Neoliberals for a larger helot class.
Author and Co-Founder of Vox, Matthew Yglesias discusses his new book ‘One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.
The choice whether or not to pick up your family and immigrate to another country is a big decision indeed.
Donald Trump: SJW of the Right.
Fed pigs defend themselves by offering the Nuremberg defense. But why are the liberal pundits at Newsweek not criticizing ALL fed pigs, rather than mere offering selective criticisms of those who are in conflict with the Progressive ideological agenda? One upside of current events is that liberals, leftists, progressives, anarcho-progressives, etc. are getting a lesson in the value of decentralism.
By Chantal Da Silva
Newsweek
A new Netflix docuseries that saw filmmakers gain “unprecedented” access to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s operations under the Trump administration sees ICE agents open up about what it’s like to be seen as “the bad guys.”
For roughly three years, starting just after President Donald Trump took office, filmmakers Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau were given a stunning level of access to the U.S. Homeland Security department’s immigration agencies, including ICE and the Border Patrol.
This has been true not only of ICE detention centers but of the US prison/jail system generally. It is interesting how the media only reports on this stuff selectively, mostly to get some anti-Trump mileage out of it. After Biden is elected, if that happens, there will likely be no more mention of this.
CBS News
This happened a few weeks ago. The fact that these folk are only protesting ICE jails and not ALL jails shows that they have not yet developed authentic lumpen proletarian revolutionary class consciousness but are merely Blue Tribe Khomeinists.
Democracy Now
In immigration news, advocates across the country are continuing demands to release all people from Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails as confirmed coronavirus cases inside facilities in the U.S. near 1,400. Immigrant rights advocates led protests outside immigration jails in California and Washington state Thursday. In Burlington, Massachusetts, advocates replaced the ICE flag at the agency’s Boston Field Office with a new flag that read ”ICE Kills. Free Them All.” Another national day of action is planned for today.
A reflection on the problem of interclass and intra-lumpen proletarian conflict.
Many positive things have happened in the uprising. These include the mass participation of normies and civilians (non-revolutionaries) in protests and civil disobedience against the state, along with direct attacks on the state such as the destruction of enemy military bases (police precincts), star chambers (courts), and enemy military vehicles (police cars).
The outright assassinations of enemy troops (cops), mostly carried out by Leon Czolgosz-like lone wolves, has been unnecessary and mistaken, because we are not yet in a high-intensity civil war situation, only a low-grade uprising. The insurgents have no capacity for fighting much less winning an actual civil war at this point.
There have also been many other mistakes involving random violence against individuals, along with interracial, inter-tribal, and inter-sectarian violence. Inter-class violence has also been a problem. The direct expropriation of ruling class resources (“looting,” or what I prefer to call a grassroots economic stimulus plan organized from the bottom up and implemented through direct action) is legitimate. Places like Bank of America (neo-usurers), Wal-Mart and Target (neo-plantations), Amazon (neo-manors), McDonald’s, and Wendy (neo-sweatshops) are clearly part of the statist, capitalist, and imperialist enemy. One can argue against such actions on practical grounds (corporations write off losses as a business expense), propagandistic grounds (FOX News-like outlets use such actions in their anti-insurgent propaganda), or pro-labor grounds (employees lose their jobs if their employer is burned out). It could certainly be argued that worker occupation of such places would be a better approach. But clearly, attacks on the neo-manorial outposts of the neo-aristocracy are legitimate.
However, this does not mean that all interclass violence is legitimate. It would be a grave error, for example, to engage in arson in upper-class residential areas, or simply to attack people who seem like that might be part of the capitalist class on the street. This opens the door for a Jacobin/Stalinist/Maoist class genocide. Even more problematic is the interclass violence that has taken place between the lumpenproletariat and the conventional proletarian or petite bourgeoisie. These kinds of things have the same effect as the destruction of monuments, landmarks, temples, and artifacts, i.e. it provides propagandistic fuel that the ruling class enemy can use to its advantage.
The intra-class violence, or threats of such, within the lumpenproletariat is also a major problem. Primarily, this is the fault of the anarchists and other far-left sectors, but not for the reasons that Donald Trump would give. The anarchists, who should be the political leadership of the lumpenproletariat, have failed to build class unity among the lumpenproletariat. For example, anarchists have protested against ICE on anti-racist/pro-immigrant grounds, but have they exhibited similar zeal for defending gun nuts and militiamen against the BATF, drug users against the DEA, tax protestors against the IRS, sovereign citizens against the FBI, “white-collar criminals” against the DOJ, and, yes, urban street gangs, motorcycle gangs, Mafiosi (Bill Kuntsler was John Gotti’s attorney), cults (Charles Garry was the attorney for the Black Panthers AND the Peoples’ Temple), and (hold your nose) white nationalists and far-right extremists against the local municipal pigs, state pigs, and federal alphabet soup agency pigs? Have the anarchists adopted the mode of “defending the undefendable”? Nothing would undermine the ability of reactionary state forces to recruit the right-wing of the lumpenproletariat than efforts by anarchists and the general far-left to defend ALL (I repeat, ALL) enemies of the state as vigorously as they defend illegal migrants against ICE.
