Heidi Blake reports on how the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.

Well-written and horrifying. I was particularly struck by the bit about how the ineptitude of police in investigating the Tates arguably set all this in motion. Of course the police wouldn't give a shit, half of cops love the shit that Tate does.

I am always a bit suspect of stories that position individual right-wing figures as Great Men, and I think in the grand scheme of things Tate is less of a central figure than he is a smooth operator in a Western political environment that has little cause to fight him.

His base in Romania is, of course, pertinent here -- a post-Soviet state plundered by capital in a revenge drive against the population for daring to attempt a more equitable way of life. Of course the Tates flourish there, the goal of American policy of the last hundred years has been to carve up the Eastern European nations for precisely this sort of horror and human rights abuse. This is what the United States has created.

Which again is why I think if I have any major qualms with this (incredibly in-depth) work of biographical journalism it is the fact that the author does not seem to grasp the political dimensions here, at least not fully. Tate is not a leader of a new movement, he is a beneficiary of a very old one -- anticommunism, at the hands of the United States.

Tate's particular brand of hyper-misogyny, right-wing agitprop, et cetera -- this is what the last century has been set up to create. Horrors upon horrors.

U.S. oligarchs desperately want to build the biggest right wing propaganda and infotainment machine ever constructed. One that pummels the misinformed plebs with soggy class warfare and divisive culture war agitprop. But they're all profoundly stupid, wildly overconfident, and drunk on sycophancy.

Good, stirring writing with only one head-scratching implication of Evil China, which I have to call out because it is stupid. Rest of the piece is good though. I appreciate the anger!

Voluntarism, programmatic idealism, and strategic moralism are typically treated as separate mistakes. This essay argues that there is one error in three domains—the substitution of an ideal political form for material analysis—and that only reversing the direction of determination can correct it.

Don't agree with 100% of this piece but found it an interesting, if deeply academic-brain written, read. Loved this little tidbit from the American analysis section:

The absence of an American labor party is not a contingent historical lacuna waiting to be filled by the right organizational initiative. It is a structural feature of American class politics that has shaped the forms in which class interests can be expressed and the terrains on which they can be contested. The two-party system is not simply an obstacle to socialist politics but a terrain through which class forces are organized. The question of what engagement with that terrain can produce is a strategic question requiring analysis, not a moral question requiring a verdict.

Where I principally break with the analysis is with takeaways like this:

The democratic and electoral terrain is not, as the abstentionist position maintains, simply a mechanism for reproducing ruling class hegemony without remainder. It is the primary terrain on which the political consciousness of tens of millions of American workers is being actively shaped, and the question of whether the left engages with that process or withdraws from it in principled disgust is not a moral question but a strategic one with determinate political consequences.

To which I would say: Is it? Did the Sanders campaign make actual waves in the American proletariat? Is Mamdani a win for socialists, or is he an absorption of New Deal liberalism into the Democratic Party program? From within the borders of the States, I don't think these are easily-answered questions. Working within the electoral frame has some advantages, but I truly doubt the easy answer of "a lot of people vote, therefore that is where power lies and where we must strive". American voting is a complete mess -- both in terms of participation as well as upper class capture. Not to mention the number of institutions in the American government that are not beholden to any mass politic (like the Supreme Court, or in a broader sense the American military). It's things like that that make me doubt the so-called "democratic route to socialism".

We created fake profiles as young people. We then went and asked it a series of structured questions, with a child who is thinking about killing themselves. Within two minutes we were able to get ChatGPT to tell us how we can [harm] ourselves safely.

Kind of ridiculous that the rest of the article exists when this passage is in it, but even the bourgeois press sometimes lets some true things slip through.

To condemn an anti-imperialist state that is actively improving the Global South and other oppressed peoples’ material conditions is to condemn internationalism itself. This is akin to tying a weight around your ankle before running from a predator. Iran has done more for Palestine and Sudan than any “nonviolent protest” ever could.

[The No Kings website] then goes on to cite the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, where demonstrators used yellow umbrellas and yellow ribbons used to represent resistance to Russia in Ukraine, as its two specific examples to align the movement with. Both of these examples are in line with the US foreign policy interests shared between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the case of the Hong Kong protests, in both 2014 and 2019, the US government was accused of directly interfering and helping to direct the demonstrations, especially through its CIA-linked soft-power projects like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

I have so much suspicion around No Kings and this article gets at one of the main reasons why.

When sexual harassment allegations against Thomas by Anita Hill, a Black woman, came to light, Crenshaw found herself watching what she called an intersectional failure unfold.

Reading Kimberlé Crenshaw's work in college was one of the first eye-opening experiences I had about structural racism in the United States. I'm happy to hear that she is also somewhat critical of the way that "intersectionalism" has become a thought-terminating cliche in the world of left-liberal work.

The legal right to defend oneself has always proved far more fragile when exercised by the very people who most need protection.

The on-paper legality of carrying arms is irrelevant compared to the social legality of carrying arms, which will always be illegal for the targeted classes. We live under a dictatorship of capital, and capital has strong reasons to discriminate against social minorities. Trans freedom to live is non-negotiable in a true progressive future.

The NYPD plans to hire 580 additional uniformed officers by the end of the year, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday, revealing an unexpected staffing increase given Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vow to keep police headcount flat.

I feel like I am simultaneously more critical of Mamdani and more sympathetic these days. Of course he's making these concessions, they are concessions that (unlike most DNC representatives) actually are allowing him to get things done in other ways. But that doesn't excuse the fact that since he is working within the current system, the compromises he makes will be to the fascist elements of our ruling class.

The police in America I think functionally act as an arm of the ruling capitalist-fascist class. The desire of the capitalist-fascist class is to maintain stable rule over the populace and they see the expansion of the police forces as the way to do that. That is not going to change unless those class elements are purged from power in America, which is not going to happen without a comprehensive revolution.

