What disturbs the sensible center of American political discourse most is that, should somebody succeed, it is very likely that a huge number of Americans would only find fault with the assassin for provoking a potential backlash, if they found any fault at all.

Scathing and brilliant criticism of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, son of two Weather Underground members. The younger Dohrn has grown up a liberal, well-indoctrinated (and, to be fair, traumatized) to hate and question his parents actions. The author of this piece rightfully interrogates this assumption on the part of Zayd Dohrn.

“I was in a rage,” Dohrn told her son decades later in an interview for his book, “at the absolute stench of American life.”

Any serious accounting of the Weather Underground must take into consideration that they were young, idealistic, and a bit naive. But those are not unreasonable faults. You could say the same about the Bolsheviks, and I would. The USSR was full of naive dreamers. What the Bolsheviks had that the Weather Underground did not was numbers and training.

One must imagine if the Weathermen had killed a million people in the New York Tristate area with a decade’s worth of bombs. Would it have been better if the Weathermen had worn medals and planned their actions from the Pentagon?

I think a lot about the American New Left. An attempt, however flawed, to bring about an apocalyptic (in the original Greek definition) reckoning with American society, tragically splintered and rife with infighting, both genuine and manufactured.

I learned recently that my grandmother's brother was part of the SDS, and was jailed for it. Why, she didn't know. But it happened, at least. That era is not so far from us.

If you are reading this, sweaty with the worry that I am “normalizing” or “justifying” political violence, consider that I am only asking why you find so many forms of political violence so normal, so justifiable, so adequately met with well, it’s a shame, of course, while the specter of old radicals looms like a nightmare. Sometimes you must stand athwart history, yelling Are you fucking serious? Is it only that you get used to that stench of American life after a while? Is it worth it?

What is to be done?

But the reality of a leaderless and structureless movement started by 50 people is, who decides who’s in and who’s out? When millions are now joining you, how do you centralize messaging? How do you stay on target for what you are organizing? In a running theme of this era, the political explosion that MPL created against not a fascist military dictatorship, but a progressive, left-leaning democratic administration, gave open ground for the far-right to take control.

I think that it would be understandable for people to take issue with my growing feelings around needing strong, verticalized, centralist structures to build movements on, but it comes from the same feelings that motivate this piece. Horizontalism is a deeply frustrating way to organize an entire movement, or even worse an organization. Best case scenario is things are slow. Worst case scenario, you are destroyed by the same fascist forces you are hoping to defeat.

It is obvious we have seen consecutive ‘biggest protests in human history’ to little global systemic change. Spontaneous uprisings have been a feature of the 21st century. In some places, one political elite was simply replaced with another. In other places, the states and capitalists cracked down on the movement so hard it hasn’t recovered. Other places were broken by the political vacuums created with no real, organized working class movement to fill that gap.

Imagine for a minute, the ICE uprisings keep scaling upwards. Millions and millions are shutting down the country. Rolling General Strikes from state to state. Then mass marches on the capital, and Trump’s goons flee to Epstein’s Island or some other far hideaway. Who, or what groups, will take over the political power of the country? How will the next decision get made? Did classes disappear? Did the social ills created by US settler colonial society disappear?

This is the key question and my greatest frustration with the modern American left. I am tired of "street protests". I am tired of "calls to action". Not because these things are bad, or even unnecessary, but because in order to work they have to be backed up by concrete organization, something that I feel we are terribly lacking.

So when looking at the vast field of lost revolutions of the 21st century, and the gravestones of all the martyrs we lost along the way, we have to ask ourselves, did we organize correctly? And the answer from the available evidence in most cases says we didn’t. Now we are facing an even worse ecological crisis, rising fascism, a new state of imperialist world order, and mass fascist violence in the streets of the capitalist hegemon—the U.S.. What changes have been made? Are we organizing differently from 2011? Because if we wish to succeed, we must.

We're very much in the 'radium underpants' stage of the surveillance economy. A lot of the hype is silly, some of what we're doing is useful, and some of it is downright harmful.

On surveillance, data, and the military-industrial complex.

I've become very interested in the way that American Capitalism managed to make so much progress -- genuine, real progress -- in the 20th century and then stalled out so dramatically in the early 21st. This is a great video analyzing the rise of American power (which dovetails with American worker power in the early 20th century) and how the process of dismantling that worker power in favor of capitalist power has led to our current state of bloated neoliberalism.

Why hasn’t the so-called u.s. left, despite all of the efforts made over the last two years, been able to meaningfully intervene in a live-streamed genocide?

All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

Jake Paul’s ascent in boxing is a cultural symptom of an empire in decline. It reflects a country that now prefers empty spectacle over real strength, both in sports and on the world stage.