Jake Levitan

The Path to the Trump Doctrine From Syria to Lebanon to Gaza, the coercion central to the new regime has been incubated in the Middle East.

In the @bostonreview.bsky.social, Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana examine the deep roots of the emerging Trump Doctrine.

🚨 LAUNCHING 🚨 State of Power 2026 🚨

Fascism and the far right are on the rise. Beyond headlines, we examine the reasons for their rise, the economic interests that support them, how they weaponise today’s social and ecological crises, and proposals for how to fight back.
www.tni.org/en/publicati...

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism Moderation used to help Democrats win, but its advantages now have been greatly exaggerated.

This Boston Review piece by @adambonica.bsky.social and @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social is obviously not going to be the last word in the "popularism" debate. But it's the last word for me, in the sense that anything I might want to say on it is said better here. www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Last week I wrote that ICE (& immigration judges) are increasingly openly defying courts. lpeproject.org/blog/immigra...

Now, a judge compiled 100 cases from ICE’s MN siege where ICE ignored court orders.

Yet what are dems offering? Basically—laws that ask ICE to please follow the law.

Working Nature Daniela Russ argues that the category of ‘energy’ is best understood not in terms of particular material things but as a social relation to nature forged over 200 years of capitalist industrialization...

Now available for preorder - Working Nature: A History of the Energy Economy by Daniela Russ

"Consistently brilliant and illuminating, Working Nature announces the arrival of a major new voice on the scene of ecological Marxism.”
- Andreas Malm

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.

I wrote on psychic life and Palestinian resistance

– to ensure more people read Abdaljawad Omar @hamayel.bsky.social.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Silicon Empires w/ Nick Srnicek Nick Srnicek on Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI. A deep exploration of the political economy of AI: the fulcrum of the authoritarian tech oligarchy—and of global contests for economic ...

The Dig you’ve been waiting for to understand the political economy of AI as it becomes fulcrum of global contests and conflicts over economic and military dominance. My interview w/ @nsrnicek.bsky.social on his book Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI www.thedigradio.com/podcast/sili...

Episode 11: Deconstructing the Law of War With Jake Romm

spoke with my favorite couple @shaabiranks.bsky.social and @seamus-malekafzali.com about international law, the so-called "war on terror," and the long shadow of colonial warfare for Turbulence

turbulencepod.substack.com/p/episode-11...

Homeland Empire w/ Nikhil Pal Singh Podcast Episode · Politics Theory Other · 01/28/2026 · 44m

📢💥NEW EPISODE📢💥 - Nikhil Pal Singh on Donald Trump's 'Homeland Empire'. Nikhil talks about how the Trump administration has collapsed the distinction between foreign and domestic policy, creating a single zone where violence and impunity reign:

New article by Phil A. Neel examining the post-2020 political order, arguing that liberal myths about law, elections, and restraint function as counterinsurgency in an era of open state violence.

illwill.com/lies

The attempts to draw distinctions between local policing and ICE on the basis of training are also mystifying because what we know today as "militarized policing" is the result of police professionalization, training, and reform. Any good history of SWAT makes this abundantly clear

I have a different question: what can we learn from the fact that the power resources that have proven most impactful in this moment can be found in mass movements rather than the formal legal structures that folk theory sees as safeguards against tyranny?

“Everybody Showed Up”: Stunning Crowds at Minnesota Day of Strike and Shutdown Against ICE Extreme cold didn't stop the shutdown on Friday as some 100 faith leaders were arrested, residents stayed home from work, and an estimated 50,000 or more marched through downtown Minneapolis.

I'm not one for false optimism. But what I witnessed today in Minneapolis was tremendous, both in scale and exuberance. It was a stunning answer to the federal assault on Minnesota, a show of solidarity that gives us something to hold on to during times that are unforgiving.

The US arrests children a lot.

If you have read even a single history of fascism, you are already aware that one thing that its rise has in common in every case is an opposition party that refuses to intervene for fear of looking weak or putting the left into power

bro there’s a gofundme to crowdfund attorney fees for a preschooler who was kidnapped by our federal government and shipped across state lines and his senator is posting about high school hockey while every other elected official is debating whether to give a zillion more dollars to the kidnappers

Beyond Feasibility in Legal Scholarship Law review articles are expected to conclude with a short section, often “Part IV,” that translates analysis into actionable prescriptions. Though well-intentioned, this convention constrains ambition...

Today, @jocelynsimonson.bsky.social and @ksabeelrahman.bsky.social challenge the idea that law review articles should conclude with a set of actionable prescriptions.

This convention, they argue, constrains ambition, sidelines critique, and conflates near-term feasibility with rigor.

Never ceases to amaze and inspire me that @scottwstern.bsky.social writes like he does on top of working full-time as an environmental lawyer

The future is (still) the termination shock

since Tooze is once again the topic du jour, some light reading on why he’s so frustrated in that interview

brooklynrail.org/2025/09/fiel...

this part of Adam's lecture got me thinking how this article initially started with something along these lines: bsky.app/profile/quin...

After the Thaw As temperatures rise and the Arctic thaws, capital is eyeing new opportunities: for extraction, for shipping and for extending a lifeline to business as usual.

It's probably not about minerals. Wrote about Greenland, shipping lanes and the political work that all this arctic speculation is doing over at @the-breakdown.bsky.social www.break-down.org/after-the-th...

americans, please: do not take the bait by resisting ICE yourselves. just give the democrats $20. they will give it to ICE so they can train more guys

Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities The rapid response networks people organized to defend their communities against federal agents seeking to kidnap, brutalize, and terrorize them have undergone a whirlwind evolution to keep up with...

Rapid response networks have evolved swiftly over the past few months. Besieged by 3000 federal mercenaries, volunteers in the Twin Cities have updated their rapid response model, developing a dynamic and resilient system.

This report explores how you can learn from their model to build your own.

Renee Good's Murder and Other Acts of Terror An interview with Robin D. G. Kelley on how to think about ICE—and the broader history of police violence.

"Strangest of all is the liberal pipe dream that local police will stand up against ICE and CBP, when police have collaborated with ICE and been deployed to protect agents from protesters, even in so-called sanctuary cities."

An interview with Robin D.G. Kelley
www.bostonreview.net/articles/ren...

Fascists Are Pathetic | Defector Two days before a shouting cluster of its agents surrounded the car of a Minneapolis mother and shot her to death last week, ICE was demanding answers from the Hilton hotel group on X.com. “Why did yo...

I wrote about The Tantrum State and living in it. Personally I do not care for it very much. defector.com/fascists-are...

MAGA Empire w/ Aslı Bâli and Greg Grandin Featuring Aslı Bâli and Greg Grandin on the MAGA model of US imperialism.

Trump is clearly not the isolationist many believed he was. From the wreckage of bipartisan imperialist consensus, Trump's creating a new MAGA model empire. New Dig episode analyzing MAGA Empire and the history that made it with Aslı Bâli and Greg Grandin www.thedigradio.com/podcast/maga...

Homeland Empire • EQUATOR From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is trying to create a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity

Nikhil Pal Singh offers the most sophisticated analysis yet of Trump’s new regime – a “Homeland Empire” that wants to rule over subjects, not citizens, both domestically and abroad. www.equator.org/articles/hom...