Benjamin Stewart

It’s Up to Us to Protect One Another As Trump sends troops to Chicago, we will continue to investigate and report. Readers have a role to play, too.

Let us be clear: The President of the United States is levying war against American cities and American citizens—and we cannot rely on the other branches of government to save us.

It’s up to us.

Nazis used courts to preserve capitalism but wouldn’t be constrained by them: “Where the Prerogative State doesn’t require jurisdiction, the Normative State is allowed to function... The limits of the Prerogative State aren’t imposed from… outside; they are imposed by the Prerogative State itself”

"Nostalgia for a past that never existed" absolutely is the summary of an ideological turn fully immersed in AI aestethics.

China Is Beating the US in the Battle for Energy Export Dominance China’s exports of clean energy technology hit a record in August, with $20 billion shipped globally.

Oh:
- The US sold $80 billion in oil and gas abroad through July.
- China exported $120 billion in green technology over the same period.
By @akshatrathi.bsky.social
🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Yes, the way we teach this stuff makes it seem like we can win by memes & PR stunts. I only recently learned the peace activists burning draft records weren't just making a symbolic statement. The draft board didn't have copies - every file destroyed was a man who'd never be called up to war.

Don't forget to go outside and look at the supermoon tonight! I will be pointing my Seestar at it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermoon

This really makes it sound like a Border Patrol agent tried to kill an anti-ICE activist in Chicago and DHS lied to cover for him

Data center boom sparks sticker shock for PJM ratepayers New analyses show that costs passed on to utility customers to guarantee future electricity demand are rising rapidly.

“By 2028, an average family in the region will be paying around $70 a month extra on their electricity bills because of forecasted data center growth”

I'm once again asking why ratepayers are subsidizing AI titans?

www.eenews.net/articles/dat...

“We are home now. We marched from the park to ICE, very peaceful crowd. We were standing around ICE pushed us down, sprayed us with chemical and I was hit in the head with a projectile. This was so unprovoked. People have to know that the Feds are attacking people with NO provocation whatsoever.”

I haven't dived into the underlying report, but this article is jaw-dropping. Data centers are apparently not *one of* PJM's demand-side problems. They are *the* problem.

Worker owned social media when

Universities Must Reject Trump Admin 'Loyalty Oath' Compacts The AAUP and AFT warn that the Trump administration’s offer to give preferential treatment to colleges and universities that court government favor in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological...

The Trump admin’s offer to give preferential treatment to institutions that toe the party line reeks of bribery in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda.

This is corruption.

Adherence to ‘loyalty oaths’ would usher in a new era of thought policing in American higher education.

We need a bigger national spotlight on this building raid, fam. Agents dropped from helicopters onto the roof. Citizens and non-citizens alike were dragged from their homes in the night. People who weren't kidnapped during the raid had their belongings seized after the fact. This is madness.

Will mining destroy America’s most-visited wilderness? The Trump administration is moving rapidly to approve a mine next to the Boundary Waters that many fear will pollute the pristine wilderness area.

The underlying refrain here is that if you spend anytime in the BWCA you come out thinking why the hell would anyone want to spoil this pristine treasure?

I have literally never seen anything like this in my life.

“An independent analysis of 45 right-wing groups advocating against trans rights found that 80% have received donations from fossil fuel companies or billionaires.”

“But AI wOnT afFECt eNErgY pRiceS thAt’s a MyTH”

Cult of the Self Podcast Episode · To The Best Of Our Knowledge · 06/14/2025 · 52m

That connection (between American hucksterism and European fascism) blew my mind when I listened to this episode podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

An Update:

I received an email canceling my contract as a columnist at @startribune.com after sharing this story publicly.

(I had written columns past the one-year contract already + been asked to continue on in July).

I’m so sorry that this happened to you, Angela. It makes it all the more awful that it appears that it’s precisely because you were doing the very thing we absolutely need right now.

Proposed in a suburb of Duluth daily water use equivalent to 160 homes.

“It gives the illusion I was standing as some lone warrior in a cloud of gas,” Evans said. “It just happened to be the way the photo was framed. But people got hurt, people were hurt purposefully.”

Line chart showing that there's been a rapid escalation in how quickly the world installs a gigawatt of solar power capacity.

Time for the world to install a gigawatt of solar power capacity
2004: A year
2010: ~ a month
2015: ~ a week
Now: < A day
ourworldindata.org/data-insight... 🧪

Twitter was far from ideal, but it is bracing to imagine how different opposition politics would feel right now if something like that still existed

Quoting Lincoln in spine-starching column:
"What will convince them? This, and this only: Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them."

Censorship Is the Authoritarian’s Dream The right to free expression must include the right to say horrible and evil things.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history."
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Another way out: Building resistance when passivity is the norm The COVID-19 pandemic should have shown us that we’re supposed to be meeting needs, not falling in line behind fascist incursions

By quickly pushing people to believe that the elderly, disabled, poor, and others were a necessary sacrifice, the ruling class and corporations primed the public for more fascist incursions. They observed how many give in to destroying one another and themselves.

prismreports.org/2025/09/16/c...

Charlie Kirk's extremism was fossil fueled Big Oil's money gave Kirk a larger platform to spread baseless climate conspiracy theories—as well as other extremist views.

The fossil fuel industry is behind most of the climate disinformation you see and hear today.

Charlie Kirk was no exception.

See @christiancentury.bsky.social and @sojo.net

People Around the World Want Political Change, but Many Doubt It Can Happen Majorities in 20 of 25 countries surveyed say their political system needs major changes or complete reform, but many lack confidence this can happen effectively.

People in regions across the globe are unhappy with their political systems and elected officials. However, many of those who want significant political change in their country are not confident it can happen.