced itself in this context by its weak support for the public employee upsurge in Wisconsin. Both Barack Obama and, before him, Bill Clinton sold out their own allies in labor with their advocacy of anti-worker “free trade” deals. Joe Biden made a bit of a splash by not merely calling for labor peace and a labor-management kumbaya but by explicitly favoring the contract sought by the United Auto Workers in their historic strike against the Big Three automakers. It says a lot about the Democratic Party that this was an unusual milestone. # Industrial Policy Again, we got a taste of industrial policy (IP) under Biden and now a bit more, albeit of a perverse nature, under Donald Trump. The idea is to restructure the economy — to shift the composition of what is produced — in the direction of higher-value-added industries. That means higher profits and wages and ultimately more tax revenue. Liberalism has been historically unfriendly to IP, in obeisance to the mythical free market. How would IP be pursued? The first problem is to determine which industries to expand and then to reckon with which ones would contract (and disemploy people, often at great personal financial harm). The tools for Biden’s attempt at IP were disproportionately tax credits. Relief for anyone negatively affected was usually nonexistent, though Biden broke this pattern temporarily with his extraordinary COVID-era expansion of unemployment benefits. For Trump, it’s whatever idea comes into his howling wilderness of a mind, legalities aside. His objective here has been showing off, to demonstrate that our national CEO can deliver tangible factories and good manufacturing jobs. It’s mostly a con. If anything, the scandal of the Georgia raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the ensuing mistreatment of Korean workers will have a negative impact on foreign direct investment in the United States. For socialists, the tools for IP would be a mix of direct grants, loan guarantees, and public enterprise. An important qualification is to ensure transition assistance for workers negatively affected by structural changes in the economy in the short term. An obvious candidate for IP is production in the service of transition away from fossil fuels. That means solar, wind, and maybe nuclear. (I’m skeptical of the latter because I doubt our regulatory apparatus is up to enforcing prudent safety standards, but I won’t get further into that thicket of weeds.) For energy aficionados, there is also the need for a robust, national power grid. A negative example of IP has been the US government’s historic support for automobile transportation and lack of investment in social transit. A leading case is our pathetic intercity passenger rail system, aka Amtrak. There are also urban intraregional rail systems begging for upgrades, support for which is plausibly in the national interest. "For socialists, the tools for industrial policy would be a mix of direct grants, loan guarantees, and public enterprise." The climate benefits of social transit are obvious. Since our metro regions are the drivers of the national economy, so, too, is the health of the cities at their centers. We may be getting a teaspoon of this with Mamdani’s free buses — hopefully a prelude to more. One branch of IP is trade policy. Here, too, we see a clear difference between liberal and social democratic approaches. Trade policy can be used to actively restructure a domestic economy, not merely to facilitate whatever corporations are wont to do. Liberalism tends to default to the latter, since traditionally Democrats have been in bed with Big Tech companies and finance, who desire government protection of their “intellectual property.” As mentioned above, a common objective of IP is supporting higher-value-added industries. This of course is what most other nations want to do as well, so negotiation is required to get a division of the spoils that is superior to whatever would happen absent such negotiations — a different kind of trade deal. Trade deals can serve IP goals, and not incidentally, the interests of labor. Liberals, with their emphasis on free-trade deals that effectively prioritize the interests of capital, have been on the wrong side of this struggle. Another branch of IP emphasized by liberals is antitrust. Again, the underlying motivation for breaking up big corporations is for the sake of a mythical free market, a delusion upheld by liberalism. It is true, there can be opportunities to enhance market efficiency by breaking up monopolies. But what tends to be overlooked is the option of _replacing_ monopolies with public enterprises. That’s the social democratic or socialist alternative. # Social Insurance The chief basis for social welfare in the social democratic nations of Europe has been their social insurance schemes. The idea is you tax people to finance benefits against likely, adverse events, what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “the