Jason Coupet

All these public cuts, all this senseless bullshit, I think it’s to try to put hat hierarchy in check man. These tech billionaires are offended by their vocal employees, good ol boys mad their universities and suburban towns have gotten so diverse and bold. They are putting us in check.

Black and brown folks are supposed to be suffering, poor, desperate, and at your mercy. It’s why so many of them hate Atlanta. Not that this place doesn’t have its problems, but you gotta see black people driving around in luxury cars in shit. That’s not the hierarchy man.

They tell you it’s about tax saving and facial conservatism. That’s mostly all bullshit. Democracy, Robust wages, and robust social safety nets threaten that hierarchy. All these good ole boy networks pass all kinds of benefits and money too each other, and public patronage greases the pan whites.

It’s why building anything for yourself and your community in the south, even if it’s through super hard work and smarts, could get you killed in the Jim crow south. The hierarchy is supposed to be 1)petty landed gentry, 2) whites, 3) poor black. Whatever you do, don’t fuck with that hierarchy.

I don’t think many of yall understand how powerful the institutionalization of relative power can be, man, especially if yourself ain’t wired like that.

But these reactionaries in power, if aliens dropped down peace, and wealth health on the black poor at no charge, they’d fight the aliens.

I’ve been saying this forever. The whole country is getting a taste of the racist petty American southern provincialism.

People who haven’t lived here are in denial about this, the idea that a petty ruling class would deliberate keep US poor just so they can lord over us.

Man white nationalism is so dumb. We have to destroy or hold back enormous chunks of a healthy, growing society so that the perceived supremacy of one group can remain intact.

It’s the macro sense of what it’s like to be black and/or to deal with patriarchy, and we are all living it.

Hard agree.

💯

What a wonderfully thoughtful piece. Love to all my trans folks in these times.

“We could all have plenty” means nothing to a man for whom the point of life is to subjugate.

Twelve thousand percent

That’s exactly how I read this. There is no planet where billionaires have this kind of political power and we don’t get fascism.

This is a very very well put synopsis of where we are.

With Trump about to try to fake economic stats, it's not very helpful for leftists to say they were already cooked. They're not. I follow this stuff very closely and have for years. They're very good and assembled by civil servants who take their jobs very seriously.

if i were a pro-trump financial type i might view the destruction of reliable government data with the kind of anger and apprehension that might lead me to reevaluate my politics, but then if i’m a financial guy throwing my weight behind strongman rule, i’m already too stupid to breathe

The social media app that was once for college kids is now a full throated authoritarian propaganda arm. No matter how much of this shit I block it just keeps coming. I need to just drop all this shit.

Omg tressie the stories I could tell about my colleagues and this “performance system” we have in georgia. I swear academics would “well actually” the titanic sinking.

It’s the most frustrating thing about academics. It drives me batty. Whenever stuff like this comes up all you get as a bunch of tortured contrarian “devils advocate” points *on the side of the nakedly transparent authoritarians*. I have so many stories man. Academics are horrible with this stuff.

An enormous race with enormous implications, particularly with regard to the right to vote.

41 for me!

At the beach with my 4yo and he slid into this barstool to call the bartender over waaaay to comfortably for my tastes. Got me wondering wtf these kids are doing in preschool.

The super rich have been fear mongering about fleeing New York City.

But the truth is that working-class New Yorkers are leave at much higher rates than wealthy residents.

The average New Yorker has been 4x more likely to leave than someone in the top 1%.

Fascism has to project strength because it exudes frail weakness. A bunch of dumb jackbooted thugs hopped up on creatine need to use the power of the state to bully regular people. And still they hide their faces. They take advantage of pre teen girls and call in threats to elementary schools.

It looks like homeownership rates for Black and moderate-income households are falling sharply, but I suppose that is no longer news now that Biden is out of the White House www.census.gov/housing/hvs/...

I can’t *wait* to read this paper

So much this man. We are fortunate that our wonderful inner city Atlanta neighborhood has middle middle class parents that, like us, think differently than others. Our kids…gasp…walk to their…louder gasp…neighborhood Atlanta public school (clutches pearls).

They walk with other kids and are fine

As I detailed in WHITE FLIGHT, segregationists in Atlanta absolutely loved public services -- buses and trolleys, parks and pools, golf courses and tennis courts, etc. -- right until they were forced to desegregate and "stolen" from them. They abandoned them and built up private alternatives.

What’s this institutionalism that can constrain authoritarianism but not - sorry, checking my reference materials here — very very mild democratic socialism?