Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 08:51 on 27 June 2025
Today’s ruling should come as no surprise, as it is completely consistent with an earlier ruling by the same Supreme Court.
The problem is, as I wrote earlier, that there are six fascists on the Supreme Court. Fascists don’t care about judicial independence. In fact, they oppose it,as it gets in the way of the will of the leader they follow.
Starting to really look like the courts won’t save you, Nice Liberals.
Published at 18:06 on 26 June 2025
Because, really, it is not my point to make. It’s a decision for New Yorkers to make, of which I am not one.
But, at over eight million people, it is the largest city in the USA, and as such has more peoople living in it than live in most US states. That alone gives it a prominence that ensures what happens in NYC often doesn’t stay there. Then you have how it is a world-class artistic and cultural centre. Yet more prominence. If Mamdani wins in November, he will likely become one of Trump’s foils, and thus affect US politics as a whole. And what affects US politics affects world politics.
When New Yorkers say their city is the capital of the world, it is, in other words, no idle boast.
Andrew Cuomo has been so humiliated by his primary loss that most pundits are predicting he will entirely drop out of the race, and not even attempt to run as an independent in November. Not so for scandal-plagued incumbent Eric Adams, who has already loudly announced his candidacy.
Here’s another point, though: If Adams continues to hog the limelight, and the centrists line up behind him, he probably loses. Mamdani has already dispatched one corrupt centrist career politician and can probably dispatch another.
If the centrists line up behind someone like Jim Walden, however, they have a good shot at things. Not a sure one (there are no sure shots in politics), but a good one. Walden looks like an outsider who is free from the taint of scandal. It’s that, and not the democratic socialism, that was Mandani’s real secret sauce in the primary. Sure, Mamdani’s base loves that he’s a socialist, but that base alone is not enough to see him through to victory.
It’s not yet clear who the centrists will line up behind.
Right now, there is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from some of the centrist crowd about the primary outcome. Something tells me that they wouldn’t be whining so hard if Cuomo had won, despite Cuomo being the very epitome of a corrupt, out of touch, elitist, career Democrat. You know, the sort of epitome that tilted enough swing voters to Trump the last cycle.
If that crowd really cared about electability, they would care about their own team’s electability issues at least somewhat. But they don’t. So yeah, they just might well fall in line behind Adams.
Or, in other words, the establishment just might just continue unwittingly helping Zohran Mamdani all the way to Gracie Mansion. Which would be fine by me.
Published at 10:48 on 25 June 2025
Well, not a complete surprise, because polling did show him surging in support, but a surprise nonetheless (the preponderance of polls still showed him missing the mark).
Paradoxically, I think, it shows basically what the support for Trump shows: that a significant number of Americans realize the political Establishment has not served them well and are upset at that Establishment.
Mamdani and Trump are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, so many political pundits cannot see this. But pundits are weirdos: they care a lot about politics. Most Americans do not care a lot about politics. Most Americans are stunningly politically ignorant, to the point that they are not even able to name their two Senators and one Representative in Congress.
Most Americans don’t think Trump is a fascist because most Americans have no idea what fascism actually is. To them, he’s just an outsider promising to shake things up. They can be convinced, with the right propaganda, to give his extremism a whirl (again, they realize the Establishment that Trump has disdain for has not served them well), or they can be convinced, again with the right propaganda, that he’s just too far outside the norm to be safe.
And, it turns out, many those same unsophisticates can be persuaded to vote for a candidate significantly to the left of that Establishment as well.
That latter point bears elaborating on. There are at this very moment democratic socialists opining that this election shows Americans (or at least New Yorkers) are coming ’round to their ideology. No they are not. They are merely dissatisfied with the political Establishment and what it has brought them, and are willing to entertain giving those from outside that Establishment a whirl.
Most Americans still have a generally negative connotation of what “socialism” means. Mamdani would have probably done better had he avoided that label. By which I mean he could have had exactly the same planks in his platform, just used slightly different branding, and done better as a result.
Donald Trump does not call himself a “red-white-and-blue American fascist,” a “21st century fascist,” or anything of the such. He could, and it would be an exercise in honest labelling, but he doesn’t. Yet one more example of why Trump is actually more politically savvy than most of the Left. (Of course he is. Just look at his winning record at the ballot box.)
Of course, this cuts both ways. The Establishment Democrats would have probably done better (and likely won) if they had put forth better standard-bearers than a disgraced mayor and a disgraced former governor. So what we have here is basically a situation in which one side’s incompetence cancelled out the other side’s.
But I am digressing here. The same Democratic Party Establishment that backed Cuomo in a desperate and ultimately failed effort to keep Mamdani from winning the primary is the same Establishment that is now only one for three in keeping the most extreme and unqualified candidate to ever seek that office out of the White House. (And when they did gain power, they refused to use it to crush fascism.) These are not people of either great political wisdom or great political morals, and we all need to spend a lot less time paying serious attention to what they have to say.