great disturbing factors of life.” Injury, illness, and involuntary unemployment are top of the list, followed directly by retirement, disability, and death of the family breadwinner. Social insurance should not necessarily be financed through progressive taxation; the idea is people should be willing to pay for what we are selling. If they aren’t, something is wrong with us or with the product. One benefit of the approach is that it provides political robustness to a program. It’s harder to take something away if people have been paying for it and feel they are owed a debt. The liberal commentary about social insurance has been unhelpful. In the case of Social Security, it has featured flat-out bogus predictions of insolvency or crackpot remedies such as individual, privatized stock market accounts. Long ago, someone suggested that, if he hadn’t been consumed by the scandal with Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton might have wrecked Social Security with privatization. In the case of health care, we have of course the Rube Goldberg Obamacare system. I would not deny it was an improvement in its time, but more straightforward, simpler models are available and on view in other countries. Even here in the United States, we still have the federal Veterans Administration, which employs its own doctors and provides health care directly. "The chief basis for social welfare in the social democratic nations of Europe has been their social insurance schemes." The biggest poison pill in Obamacare was spurious, liberal defense of deficit reduction that constrained the subsidies made available to the insured. At the root of Obama’s crippled health care reform effort was the Democratic establishment’s mantra “We believe in the market.” Of course, if they had a clue what a market really is, either in ideal terms or in the real world, their behavior would be very different. But the Left has also been mixed up about social insurance, including cash benefits. In the matter of health insurance, it is reduced to the slogan of taxing the rich to pay for M4A. First, socialism will require more dough than we can get just by taxing the rich and corporations. The idea of focusing taxes on the rich has reached absurd lengths with the Democratic Party’s now-standard assurances that it doesn’t want to further tax anyone earning less than $400,000 annually, or some similarly ridiculous number. Second, M4A is an empty box. What is it, exactly? Existing Medicare, for all? I’m on it, and no thanks. Medicare covers only 80 percent of catastrophic expenses. For most, including me, 20 percent of a catastrophic expense is still a catastrophe. Furthermore, it’s hard to find doctors who accept Medicare patients. Some other version of Medicare? What exactly? The possibilities are endless, and you wouldn’t like some of them. The Left needs to deliver specifics about what its envisioned national health system, or national health insurance plan, would look like, including how it will be realistically financed. On cash assistance, we have the faux-left dead end known as the universal basic income (UBI). Not for nothing have some libertarians latched onto it. The hope is to set up all cash assistance to be like “welfare,” then come in swinging with the wrecking ball. If you’re for socialism, consider what social democratic governments actually do: it’s social insurance, not UBI. # Social Ownership Here we are out past Bernieland. Bernie says he is uninterested in “nationalizing the means of production.” (So am I, to be honest; I don’t want the US Congress trying to run Nvidia.) That hasn’t stopped Sanders from making some friendly noises about Trump’s machinations in establishing US government stakes in tech companies, however. As usual, there are many incremental way stations. Once again, Mamdani gives us a taste with his public grocery stores. At one point, in the teeth of the COVID-19 pandemic, even the loathsome Andrew Cuomo fiddled with the idea of New York State producing protective equipment to deal with the Trump administration’s shortages. In 2020, California governor Gavin Newsom took steps to acquire COVID supplies the federal government was failing to provide. Perhaps the two most pressing needs for social ownership are in the fields of energy policy and housing. In both, the private sector has proved itself utterly inadequate. We rely too much on fossil fuels, and housing costs, due in large part to supply shortages, have become prohibitive for aspiring homeowners and renters. It perhaps feels a little easy to say, “Well, the government can build this stuff.” But it is also true. As I mentioned above, we will need much more revenue to do so, a bullet most liberals are not willing to bite. "Perhaps the two most pressing needs for social ownership are in the fields of energy policy and housing." Social democrats can first sell the program; if you build it, people will be willing to pay. Liberals