Of course, the difference is that illegal migrants are considered to be “progressive” (fueling cosmopolitanism or “diversity”) while these other sectors are considered to be “reactionary” (the modern equivalent of Marx’s “non-historical peoples”). This indicates that most “anarchists” or “far-leftists” are really just Blue Tribe fundamentalists first, with their anarcho-progressivism merely being an afterthought, and who are not yet ideologically and psychologically ready to launch a full-fledged war against the state even if they were militarily capable of doing so, which they clearly are not.
By Leticia Miranda
NBC News
Salih Mothana came home so quietly after he surveyed the damage to his small grocery store in Chicago that his family had no idea their business had been destroyed. Looters had raided the family store after a night of peaceful protests against police brutality ended with pockets of destruction last weekend.
“I understand why it happened, and it’s OK,” Mothana, a Yemeni immigrant, said in Arabic as his daughter translated. “It’s not like I have to blame someone for this. I understand why this happened. If it sends out the message, it doesn’t matter to us.”
Mothana, who has run Express Food Market on the South Side of Chicago for over 20 years, is one of scores of small-business owners across the country who are now trying to pick up the pieces after social justice protests over the killing of George Floyd.
First, Marianne Williamson calls for “primarying” neoliberal Democrats with social democrats, and now Tucker Carlson calls for “primarying” neoliberal Republicans with “national-populists.” About 20 years ago, I started noticing the rise of anti-neoliberal tendencies in Europe with social-democratic (e.g. SYRIZA) and right-populist tendencies (e.g. LePenism). I figured the same trends would eventually develop in the US, and it seems to be happening now. It’s also rather sad that “libertarianism” has come to be associated with neoliberalism.
It seems that most people even on the far left and far right have a limited perception and definition of what concepts like the “state,” “ruling class,” or “power elite” actually mean. It would also seem that we need a much more modernized and expansive definition of these concepts if we are going to be intellectually and strategically prepared to fight our common enemies in the future (assuming that is what we want to do, which many apparently do not).
Will the US be a one-party state in the future? In the past, I have thought that as the Republicans’ demographic base continues to shrink they would likely reinvent themselves as a pretend populist-nationalist part (which has since happened with Trump) and that some on the right would move to a more extreme position (e.g. Alt-Right). But the key to remaining competitive for the Republicans is likely to develop the ability to attract more union members, Hispanics, and African-Americans who feel threatened by a combination of “free trade” (neoliberal economics) and immigration. A GOP that reinvented itself in the image of France’s National Rally (semi-isolationist, populist, to the left of neoliberalism on economics, and comparatively more “liberal” social questions) might be able to hold its ground to a much greater degree than the dying Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan “conservative” coalition of military hawks, corporatists, and social conservatives. Read about the LePenist movement in France and notice the similarities between it and Trumpism.
The latter part of this segment has an interesting discussion of the differences between Carlson’s and Hannity’s coverage of COVID-19.
Krystal and Saagar look at a Tucker Carlson FOX News clip, where he calls out Trump for not doing enough on illegal immigration, which makes cheap labor easier to exploit.
The upside of the Latin Americanization of the US economy is that it will essentially resolve the immigration debate because no one will want to migrate from Latin America if they are only going to another country with Latin American class structures.
“Yankee, go home!”
BBC
Mexican protesters have shut a US southern border crossing amid fears that untested American travellers will spread coronavirus.
Residents in Sonora, south of the US state of Arizona, have promised to block traffic into Mexico for a second day after closing a checkpoint for hours on Wednesday.
They wore face masks and held signs telling Americans to “stay at home”.
Mexico has fewer than 500 confirmed Covid-19 cases and the US over 65,000.
The border is supposed to be closed to all except “essential” business, but protesters said there has been little enforcement and no testing by authorities.
The blockade was led by members of the group Sonorans for Health and Life, who called for medical testing to be done on anyone who crosses from the US into Mexico.
Tim is overstating his case here. Coronavirus will no more end globalization than the Spanish flu halted the progression toward the managerial state.
Coronavirus is having the interesting effect of turning liberals into immigration restrictionists and turning conservatives into social democrats.
