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I know things feel helpless in the United States. But they are not. Orbán was in power for sixteen consecutive years. He was the spoke at the center of the global far-right. He built the network, wrote the playbook, modeled competitive authoritarianism. His long reign seemed a sure thing.
Imagine an electoral campaign like this in Russia today. You can’t. Too many have died under mysterious circumstances or rotted in prison. No one is left to push back against Putin without extraordinary risk.
Hungary is a reminder it's critical to contest power forcefully while you still can.
After sixteen years in power, his loss is a searing rebuke for the global far-right and a warning to leaders from Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi to Donald Trump that Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” isn’t the magical system hack they hoped it was.
everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability
Tucker Carlson is very good at what he does. It is what makes him so dangerous. As long as Dems and centrist & liberal public figures continue running cover for genocide & apartheid, the more effective and powerful Tucker will become.
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.
Results: Progressives win all four of these primaries, ousting incumbents Cunningham, Willingham, and Majeed, while Pierce held off Wray’s comeback.
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.