usually wring their hands and lead with, “Gee, how will we pay for it?” But if what you build is more beneficial than foregone tax revenues, it is more difficult for the other side to take it down. If it is not, then somebody screwed up somewhere. # Anti-Federalism Finally, there is the conundrum of US federalism. Decentralization of the public sector in the United States is extreme by international standards and retards economic and social progress. Back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, “anti-federalism” meant opposition to a strong central government, in favor of states; I mean the opposite. Centralization begins with an expanded revenue system — more taxes, and not exclusively progressive ones. Such revenues could go to the states in part while serving the purposes described above. Some public services are properly national in scope and require federal design, funding, and management. Examples already mentioned are intercity rail and a national power grid. Transition off of fossil fuels must be a national policy, though implementation can and will likely be decentralized and incremental. What’s so bad about federalism? Income and wealth, as they are in most nations, are unevenly distributed geographically. The larger the nation, the greater the burdens of a unitary central government. Insofar as we assign taxing and spending to local jurisdictions, we get inadequate public funding and gross inequality. A state tax is better than a blizzard of local taxes. For one thing, it raises more revenue, even if the rate is the same. And a federal tax is better than fifty state taxes. It is possible to take the principle too far, since people have sorted themselves out geographically, to some extent, based on preferences for public services, and it is possible to excessively flout those preferences. I would say we presently have the reverse problem, however — too much indulgence to decentralized finance. # A Social Democratic Alternative On all these dimensions, social democratic or socialist policy visions are categorically or conceptually distinct from “more liberalism.” In a nutshell, the Left can make political hay by advocating more power for labor, industrial policy, social insurance, social ownership, and less federalism. These are well-regarded ideas. Making clear that democratic socialist politics need not mean a pell-mell avalanche of new and unfamiliar programs can reduce people’s fears about the ideology. The popularity of Mamdani’s baby steps in these directions attests to their political viability, as do the polls that suggest that people are receptive to the content of democratic socialism, even if the label makes some apprehensive. A common alternative understanding of democratic socialism foregrounds the question of the political power of the working class. I find this notion amorphous. Who, exactly, is the working class, and how does it, whatever “it” is, win and exercise that power? One idea in this vein is worker ownership, or at least worker control of workplaces. There is no question such an arrangement would be an improvement, but the gains can be exaggerated too. Workers at a particular workplace could be as collectively self-seeking as the owner they replaced, and there are still all the problems inherent in commodity production. There are also questions about how control without ownership would be meaningful or how the transfer of firm ownership should be financed. "In a nutshell, the Left can make political hay by advocating more power for labor, industrial policy, social insurance, social ownership, and less federalism." Worker ownership of individual firms encounters the same problem as local financing of public services that I discussed in _Jacobin_ recently. There will be rich firms and poor firms, and their geographic locations will be haphazard, fomenting inequality. Labor management of firms is a benign improvement, but it seems a dubious candidate for a _systemic_ improvement. So, too, with cooperatives or renters’ unions. Of course, these are not novel ideas nor is there anything wrong with them. There have been attempts in the past, and there are many existing examples. But in the absence of broader change, their spread would still leave us with capitalism. A socialist vision has to go beyond the atomized management of firms or a proliferation of cooperatives. The crucial political point is to grasp a _dynamic_ of comprehensive change, through the inauguration and expansion of progressive policies and institutions that strengthen workers’ bargaining power and expand democratic public control over the economy. Socialists championing these reforms can offer a robust, realistic alternative to liberalism while showing the American public that the “S-word” is nothing to be afraid of. And if they start by enacting just some elements of this agenda, they can grow momentum and popular support for more changes to build a less alienated economy. * * *

