@drdelpotter.bsky.social
I’m deeply immersed in the intersections of neuroscience, ethnobotany, & pharmacological research, I thrive on leveraging science to enhance human well-being and longevity. After years of scientific writing I’m writing fiction and a cinematic memoir.
The Middle Class Is a Feeling. That’s Why It’s Dangerous.
open.substack.com/pub/delpotte...
The Middle Class Is a Feeling. That’s Why It’s Dangerous.
open.substack.com/pub/delpotte...
The Middle Class Is a Feeling. That’s Why It’s Dangerous.
open.substack.com/pub/delpotte...
The Cannabis Industry’s Heroism Problem
open.substack.com/pub/delpotte...
Be kind to family members going through this.
youtu.be/-wQhY5CMMl4
Chapter 4 from my memoir, in which I meet the Shulgins and those around them.
open.substack.com/pub/delpotte...
break the civic peace, flood the streets with tension, then demand more power as the “solution.” It’s a cycle of intimidation designed to normalize authoritarianism one crackdown at a time, until what should be unthinkable starts to feel routine.
16.01.2026 15:24 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The goal is to keep the country in a constant state of conflict and panic, to deflect attention from economic failures, corruption, and scandal, including the Epstein files, while manufacturing a crisis Trump can point to as justification for escalation. Disruption becomes the strategy:5/
16.01.2026 15:24 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
and it’s profoundly unnecessary.We spend grotesque amounts per person on enforcement and punishment when we could create faster, rational pathways to lawful status,policies that would be cheaper, more humane, and far better for communities and the economy.
The real purpose isn’t order. It’s chaos.4/
Not with new investment, but through extraction, by siphoning money from healthcare, housing support, education, and essential social services to bankroll raids, disruption, and spectacle. This is not a serious public safety strategy. It’s a political project built on fear, racism and cruelty,3/
16.01.2026 15:24 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
And the targets aren’t “dangerous criminals.” The targets are whoever is easiest to victimize and easiest to demonize: citizens, children, long-established working families who’ve been here for decades, and asylum seekers whose only “crime” is being vulnerable.
And we’re paying for it. 2/
This isn’t legitimate law enforcement. It’s a politicized enforcement machine operating like a private army. It’s an expanded, quasi-paramilitary force being deployed with an intentionally broad, poorly defined mandate, not to protect the public, but to intimidate it.1/
16.01.2026 15:24 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Therefore, the most coherent moral conclusion is:
They are not owed compensation.
They are owed, at most, the historical recognition that their era of extraction has ended, because the wealth beneath Venezuela’s soil was never meant to be the private inheritance of foreign capital.
And when Venezuela attempted to reverse that flow, capital demanded payment as a disciplinary tool.3
16.01.2026 04:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0The oil companies entered Venezuela as agents of a world system built to transfer value from periphery to core. They did not create Venezuela’s oil; they secured privileged access to it. They extracted rent and surplus for years, often under conditions of unequal bargaining power.2
16.01.2026 04:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0The argument that oil companies “are owed compensation” is not a universal moral truth. It is the moral language of capital protecting accumulation. 1
16.01.2026 04:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I've now watched the censored 60 Minutes report on CECOT. If you watched it too—and if you have any decency at all—I'm sure you came to the same conclusion I did: winning elections won't be enough; people like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem will need to be charged and imprisoned.
24.12.2025 05:40 — 👍 19399 🔁 5374 💬 977 📌 253If the public staging of cages,humiliation, torture and indefinite containment doesn’t at least trigger the historian’s alarm bells, what does? When does don’t compare become don’t notice?
23.12.2025 06:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0the celebration of state cruelty,the fetishization of punishment,the conversion of human beings into a disposable category,the blatant torture&sexual abuse of people whose only crime was being a migrant like every one of our ancestors. 2/
23.12.2025 06:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0After watching the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT,I’m left with one question:what do Trump supporters have to say now?They protested so loudly,so indignantly,against even an allusion to the idea that this administration&its supporters are tracing the familiar historical grooves of the 3rd Reich: 1/
23.12.2025 06:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0