If Mamdani wins in November and accomplishes that alone, his victory will have meant something.
If, furthermore, his administration is a success and gets more Americans to seriously entertain more left-wing policies, it would be great. But even the former lesser case would prove politically beneficial.
Published at 07:15 on 22 June 2025
Now we get to see how many Trumpers rescind their support for Trump as a result, and how many will convince themselves that Big Brother just increased the chocolate rations.
We also get to see how Iran retaliates. If Iran does not retaliate, it will show how weak and ineffectual the regime is, which will hasten its demise. Those who run that regime know this.
Iran gets to choose the time, place, and means of retaliation, and they will choose it with an eye to maximizing the surprise factor and the effectiveness of the mission.
Welcome to war.
Published at 08:49 on 20 June 2025
Who knows? It will depend largely on his whim at the moment, and that is famously unpredictable.
It is not the definitive “yes” answer that Rick Wilson seems to think it is.
Why? Because Trumpers are not what he thinks they are. Many Republicans warmed to Trump’s willingness to burn it all down in part because they felt betrayed by their own elite, who led the USA into a number of futile “forever wars” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Wilson is of course one of that old elite, he hates Trump, and this reality is therefore most unpleasant to him.
So he constructs an alternate reality in which much of the Right just became inexplicably depraved for no good reasons at all. And, conveniently enough, there are plenty of examples of depraved beliefs to back this whole “depraved” narrative up.
I sometimes interact with Trumpers online, and one common narrative they volunteer as to why they are what they are does fall back on these forever wars. It’s why they can so easily wave off all the concerns of the Never Trump crowd (largely dominated by those same neoconservatives who led the USA into those wars).
And keep in mind: this is what has been volunteered to me, repeatedly, for years now. It’s not some new stuff that some echo chamber media voices thought up on the spot just to help them argue “no, we don’t want to get more involved in the Israel/Iran war, trust me.” It really seems to be a genuine motive.
As such, I rate it as highly likely that if Trump does get the USA heavily involved, it will hurt him.
Sure, a lot of his base are fascist follower types who will pivot on a dime and not only argue but actually believe that Big Brother just increased the chocolate rations. A lot. But not all. Some won’t.
And Trump didn’t win by much, so he can’t afford to lose much support. He’s already underwater on most issues in the polls.
Getting the USA directly involved is highly likely to hurt Trump. And Trump might realize that, which reduces the odds that he will. It is revealing that his current line is that he will decide in “two weeks.” That seems to be his stock phrase for kicking the can down the road and often doing nothing at all.
Trump’s only loyalty is to himself. He has no loyalty to anything or anyone else, including Israel and/or Netanyahu.
Anyone giving almost-certain answers on this one is missing some important points.
Published at 09:17 on 14 June 2025
There has been a lot of hand-wringing recently from many on the anti-Trump side of how the recent protests against ICE are doomed to be a disaster because they are not perfectly adhering to the ideals set forth by those wringing their hands.
Look, this is a stupid basis on how to judge things. No set of protests of any size and consequence is ever going to strictly adhere to any one individual’s pet set of standards for political protest. It’s just not going to happen.
This sort of unrealistically high standard is almost uniquely applied at home and nowhere else. Look at any other authoritarian country where open opposition emerges, and you will find incidents of, at the least, property destruction and retaliation in kind against police violence. Of course, the narrative is never about the property destruction or retaliation then. In fact, that stuff usually gets papered over in the mass media. But it’s fairly easy to find the images of burning vehicles and protesters throwing rocks at police if you look for them.
Almost never is there the “oh, dear, the protester’s tactics are going to alienate people from their cause” take for such protests abroad. Rather, the sign that protests are emerging at all is seen as a positive sign that the regime’s spell over its populace is breaking.
And yes, at this point, the USA is best understood as some form of a soft authoritarian regime. It’s really the only honest way to characterize a society where masked secret police go around disappearing people, with (up until the last week or so) very little resistance from the populace.
No, that doesn’t mean that optics are unimportant, or that there are not big issues on the American Left. I have written before on how much the American Left is an inward-looking subculture and of the necessity of any protest movement to break out of that subculture.
But that latter point cuts both ways. There is also a need for any protest movement to break out of the control of the Democratic Party and its allies. That crowd is so stunningly incompetent at the whole politics game that any leadership role on their part probably dooms opposition to ineffectiveness. What we don’t want is protests that can be turned on and off at the whims of the Democratic Party. We need the heat to stay turned up on Washington even after Trump is, one way or another, removed from office. The Democrats did very little to fight fascism under Biden and there is exactly zero reason to assume they will, absent a lot of pressure from below, do much about it again if they ever manage to regain power.