Socialists Need a Distinctive Economic Policy Agenda

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Trump’s St Patrick’s Day Party Will Be a Celebration of War ### Ireland’s taoiseach, Micheál Martin, will be paying homage to Donald Trump on St Patrick’s Day. Irish public opinion is strongly opposed to the US war on Iran and the Gaza genocide, but Martin and his allies are anxious to stay on Trump’s good side. * * * Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin presents Donald Trump with a bowl of clover during a St Patrick’s Day event in the East Room of the White House on March 12, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images) Another humiliation awaits Ireland’s premier Micheál Martin in the coming days at the hands of the Trump administration. At last year’s St Patrick’s Day event in the White House, an annual jamboree of Irish groveling and American paddywhackery, Donald Trump charged the Taoiseach and his “beautiful island” with stealing the US pharmaceutical industry while openly fretting about the loss of the “Irish vote” if he “drained” the country in retaliation. Right on cue, Martin curled up in Trump’s lap, obediently pointing out that his government had, in fact, fought the EU’s tax-avoidance case against Apple in the European Court of Justice. The meeting took place less than two months into Trump’s second, more radical administration, when he was already revealing a desire to dismantle the international order on which the hyper-globalized Irish economy relies for its booming budget surpluses and eye-watering corporate tax receipts. In 2024, 46 percent of Irish corporate tax was paid by three American multinationals: Apple, Microsoft, and Eli Lilly. Within weeks, Trump had unleashed a battery of global tariffs, causing one onlooker in an American investment–reliant Irish town to worry about the local economy being “blown to bits.” In MAGA circles, Ireland’s export surplus with the United States was being talked about with increasing regularity and intensifying venom. Shortly after Martin’s obsequious display, Howard Lutnick, the US Secretary of Commerce, described the Irish economic model as his favorite “tax scam.” In the Irish tax haven, we have since seen a minor reevaluation of American leadership, although it is difficult to tell at this stage whether this is temporary or permanent. One can discern a tactical softening in the government’s line on China with regard to trade and security, and support in some quarters for the goal of European industrial autonomy. The _Irish Times_ editorial board recently gestured toward a redefinition of the Ireland-US relationship. Another commentator called more explicitly for a partial decoupling from “excessive dependence” on the United States in favor of “deeper integration with the EU.” # Sentimental Attachment Just as the transatlantic alliance frays, however, Irish political elites seem to be latching onto both the geopolitical ambitions of the EU and the imperial prerogatives of NATO. In their comfort zones, they have delivered cautiously critical statements on Gaza and Greenland, yet Martin happily condones Washington’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and refuses to condemn the illegal war on Iran. These “FDI nationalists” — meaning foreign direct investment — know what side their bread is buttered on. "Irish political elites seem to be latching onto both the geopolitical ambitions of the EU and the imperial prerogatives of NATO." With global neoliberalism in deep crisis, and the United States violently retreating from its informal empire, we seem to be entering an era defined less by a clean form of multipolarity than by a messy state of non-hegemony, with multiple power centers struggling for control over “financial, trade, production, energy, and technological networks.” Some of this struggle is beginning to take shape in Ireland, threatening to militarize the domestic economy, liquidate neutrality, and drag the state ever closer to the heart of the European and American security establishments. In the most recent US National Security Strategy, the Trump administration singled out few specific countries except Ireland and Britain, declaring that “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.” This invites the question: What is Ireland’s new position in the world system? Whether Britain or the United States held global primacy, Ireland has long been something of an “intermediating periphery” in what the worlds-system theorist Denis O’Hearn once dubbed the “Atlantic economy.” Yet Ireland’s semi-peripheral position in the world system is mutating. Already a global profit-shifting center for US tech and pharmaceutical giants, it now appears to be becoming, as Patrick Bresnihan, Patrick Brodie, and Rory Rowan have stressed, a “strategic, infrastructural frontier” between the United States and Europe in this age of geopolitical competition for supremacy in technologies like AI and semiconductors. Stigmatized as a defense laggard, a security freeloader, an economic leech, the southern Irish state is under sustained rhetorical attack by European, British, and American elites. This small country on the edge of Western Europe has no option, the argument goes, but to embrace the new world disorder. The Irish government has signaled its intention to bring forward plans to abolish the triple lock, which requires overlapping mandates