Amna A. Akbar

I Signed Letters Referring Student Protesters for Deportation, ICE Official Testifies

updates from the ongoing trial AAUP v. Rubio

knightcolumbia.org/content/i-si...

Mamdani does what I've been calling constructive politics: appeals to identity as a building block of solidarity rather than a replacement for it. love to see it

screenshot of a Facebook post by Corey Robin, which says: "By the way, did you all notice how Zohran made affordability a central issue of his campaign without selling out trans kids or shitting on immigrants? Might be some lessons there. Just a thought."

he's right and he's right to say it

and resistance thereto i should have said

The Dark, McCarthyist History of Deporting Activists Donald Trump is using decades-old laws to expel critics and opponents.

time to brush up on history of deportations of communists and suspected communists, a good recent explainer by Michelle Chen @theprogressivemag.bsky.social

progressive.org/latest/the-d...

Trump’s Antisocial State - Dissent Magazine The administration is attempting to incapacitate the redistributive and social protective arms of the state, while exploiting its vast bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport.

must read by Melinda Cooper on the antisocial state @dissentmag.bsky.social

www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

“The Basic Liberal Narrative Is Gone”: Immigrant Rights and Abolition with Silky Shah “A singular focus on conditions, rather than the violence of immigration detention itself, just lent itself to expansion.”

Both Republicans & Democrats oversaw the merger of the criminal legal & immigration systems, leading to more people being deported & detained.

Read @amnaakbar.bsky.social’s interview w/ abolitionist immigration justice organizer @silkys13.bsky.social, new @ PB:

“The Basic Liberal Narrative Is Gone”: Immigrant Rights and Abolition with Silky Shah - Public Books “A singular focus on conditions, rather than the violence of immigration detention itself, just lent itself to expansion.”

New at PB, @amnaakbar.bsky.social chats with @silkys13.bsky.social about her new book “Unbuild Walls,” which offers a primer for activists, organizers, students, and intellectuals who wish to approach immigrant justice through an abolitionist lens.
buff.ly/hRv49ZG

"The reason we don’t have fully functioning voting rights laws, anticorruption laws, and civil rights laws isn’t because of anything that has happened so far this year, but because federal judges have spent the last one hundred and fifty years striking these federal laws down."

more and more these days, I find myself thinking that you can accept the discipline of your political goals or you can accept the discipline of your resentments.

has the fascism question/debate been had in law? reading Toscano's Late Fascism now and i'm curious. im about to read the piece on the LPE blog by Matthew Glover & Joshua Ingram, organizers with Black Men Build. what else is out there past or present? wouldn't be surprised if there isn't much.

one of the wildest thing about trump is his ability to distill some core aspects of the USA (past and present) so intensely that they look cartoonish and are easy to mistake as out of whack, when in so many ways, they are so very much of a piece with long threads and current crises of state

Feb 19 / SOS / Save Our Services.

This organizing is critical and this action is a concrete way we can all show our support for public workers and public goods.

Participate and pass it on.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Fund Don't Freeze: National Higher Education Strategy Call. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Join higher education workers from around the country on 2/13 at 8 PM Eastern / 7 PM Central / 6 PM Mountain / 5 PM Pacific for a national strategy call on the federal attack on higher education and h...

The only hope for higher ed is the academic labor movement. Join this @higheredlabor.bsky.social call next week to plan our fight us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Personal Discretion Over the Treasury's Payments System Means the End of Democracy If the Court and federal workers fail to stop Elon Musk, we are heading for authoritarianism.

The NYT asked me to write an op-ed on Musk and the Treasury and then took a pass. I hope it will still get read.

at an activist conference last year i saw a sign that said "law is not real" and i shooed it mentally -- thinking, that's a bit extreme, even for me! -- but couldn't stop thinking about it. found it fundamentally agitational (in a productive way). and here we are.

among other things Sarah connect this to Gilmore's anti-state-state conceptualization, which is in cartoon mode atm

i mean yes it matters for a range of reasons to be specific, but some seem to think the problem in itself is that bad billionaires are in charge, as opposed to a system that structurally produces billionaires with such power

how else to understand for example the NYT silence

worth thinking over if the problem is really which billionaires are in charge

Amazon Closes Its Operations in Quebec, Laying Off 1,700 Workers Unions had gained a foothold in one of the company’s warehouses in the province, though Amazon would not say if there was a connection.

"Amazon on Wednesday said it was closing all of its warehouse and logistics operations in Quebec, the Canadian province where unions gained a foothold in one of its facilities, and would lay off 1,700 employees." www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/t...

@yesnomabie.bsky.social @danieldenvir.bsky.social Adam Elliot Cooper and of course Michael Denning & Stuart Hall 🙏

this double header by @thedigradio.bsky.social on Stuart Hall is indispensable -- done with such style, passion, and commitment -- listen as soon as you can and pass it around

“Repression is an expression of the ruling class’s fear, but it is no romance. It is brutal, and it can end us… Feel your melancholic feelings. But now is not the time to lose faith.”

this piece is pitch perfect — pin points our malaise & sees through the same old oppressors in new clothes

“The media wrangling to mute radical critique and popular resentment against the ruling class may not feel the steady beat of confusion or malaise—but the country certainly does. We are at a real impasse.” @amnaakbar.bsky.social in @nplusonemag.com

Malm and Mangione | Amna A. Akbar You can almost hear the chattering class’s chattering teeth as they balance the need to generate clicks with their sanctimonious shock at the public’s hatred for Brian Thompson, the company he ran, an...

Great essay from @amnaakbar.bsky.social insisting on the urgency of figuring out of what it will take for mass mobilizations & organizations of USians around the slower deaths from climate crisis, unaffordable health care & other capitalist horrors. Highly recommended::

oh will have to read this