And this leads me to the really worrying thing about the planned No Kings protests. From what I have been able to determine, it’s all being run by a centralized leadership that is, in fact, closely linked to the Democratic Party.
We still have yet to see any sort of broad none-of-the-above movement emerge. This limits my optimism, although it is also true that in this sort of situation, any protests almost always beat no protests. So I am more optimistic than I was a month ago, but it will take significant changes in the nature of the opposition to Trump to raise that optimism to a truly significant level.
Published at 16:15 on 7 June 2025
Nice Liberals might fret about stories like this, but I see them as signs of hope. At long last, grassroots resistance to Trump seems to be emerging on the streets, and hopefully in time for Trump to have a long, hot summer.
Because, yes, unrest can involve excesses, but so far, these are not happening. A little graffiti and blocked traffic? Sure, those things are illegal. But Trump is breaking laws left and right (and getting very little pushback from the Democrats) and getting away with it, so let’s have some perspective here.
I mean, really now. There are literal gangs of masked fascist goons arresting people without due process under the president’s orders, and yet the real problem is supposed to be some graffiti, disrespectful chanting, and blocked traffic? Please.
It is interesting to note that the Nice Liberals were wringing their hands when MLK was disrupting business as usual in the Civil Rights Era. So much so that MLK himself wrote about the phenomenon in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And yet, real substantive gains were won as a result of that unrest, gains that had failed to happen in well over a century of quiet, polite, obsessively lawful action (or, more commonly, inaction).
And, a lot more recently, Biden cruised to victory on the heels of Black Lives Matter protests (and even a few literal riots) that disrupted business as usual.
Historical evidence indicates unrest is not so universally toxic as the Nice Liberals claim it to be. In fact, it often tends to accompany or precede periods of progressive change.
Published at 11:08 on 13 May 2025
Suppose, just for sake of argument, that all the stuff J.B. Pritzker recently said in New Hampshire is sincere and not just hot air and politicking. What then?
Well, first he’s just one Democrat. He speaks for himself, and nobody else. And yes, while he’s not the only one, what is being done here is to cherry-pick Democrats. Overall, and in the aggregate, it is a party that has been a willing co-participant in the USA’s transition to an authoritarian, fascist (or at least quasi-fascist) state.
Realistically, what hope is there for that trend changing, for no apparent good reason, in the near future, just because it is politically convenient? Let’s be realistic here: it is somewhere between slim and none.
So even if JBeefy is serious, and even if he gets to the White House (and he is definitely running, even though he hasn’t officially announced it yet), it will be just him and a few other exceptions that prove a general rule. It is pretty obvious that, overall, the general rule will prevail.
And if it is just hot air and politicking? Basically the same result, just with a little less sturm und drang, that is all.
So J.B. is irrelevant.
He is irrelevant, that is, so long as action is mostly limited to voting for the self-proclaimed “opposition” party and/or candidate.
Until the none-of-the-above movement of which I have written earlier emerges, elections are more irrelevant than most think. But if such a movement emerges, it might be able to hijack the Democrats and use them to serve its end, in much the same way as Trump hijacked the Republican Party.
Will it happen because Democrats are opportunists and want to pander? Yes. Will it happen in spite of Democratic Party insiders’ attempts to contain, manage, and minimize it? Yes. Will those insiders have to be fought for true control? Yes.
But it doesn’t matter so much. A Democratic Party that does the right things for insincere reasons, does the right things against the wishes of its operatives, is still ultimately doing the right things.
But just voting alone will not and cannot make this happen.
Published at 12:23 on 8 May 2025
Sometimes, you can tell a lot from a name.
This was certainly the case for Leo XIV’s predecessor. The instant the name “Francis” was uttered, it became obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Catholic history what sort of pope he would probably be.
It’s not nearly so obvious, but I think think the name “Leo” might be similarly telling. The last pope to take this name was instrumental in developing many of the contemporary social teachings of the Catholic church, particularly those with respect to the rights of workers.
In choosing a name that is both traditional and associated with reformism, this pope might be saying that he will be less of an innovator than his predecessor, but is still very much grounded within the more liberal tradition of the Catholic church, and will defend those aspects of church doctrine.
We shall see.
And yes, this is all more in the vein of damage avoidance than anything. But damage avoidance is not nothing. Imagine the harm someone like Cardinal Erdő (Hungarian, staunchly traditionalist, closely allied with the neofascist government there) could have done as pope.
Update: Leo XIV is now on the record as having his name choice inspired by Leo XIII’s social teachings.
Published at 11:25 on 8 May 2025
Which is about the best that could be reasonably hoped for.
Here’s what the Associated Press had to say about him (scroll down) pre-conclave (he was considered a contender, although not a top one).