from the United Nations, the government, and the Dáil to send more than twelve Irish Defence Forces personnel overseas. It recently placed the country’s critical infrastructure on a “war footing” due to unevidenced and highly exaggerated “warnings” of Russian sabotage (and Chinese espionage) during the state’s upcoming EU presidency. Following the lead of war hawks in Brussels, it plans to fortify European militarization by enhancing the EU-NATO relationship. In its first Maritime Security Strategy, released in February, the government laid out measures to protect Irish waters and subsea infrastructure, the majority of which concerned increased cooperation with Britain, France, and NATO. This includes working through the framework of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (composed of ten NATO members). Plans are also afoot to deploy the country’s first defense attachés to Washington, Paris, and London: Ireland’s most important “strategic partnerships.” # FDI Militarization In a one-sided debate that is increasingly pitched in a paranoid register, politicians and pundits are selling these moves against Irish neutrality to the Irish public not as choices but acts of necessity and as preventive measures against Russian imperialism in particular. Bresnihan, Brodie, and Rowan rightly see such actions as part of a wider process that they refer to as “FDI militarization.” This political-economic shift, as undemocratic as it is reckless, has two key characteristics: the securitization of Ireland’s expanding green and tech infrastructure, and a related push for greater geopolitical alignment with NATO and the EU militarization project to protect against these “vulnerabilities.” This conveniently presents further economic opportunities for American capitalists and investors. "The Irish business lobby is loudly demanding increased defense spending to achieve what is euphemistically called ‘strategic resilience.’" Those pushing this agenda present Ireland’s military neutrality and comparatively meager defense spending not merely as obstacles to “security” but also as hindrances to economic growth and the flow of foreign direct investment from the United States. This is a bleak vision of Ireland as a dual-use exporter, defense tech–hoster, and NATO-collaborator: a notionally neutral proxy in the Atlantic doing its bit to fight the West’s enemies (phantom or real) and protect US tech infrastructure. Why shouldn’t Ireland, the European outpost of Silicon Valley, share in the spoils of ReARM Europe and other EU defense spending initiatives? Keen to turn Ireland into a better-armed tech protectorate of sorts, the Irish business lobby is loudly demanding increased defense spending to achieve what is euphemistically called “strategic resilience.” Having identified “sectors of interest” (air defenses, cyber, radar, space, cryptology, satellite communications, maritime, chemical), the government is mulling the removal of legal barriers that prevent Enterprise Ireland from participating in contracts of “primarily military relevance.” In another break with Irish political precedent, it is considering setting up a new national security agency to clear sensitive defense contracts. An economist for one of Ireland’s largest banks suggests that the rising popularity of weight loss drugs (a new staple of “Irish” exports) could “offset some of the negative effects of US tariffs in other sectors.” The Irish government and the bullish Industrial Development Authority (IDA), the semi-state agency in charge of chasing FDI, also hopes to lure more semiconductor companies, scale up AI investment and data center infrastructure, and liberalize the Irish financial services regime. As the _Financial Times_ reported last summer, some small Irish tech companies, mostly in the fields of radar, AI, and surveillance tech, are also seeking to take advantage of European rearmament. One tech executive, a founding director of the Irish Defence and Security Association (IDSA), an arms lobby group, asserted that Ireland “could be the leaders in the area of dual-use technology.” Could we see the development of an Irish Palantir? The online news outlet _The Ditch_ has consistently reported on the more clandestine aspects of this FDI militarization. Last year, it unearthed internal IDSA documents that revealed plans to lobby politicians and change the minds of a people largely uninterested in the arms industry and defense spending. It has also shown how international arms lobbyists held a secret meeting with Department of Defence officials in 2024. The following year, the Department of Enterprise, directly responsible for screening FDI, met the IDSA in a “strictly confidential meeting” at a private members’ club. # British Intrigues At home, the professed goal is to strengthen security against an amorphous Russian-Chinese menace, and against Russian hybrid threats in particular. Yet very little evidence exists that Russia has anything but a cursory interest in Ireland. Across the Irish Sea, though, MI5-linked think tanks, figures in the British defense establishment, and warmongering members of ascendant right-wing parties are talking openly of reclaiming Ireland in geostrategic terms. "Very little evidence exists that Russia has anything but a cursory interest in Ireland." Speaking at a lobbying event held by a pro-union think-tank, Chris Parry, a retired Royal Navy admiral and failed mayoral candidate for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, hinted that NATO should conduct naval exercises in Irish waters without Irish approval. Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, recently remarked that “Ireland’s position in the Atlantic has always made it pretty critical to British defence.” In 2024, the Policy Exchange think tank released a report that made the case for a renewed focus on Ireland as a British security priority, including the resurrection of British naval and air bases in the north. In unfashionable language, it declares that the preservation of the “strategic unity of the Union is an inextricable component of British grand strategy,” presenting “British military draw-down” after the Good Friday Agreement as a regrettable mistake. A more recent Policy Exchange report similarly concludes that the UK needs to reject Irish reunification out of hand. Disappointingly for Britons who strive for a more independent role in the world, the report insists that the Irish example should demonstrate to the UK that it (somehow) needs to shackle itself even more tightly, in both economic and geopolitical terms, to the United States. Dublin’s track record supposedly involves a loss in influence in Washington caused by foreign policy “activism,” slack security, and low defense spending. While it may be difficult to imagine a more self-subordinated UK, a descent down into this level of servility would be unsurprising given the proud “imperial lackeydom” of the English political and media class. Where the United States walks, Britain usually runs. But why should Ireland follow their destructive paths? # Post-Atlanticism In one sense, an inchoate militarized FDI regime in Ireland is, as Bresnihan and Brodie observe, a “radical transformation of Ireland’s position in world affairs.” Yet one can also see it simply as a rebrand of the old economic growth model, updated for this volatile era of tariffs, sanctions, genocide, and rearmament. "A blitz of propaganda about cyberwar and hybrid threats has had little effect on Irish public opinion." A blitz of propaganda about cyberwar and hybrid threats has had little effect on Irish public opinion. Polls continue to show strong support for the current policy of neutrality and plurality backing for the triple lock, even when the wording of the question is transparently loaded to encourage opposition to it. A whopping 71 per cent of respondents also said they support enshrining the current model of neutrality in the constitution. With his eye fixed on obtaining a post-government sinecure in Brussels, as is the case for most senior politicians in Ireland, Martin quickly shot down this proposal by claiming that a referendum could “straitjacket the government democratically forever” on matters of defense and security. Pro-neutrality activists would counter that, in a notional republic, democratizing foreign policy is precisely the point of such a move. A truly independent foreign policy and a reimagining of Ireland’s role in the world system require a reckoning with the current economic model. These are not separate phenomena, and pro-neutrality activism is not a distraction from anti-capitalist politics. But the broad Irish left, including its radical socialist groupings, sometimes struggle to offer an alternative vision of the Irish economy. It, too, is afflicted by a sort of “tax haven realism.” A radical reunification, one that abolishes both existing statelets, develops a new, sustainable economic model, and breathes new life into Irish democracy, is perhaps one way Ireland could begin to plow a more independent path in world politics. # Strategic Crossroads There is no doubt that the country faces a strategic crossroads. Does it double down on FDI flows and further embed itself within the imperial transatlantic order, or retain its neutral ethos to fight for a peaceful multipolarity, argue for transformative reforms to the EU, and promote some kind of “critical integration with China”? As the decaying American empire convulses and lashes out, can it embrace a post-Atlanticism, a new internationalism rooted in global solidarity and truer to its native anti-imperial traditions? Someone who understands this tension well is Irish president Catherine Connolly, the first socialist to win a national election in Ireland, who is coming under fire from her own government for allegedly overstepping the political boundaries of her ceremonial role. While some have praised Spain’s Pedro Sánchez as one of the only European leaders to condemn the US-Israeli onslaught in Iran, Connolly really does stand alone as perhaps the sole elected leader on the continent to consistently and unconditionally oppose creeping EU militarization and US-NATO warmongering. In her inauguration speech, she laid out a positive vision for Ireland’s role in the world. “As a sovereign independent nation with a long and cherished tradition of neutrality and an uninterrupted record of peacekeeping since 1958, Ireland is particularly well placed to lead and articulate alternative diplomatic solutions to conflict and war,” she said, tapping into the republican-tinged anti-imperialism that still strikes a note in Ireland. Indeed, she continued, the Irish experience of colonialism and anti-colonialism “gives us a lived understanding of dispossession, hunger, and war and a mandate for Ireland to lead.” * * *

