They are torturing and killing people in our concentration camps, and I wish more people were actively bothered by that
AOC: We already have multiple American service members who are dead for an illegal action that the president has pursued with no plan out. They don’t know why they got into this war. They’re talking about a hundred different reasons, and they don’t know how they’re getting out.
extraordinary night for state progressives in North Carolina
via boltsmag.org/whats-on-the...
ALL 4 Democratic lawmakers in NC who sided with the GOP to overturn vetoes of major bills have lost their primaries to progressive challengers. It is indeed a major night for NC.
Israel simply does not have the power to force the US government to do something it does not want to do. What Rubio is doing here, by claiming Israel forced the US hand, is making Israel the scapegoat for a US policy he knows is unpopular. This framing is going to be so bad for Diaspora Jews.
The fact that Lockheed Martin’s stock rose since Feb 27th shows us that private companies trading weapons, mercenaries, airplanes etc are all increasing their profit margins as people from Sudan to Iran to Congo to Palestine are being murdered. Lockheed Martin is implicated in all four places.
Obviously, Israel is taking part in this attack, and that should be condemned as much as the US role.
But if you’re saying that Israel is really driving it and the US is a helpless puppet, then please, learn a tiny bit of US history.
The fact that the Union for Reform Judaism feels the need to support this illegal war just because the Israeli government supports it - even though the Israeli government openly disdains Reform Jews in return - is part of why institutional American Judaism is in crisis.
I promise you that the government that murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good does not give a flying fuck about the protests in Iran.
New polling suggests American Jews don’t know what the word “Zionism” means. Should it change the way the Jewish left organizes? Arielle Angel speaks with Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, @dovekent.bsky.social, and @fadiqu.bsky.social on the JC podcast.
jewishcurrents.org/whos-afraid-...
The contrast between the complete cowardice of our civic institutions in the face of creeping authoritarianism, compared to the bravery and fortitude of ordinary citizens, is so glaring.
The nazis redistributed the stolen property of deported Jews to the German population. It was called Aryanization.
This is no different.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryaniz...
4 Black journalists have been kidnapped by the federal government
This isn’t about convicting Don Lemon. It’s unlikely that will happen. It’s about intimidating journalists & making them censure themselves out of fear of consequences. It’s about eroding the free press because the administration can’t afford the criticism.
CAN WE ALL CAPS THIS
"A chronic mistake organizers make is basically organizing people around their lack of agency."
People talk about who has citizenship and who does not as though these are absolute, ontological qualities that confer moral worth, as opposed to legal fictions invented by the state to distinguish between an in-group and an out-group, and can be conferred or withdrawn at any time.
Anne Frank is culturally coded today as "innocent victim" because we beat the Nazis, so we back-project modern concepts of stable citizenship onto her to maintain our cultural view of her as innocent. If we beat ICE, maybe 80 years from now, we will look back similarly on ICE victims today.
For example, a reform that restricts ICE’s ability to interact with the public in specific ways takes power away. Body cams, on the other hand, are an expensive non-solution that increases mass surveillance of the public. “Police reform” has proven they don’t stop shootings.
These ICE killings are "the blueprint for how NSPM-7 will be enforced against community members and rapid responders". This order can "retroactively justify the extrajudicial killing of a community rapid responder by a federal agent [in] the worst-case scenario long feared by frontline responders."
"The lies this administration is telling... aren't those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They're those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything." When they raise the cost of unity, its on us to raise the solidarity.
M. Gessen, gift link: The soviet secret police too "were ruled by quotas... Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works. The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive"
Media: do not lead with the false government framing of what happened
ICE is a paramilitary that summarily executes people who dare to protest against them. That is who they are. They cannot be reformed. Everyone who works for them at this point must face consequences.
Exact same playbook as the reaction to BLM. Same wording and conspiracy theories.
Except this time it looks like fewer people are buying it. Hopefully Dems don’t legitimize it.
The political ground is shifting on ICE. Your own Dem rep or senator may not have caught up yet. Now - before the 1/30 funding deadline - is the time to push.
Nice thing about Minneapolis being kinda small is that it’s hard to convince us protesters are being paid because you’d go out and oh there’s that kid from my high school who played Sancho Panza in Man of La Mancha one year, and is that the pharmacist at my CVS over there, and there goes our realtor
I don’t think people quite understand that the occupation by ICE in the Twin Cities has more or less erased non-white people from public life. They cannot safely exist in any space accessible to the public and moving between private places leaves folks vulnerable to kidnapping by armed masked goons.
every single successful general strike in US history has had union backing through the local AFL-CIO
this is the first time it’s been called for since the 1940s
When law-and-order types point out that only a small percentage of people killed by police each year were unarmed, keep in mind that Renee Good will be classified as "armed."