So like, yeah I mean, I get it. Mamdani is able to execute quite well in his office -- better than many other Democratic representatives -- and that's praiseworthy! It's understandable for him to make these sort of concessions/compromises. Also, these compromises fucking suck and I wish he was not in this position, because the sort of charisma that he has could really be useful to an actually revolutionary organization/position.

The balance of power has shifted, and nations of the Middle East will no longer accept a regional order dictated by the US and Israel.

History continues apace!

With reactionary forces bearing down upon us, we, the children of these struggles, must take on this banner and win the war once and for all. To do so, we must develop the means to secure our survival outside of the support from the state or any liberal institution. We must develop cadres that can bring the masses into our joint struggle for liberation, underground communication networks through digital encryption and physical dropbox networks, resource depots (which will form the backbone of a logistical network) to secure the supply of necessities to the people and our revolutionary fighters, basic physical and medical educational programs so cadre are fit to engage struggle they are met with, and we must develop cells within every pore of this country from which we can mount our organized counter-attack. [...] Most of the work of a revolutionary army is logistics, followed by aiding in the work of the people by acting as a pool of concentrated labor, then engaging in direct confrontation with the enemies of the people. The People’s Liberation Army undoubtedly harvested more pounds of rice and millet than can be counted in spent bullet casings. A Communist party is nothing more than the rationalized organization of the people’s collective will, for every gain of the people is a gain for the party, for every loss of the people is a loss for the party.

I always find it enlightening that Mao's theories around guerrilla warfare mesh so well with those of Lawrence of Arabia's, as I think there's a lot to learn from both sources. Putting the organization of trans & queer liberation into these lenses aligns a lot with my feelings.

A Texas councilmember will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits" and "a total termination of all internet services."

Fascist crashout. #BANDERAMELTDOWN

I don’t think I was supposed to get these emails in full. The city had just gotten a new public records officer, and the folder I received in response to my right to know request had both redacted and unredacted copies. I’m pleased to have the unredacted versions, though, because they narrate the push to clean up Downtown succinctly and honestly, spelling out the true drivers of policy: the unbridled revulsion of much of the propertied class for people who have the audacity to exist as poor in public.

Truly wild post here about the insanity of the petit bourgeois in America. I think people who have not experienced "local politics" may not be aware just how fucking evil the average small business-owner is as soon as you mention "the homeless". This is a good article to illuminate how much these people do not need to be listened to.

I think a lot about how the path after whatever This is has to involve a conscious disciplining of the petit bourgeois. Sorry if that's too straightforward of a way to put i, but it's just important to remember that you don't have to listen to these people. Not 'you', reader, necessarily — I have to hope you-the-reader are already not listening to the woes of the Small Businessowners in your neighborhood on homelessness issues — but 'you', the potential ruling majorities of the future.

I would say that the ruling majorities of the present should also keep this in mind, but as it stands the Businessowner class basically already rules, and they don't give a shit about the homeless. Sure would be great if that wasn't the case!

America's latest obsession with Wasians is more dangerous than you think. Hudson Williams, Charles Melton and the problem with Hollywood's obsession with mixed race asians.

It seems as though only when we list out all that is happening around us, can we, for a moment, summon the vertiginous feelings of overwhelm and dread we seemingly do everything in our power to suppress. Three years of a genocide transpiring in plain sight — one by which we increasingly scroll with the flick of a thumb; a new, stupid and brutal war whose consequences include an impending economic and energy crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before; the accelerating destruction of the planet; the dismantling or elimination of the institutions that protect and enrich us; the wanton targeting of things that many of us love — the earth, the birds, learning, reading, the arts, one another; an emerging global consensus in which children are increasingly viewed as disposable, the terrifying erosion of the rights of women, trans people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the poor, and the persecution of those on the Left — I can name more, but there is no point, save for perpetuating this mounting discomfort. To consider even a single one of these elements in its entirety is already too much for the ordinary mind to to bear, and yet we are asked to bear all of them simultaneously every single day.

Impossible to talk enough about the memorable quotes in this piece. Kate Wagner once again knocks it out of the park with this, combining the psychological with the social (the psychosocial, some might say) into a rumination, a paean about grief and perserverance.

I don't know where "we" go from here, but I also can recognize that "we" are situated in a moment that I would call 'imperial collapse' (as Kate also aptly puts it), and that things feel incredibly disoriented. Systems that once worked no longer work, horrors beyond measure are commonplace, even intrusive, even in the lives of those who do not directly see them.

I have become transfixed, these days, on trying to figure out how we got this way. I'm not a scholar, I'm not an academic, I'm just kind of an armchair history dork who is finally getting to the modern era, the 19th century and onward, and realizing that all that shit that Lenin was talking about re: the systems of capitalism building up and up and up and creating their own gravediggers might have something to it. There's a lot that I think you can point to the end of WW2 and say "ah, here is where things started getting really bad" and that might be true, but you could also point to a million other times. As Kate points out in the footnotes, the American Reconstruction era is another good touchpoint.

Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence. We learn as children that the suppression of our emotions is integral to social equilibrium within the family, something which is then extrapolated onto public life at the high, high cost of the subconscious belief that our emotional needs do not ultimately matter beyond ourselves. The despair of others frightens us in part because it forces us to reckon with that same bargain. What makes you so special? What gives you the right to cry?

My therapist would chastise me (politely) for agreeing with these feelings, and she would be correct to do so. I grew up a man, I grew up in America. These two things have instilled in me a pathological distaste for expressing tender emotion. It's not a good thing.

The breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened. It has happened and continues to happen by way of several concurrent historical processes from which one can cherrypick their best narratives about how precisely it all came to pass.