Trump’s St Patrick’s Day Party Will Be a Celebration of War

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The #right & #FarRight spread lies & hatred about us on the #left, but they can all fuck off!

But, one thing that is for sure, we MUST unite to defeat these vile bastards.

All parties on the #Left - & NO, this doesn't include #Labour, must unite & work together to defeat the establishment parties & to defeat the rise of the #FarRight.

#GreenParty #PlaidCymru #SNP #YourParty

Interesting!

We've all suspected for a while that the remaining #Labour MPs on the #Left could defect to the #GreenParty, but who had the #LibDems defecting on their bingo card??

Could defecting MPs boost the chance of a #Green govt or hinder it?

Hopefully boost, IMHO, depending who they are.

youtu.be/1oGwP3YUu2A?...

#LEFT

And the Oscar Goes to … Men Not at Work Our male protagonists – or perhaps men more broadly – are searching for meaning, solace, or glory anywhere but in the workplace. The trend represents a collective ambiguity about the point of work.

And the Oscar Goes to … Men Not at Work

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Working-Class Resistance Forced ICE Out of Minneapolis In Minneapolis, a new generation of activists is challenging Donald Trump, reviving labor militancy, and scoring victories. Next stop: May Day 2026.

Working-Class Resistance Forced ICE Out of Minneapolis

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Wordle - A Wordle Alternative Guess the hidden word in 6 tries. A new puzzle is available each day.

#LeftWordle 1,729 3/6 ( #Left #Wordle )

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

https://left-wordle.com/

Hasan Piker on Why the US Empire Is in Decline We’re living in the imperial end times, argues Hasan Piker. With Trump entering a quagmire in Iran after having cast off America’s allies, a new era of belligerence, cruelty, and MAGA fascism looms over the home front.

