Resist!

  By Will Bunch The Philadelphia Inquirer (7/30/18) Last week’s news that special counsel Robert Mueller had the goods on 12 high-level Russian spieswhose job was to hack computers and muck up America’s 2016 presidential election was a political bombshell — but also a resounding vindication for a 26-year-old Georgia woman with the wonderfully poetic name of Reality Winner. In the spring of 2017, with public concern mounting about the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, federal officials still sought to assure people that there’d been no major success in penetrating electronic voting systems. But Winner, a commended Air…

  By Rebecca Solnit The Guardian (7/13/18) I keep the newspaper clipping inside a Milan Kundera novel: it shows demonstrators in Prague in 1989, one of them carrying a badly chipped bust of Stalin around whose neck hangs a placard that says nic netrvá věčně: nothing lasts forever. It’s not a war cry, nor a prophesy, but a bald statement of fact at the moment when the Soviet bloc Stalin had been critical in establishing was falling apart and Czechoslovakia was liberating itself. It must have seemed like forever to those who lived under totalitarianism until all of a sudden “forever”…

VICE News (5/12/18) NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The alt right is struggling to hold itself together. It’s dealing with infighting and money problems, and some of its leaders have decided they can’t risk holding events that are open to the public. One reason for that is antifa, the anti-fascist activists best known for punching Nazis but who also engage in digital counterintelligence, infiltrating white nationalist message boards and chat rooms to find out who they are and what they’re doing. Link to 7-Minute Video

“It’s a tragedy that the free world always refuses to learn from past mistakes where dictators and would-be dictators are concerned. “The autocrats, in contrast, are eager students of their predecessors. The make careful study of how to gradually remove rights without allowing rebellion, how to crush dissent and hold sham elections while keeping favorable travel and trade status in the West, and how to talk peace while waging war. The motives of dictators vary, it is true — communism, fascism, conquest, larceny – but the drive for total control never changes and their methods are painfully repetitive. In contrast,…

Illustration by Seth L. Taylor, 2018.   The New Yorker Radio Hour (4/6/18) Emma González is a survivor of the Parkland school shooting and a leader of the #NeverAgain movement. She talks with David Remnick about the ways her life has changed since the attack, and why activism comes naturally to the teen-agers spearheading this new push for gun control. Link to 16-Minute Audio

  “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;” and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.” “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.” “There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes…

  Democracy Now! (3/3/18) As a student-led movement for gun control sweeps the country, we look back at a key moment in another historic student movement: desegregation. “As I look at these young people I think back on those days and I think their time has come to pick up the baton looking for justice and freedom.” On January 9, 1961, African-American students Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes walked onto the campus of the University of Georgia to register for classes, as a howling mob of white students screamed racial epithets at them. It was a pivotal moment in the…

    By Peter Dreier The American Prospect (2/20/18) There’s nothing on the Parkland, Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School website about the woman whose name adorns the school, so its students may not realize that in rising from last week’s tragedy to speak truth to power, they are following in Douglas’s activist footsteps. Douglas would certainly see a bit of herself in Emma Gonzalez, the poised and eloquent young woman whose speech electrified her classmates, teachers, parents, and the whole country at a Fort Lauderdale rally on Saturday, only days after a gunman entered her school and killed 17 people. “If the president wants to come…

“Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.” The 2016 elections were the bow wave of change, the harbinger of a revolution to come. This time, voters were given a choice between a faux progressive elitist and a man who at least pretended to represent the people, while simultaneously appealing to hate, fear, greed, and ignorance. If the United States is to avoid the siren song of fascism, we will have to give people a real choice — one that explicitly seeks to overturn the Oligarch’s Coup and restore power to the people. The bottom line…