Jay Ulfelder

A great list of orgs to get help from, to donate to, & to get involved with to support and defend our neighbors in DC!

Immigration crackdown stokes fear and solidarity at a Catholic church in DC The Shrine of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic church a short drive from the White House, was intended to be a sanctuary for worshippers.

See also:

Chicago's children are getting caught in the chaos of immigration crackdowns In Chicago, children and families have been traumatized by an immigration enforcement action involving tear gas.

This is not specific to Chicago. This is everywhere that ICE & co. are operating en masse, which is a lot of places, including the DC area. The feds are acting out a long-standing white-nationalist fantasy of terrorizing migrant communities in the quixotic hope of preserving racial dominance.

This is obviously a horrible comment to make, but it illuminates something critical about ICE's tactics in a large metro. They are skimming human beings from the most vulnerable populations and spreading themselves very thin to do it like this on purpose—because it works.

I'm excited but a bit sad to announce that I've left Bellingcat to start a nonprofit investigative outlet focused on the far-right. We're called Decoherence Media, and we're launching today.

An alternative perspective: a coalition of DC-area orgs with direct ties to local affected communities explicitly recommend against this, because it can make it difficult for responders to get information from the person(s) being grabbed that can be used to help them and their families.

An alternative perspective: a coalition of DC-area orgs with direct ties to local affected communities explicitly recommend against this, because it can make it difficult for responders to get information from the person(s) being grabbed that can be used to help them and their families.

One option that is available to people everywhere is looking to Black history for a model of what it is possible for people facing oppression to achieve.

Trump backs off planned surge of federal agents into San Francisco after talking to the mayor President Donald Trump says he’s backing off a planned surge of federal agents into San Francisco after speaking to the mayor, as protesters gathered outside a U.S.

None of this shit is inevitable. I suspect that the intense local pushback against these deployments in other cities—and the broad popularity of that pushback—helped cause this u-turn. So, fuck yeah, and let's turn it up.

If reactionaries in power wanted to build a giant machine that would constantly distract their political opponents and redirect their energy toward less threatening endeavors or just burn them out emotionally, they could do a lot worse than contemporary social media.

I hope no one really thinks we can rely on state and city cops to arrest federal cops and stop fascism.

These cops will stick up for each other way before they do anything for you.

Personally, I hate the romanticization and adoration of state power and its symbols, including but not limited to the White House, which is actually a big-ass fortified office complex squatting on prime turf in the heart of my hometown. I also hate official corruption. And I hate Donald Trump. So.

I toss this out there as a DC native who has lived inside the Beltway for 40 of my 55 years, works/worked as a political scientist for my entiire adult life, has never set foot inside the White House, and is not sad about that.

Anyone at @51st.news writing something up on how DC residents feel about the White House as an actual local space and Trump's renovations of it? I suspect the answers would be complex, varied, and fascinating (like the city's residents).

You can *care* about many things and you can only take concrete & sustained action on 1 or 2 things.

he showed up in person to a bunch of stuff on this issue in NYC in the past couple of years, big props to him

It’s hard to convey just how much Chicagoans are mobilizing against ICE. Don’t want to downplay the harm, or make it seem like a fair fight. But in neighborhoods across this city, ICE is getting chased by people blowing whistles and shouting. People are running TOWARD ICE to protect their neighbors.

Yeah, def noteworthy.

‘He lost us’: Generals, senior officers say trust in Hegseth has evaporated Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has lost the trust and respect of some top military commanders, with his public “grandstanding” widely seen as unprofessional and the personnel moves made by the former ...

"High-level sources said that they believe Mr. Hegseth is simultaneously doing deep damage to the military, both from a public relations standpoint and structurally behind the scenes, that may not be fully apparent until months or even years from now."

I'm not going to render value judgments on this aspect of the movement here/now, and I'm definitely not going to offer ridiculous prescriptions on what organizers "should" do about it or not. Just wanted to drop the point about how it fits neatly into the recent current global pattern. /end

He compares this to protest waves he saw in places like Argentina, Chile, France, and Spain, which heavily emphasized an electoral threat, and wonders why the U.S. is exceptional. My point here is that it isn't exceptional, it's right in line with most other mass mobilizations of the past 15+ years.

MUSINGS 2 “No Kings!”

I'm thinking about this after reading Adam Pzeworski's latest post, in which he says he marched on Saturday in NYC and "found it striking that one would not know [from what he saw at the march] that there exists an opposition party that will contest the forthcoming election."

In this context, "illegible" isn't meant as a diss; it's just saying that there's no single true interpretation of what the wave is about. People participate for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways, many of them pointing in a similar direction, but with a lot of ambiguity and tension, too.

Among the very many things that could be said about No Kings, I think they fit neatly into the wave of "horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest" waves that Vincent Bevins describes in his book If We Burn, and that, like the others, they are "fundamentally illegible."

Why are scholars researching the far right still so reluctant to use racism as a defining concept?

It was problematic when racism was disguised under a thin veneer of twisted liberal discourses, but now it's pretty much in the open I'm surprised there still appears to be a reluctance

I agree, and I hope you didn't read some kind of broad disparagement of No Kings participants in what I wrote. I didn't say anything about No Kings and am riffing here on the latest iteration of the "big tent" convo.

“No Kings” Protests Are Just Not Enough These are worthwhile events, and leftists shouldn’t shun them. But stopping Trump requires building power. If protests aren’t coupled with organizing, the right will win.

I think this is a version of the left critique of the recent mass mobilizations that makes sense. No Kings mobilizations are not a diversion of energy that would be used more effectively otherwise they are fertile ground for the organizing folks say they want to do.

Yeah, and I do think there is this analysis lurking under that assertion that electoral democracy is the best and only way to get to any and all good things. So, lose it, and it's negative infinity for everyone. But that's not really analysis, it's ideology.

The point is, you don't get to escape the essential problems of coalition politics by declaring your view correct and demanding fealty to it. What you get instead is a weak or failed coalition. So maybe start from that assumption instead?

I think of a lot of Americans think it's a given that electoral democracy is a higher or more fundamental value than just about everything else, but that's still a value judgment, and it's not necessarily what philosophy or history show. It is what we learn in civics class and pop culture, tho.