Hasan Piker on Why the US Empire Is in Decline

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A Post-Order World ### As US power declines, it is destroying the norms and institutions that once organized its international projection of authority. While the US is losing its leadership role, no single power is replacing it as a global hegemon. * * * If the international order has now come to an end, it is because consent for US empire has broken down. (Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images) If there was still any doubt about our coordinates after a decade of shocks to the normal order of things, the disorientating opening of this year has confirmed that we are not in Kansas anymore. A new geopolitics is taking form, particularly evident in the ongoing US-Israeli bombardment of Iran, in the US abduction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, and in the positioning of European troops in Greenland following Donald Trump’s claims on the island. Since the financial crisis of 2007–8, incipient challenges to the primacy of US power, as well as political turbulence within Western capitalist democracies, have provoked the production of a considerable body of angsty writing about the end of things. Much of this writing, as it pertains to the imperial situation now commonly referred to as “international order,” expresses the desire for a “return” to stability. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that so many commentators on international affairs, of different political allegiance, have repeated the famous statement on “interregnum” authored by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci: a period in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Today such anticipation of “the new” in the international system tends to betray a pursuit of partial restoration of “the old,” premised on the idea that order can be a product of the will, of the kind of moral entrepreneurship exercised in previous decades by the cadres of global civil service and the executives of aid agencies and financial institutions. But there is no guarantee that a new order will be established. The concept of international order, as it is generally understood today, describing a global arrangement of governing norms and institutions, is a bequest of the twentieth century, and more specifically of the period of US hegemony. In fact, while usage of this concept increased steadily in the second half of the twentieth century, it spiked dramatically over the last decade and a half, in precisely the moment of putative collapse of international order. But it’s worth exploring Gramsci’s argument a bit more closely. In his thinking, order depends upon hegemony: that is, it depends not only, or primarily, on coercion but on “spontaneous consent.” The interregnum, he argued, is precisely a moment of hegemonic crisis, produced by a loss of authority and “leadership” that leaves only domination. Though Gramsci was concerned with the means through which the ruling class reproduces its power, his definition of hegemony has often been applied to international relations. If the international order consolidated in the aftermath of World War II has now come to an end, it is because consent for US empire has broken down. American hegemony derived from a material structure: initially from the development of an unparalleled industrial base that enabled its projection of economic and military power; and then from the transformation of global trade and finance into mechanisms for the reproduction of this power. This material structure produced an international complex of dependencies upon US empire, which, in turn, nurtured consent to its global leadership among other states and their ruling classes. If they were partially shaped by struggles “from below,” institutions of global governance — those of the United Nations, most obviously — were conditioned by US authority and a sufficient consensus with respect to it. However, the material structure of American hegemony no longer exists. In pursuit of new opportunities for profit, US capitalism evolved over the last quarter of the twentieth century into a neoliberal regime of asset appreciation, partly through deregulation and financialization. Significantly increasing the value of the dollar, high interest rates in the United States provoked an explosion of global debt, cutting short import-substitution industrialization across much of capitalism’s periphery. However, they also accelerated the offshoring of American industry and created opportunity for the rise of national competitors to the United States, among which China eventually emerged as the most important. This competition then fragmented the authority of the United States itself. Conducted without any attempt to formulate a coherent pretext, the attack on Venezuela by the United States provided perhaps the clearest demonstration to date that it is prepared to exercise coercion without consent, or, in the words of Indian historian Ranajit Guha, “dominance without hegemony.” Neither the overextension of US empire through warmaking nor the exhaustion of its propaganda is primarily responsible for the crisis of its hegemony. Rather, the main cause is its creation of conditions for economic challenges to its pursuit of global power, a contradictory consequence of its expansion. Amid the ruins of the old order, however, it is far from clear how the material structure able to sustain a new one might take form. US empire retains much of its might, with the unmatched budget and reach of its military, the global reference of its currency, and the market dominance of its biggest firms. Any prospect of subordinating it in a system instead ordered by Chinese hegemony seems inconceivable without a direct and large-scale military confrontation, involving the possible use of nuclear weapons. And, for all the features that distinguish the Chinese regime of accumulation from US capitalism, it is increasingly suffering from similar pathologies: falling productivity and demand, along with deflationary pressures, suggestive of a secular stagnation exacerbated by industrial overcapacity, rising debt, and a rapidly aging population. It seems likely, then, that we are now entering a time _after order_ , a time of enduring hegemonic crisis. Some might read this situation as a revival of the _status quo ante_ , since, in the long sweep of modern history, the American century was exceptional for the global extent of hegemony exercised by a leading power. However, contrary to the emerging common sense, this does not imply return to a geostrategic dispute managed through “spheres of influence” — a legalistic arrangement associated with the late nineteenth century, through which colonial powers divided mostly distant territories. There is no pact of noninterference between the United States and China; and, while both will most forcefully assert primacy over their respective regions, neither will manage to expel the other. The world after order is giving form to a “zonal geopolitics,” in which different terms of great-power dispute will likely prevail across different geographic zones. This is a more unstable and dangerous interimperial arrangement, and it has significant implications for international governance and cooperation. Those rightly concerned with developing international institutions to protect sovereignty and constrain empire might be well-advised to focus their efforts regionally and on the formation of blocs that can compel great powers to moderate pursuit of their own particularist interests. * * *

A Post-Order World

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Europe’s Far Right Want to Be American Vassals Europe’s far-right parties have long boasted about putting their own countries’ interests first but now slavishly support the latest US-Israeli war. While they opt for vassalage, antiwar forces have turned out to be the real defenders of sovereignty.

Europe’s Far Right Want to Be American Vassals

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Late Night Musings Late Night Musings Hey Copilot, Philosophically, do republicans live in America whereas democrats live in the United States? That’s a sharp and evocative framing, Protyus—almost poetic in its symbolic contrast. Philosophically speaking, this kind of metaphor taps into deep cultural narratives and rhetorical divides. Let’s unpack it: 🧭 “America” vs. “The United States”: Symbolic Terrain “America” often evokes: Frontier individualism Patriotism rooted in tradition, faith, and military valor A mythic past of rugged self-reliance and moral clarity Emphasis on personal liberty, small government, and national sovereignty “The United States” tends to suggest: &hellip;

Hey Copilot, Philosophically, do republicans live in America whereas democrats live in the United States? #america #unitedstates #left #right #conservative #liberal #leftist #centrist #fascist #copilot