By Libertarian Heathen
Libertarianism is Natural Law Enshrined In Politics
I have a variety of people on the social media pages associated with this website. I generally do not ban contrarians as they provide fodder for good debate.
Most Libertarians/Conservatives have encountered a common fallacy offerred by Marxists who still cling to the idea “Communism would work if it was only done right” or “There was never actual Communism”. The argument is made in varying forms, but this is the essential premise.
Here is a recent example from Facebook:
This is the transcript of a talk I gave to the H.L. Mencken Club on November 9, 2019.
By Keith Preston
When it comes to questions of strategy, it is important to base one’s approach on a reasonable estimation of the probable circumstances one will be facing in the future.
I constantly hear claims that there will be a civil war at some point, or an apocalyptic revolution, or a coup, or the election of a populist leader that will set everything straight.
But the probable future of the United States will be something more like what is actually happening on the West Coast at present. In the future, the United States will increasingly start to resemble a Latin American nation in terms of demographics, socioeconomic class structures, and political characteristics.
Many people on the Right tend to focus on the demographic angle, and it is certainly true that the US is experiencing a demographic transformation in the sense that in the future there will be no ethnic majority, but merely a collection of minorities.
However, just as important is the fact that class divisions continue to widen in the US. The gap between rich and poor is the widest it has been since the 1920s, and there is no evidence this will change in the foreseeable future. I would argue that the widening class divisions probably have dozens of causes rather than any singular cause, but it is an issue that is just as important as the demographic issue.
At present, California is starting to look like what a traditional so-called “Third World” model society looks like. In Third World societies, and traditional societies generally, class structures are such that the very rich live in opulent luxury, with a relatively small middle class of ruling class functionaries, and masses of workers and poor people. That is the picture that is emerging in California.
Certain areas of California are among the wealthiest in the nation. There is also a middle class and upper middle class of professionals, tech workers, public sector workers, bureaucrats, and corporate managerial personnel, but what Americans traditionally think of as the conventional working to middle class is shrinking in size, and the ranks of the poor, including those experiencing Third World or Fourth World levels of poverty, are growing. For example, some areas of California have poverty levels that approximate those of the Congo. California cities have a massive homeless population of the kind normally associated with Latin America or South Asia. Certain medieval diseases like typhus and leprosy are making a comeback among the poor in California as well.
It has been said in the past that California is the bellwether of the nation, and I suspect that will prove to be true in this scenario as well. Increasingly, US politics is starting to resemble Third World politics with openly demagogic figures on both the left and right beginning to appear. In Third World politics, it is not uncommon for open socialists and communists as well as right-wing extremists to get elected to parliaments. Corruption, nepotism, ethnic spoils systems, institutionalized bribery, and flagrant incompetence are not exceptions but the expected norm. We see plenty of examples of this happening in the United States as well.
Kim has an interesting take on the immigration question that demonstrates how the way the issue is presented by the political class and the media is an insincere fraud.
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
I sympathize with Willem Van Spronsen. Maybe that’s a bad way to start this post but it feels like the most honest way to start this post. A mentally ill anarchist, not unlike myself, Willem wanted to end his life but he wanted to end it for a cause. So he attacked an ICE detention center with pipe bombs and let the cops do the rest. I’ve never made my disdain for Antifa a secret, I’ve befriended too many right-wing anti-imperialists caught in their crossfire, but god help me, this struck me as a move in the right direction for Pacific Northwest anarchists, who have lately been far too busy bombarding alt-right imbeciles to confront our growing police state.
My sympathy is not exclusively political however. My sympathy comes from a place of very personal outrage and my outrage comes from a deeply traumatic childhood. I can usually retain a pretty jaded gonzo snark with my writing, stemming from my misanthropic drag queen sense of humor. But when you’ve been fucked with by role-crazy adults as a child, part of you will always be that child. So when I see kids in fucking cages, I see myself brutally misgendered in a confessional waiting for hell. And that’s when I flip my proverbial shit and get downright histrionic. The only reason why I haven’t gone full Kaczynski like Willem, aside from the fact that my meds are working and I generally appose initiatory violence, is because I’m usually too livid in these moments to handle anarcho-home-ec projects like IED’s. I’m also probably too pissed off to write a completely lucid blog post, so this time I decided to wait a week and take a closer look at the issue of the camps.
It’s very tempting to drop the lion share of the blame on a loud-mouth bully like Trump. He’s certainly made the immigration issue more personal by declaring entire classes of people war criminals and encouraging his beloved gorilla juice-heads in ICE to get their Gestapo on. The harsh reality that the media has chosen to ignore however is that there is nothing particularly new about Orange-Man-Bad’s persecution of pint-sized undocumented line-crossers. In fact, the bastard still comes in fourth behind the last three presidents in mass deportations. The modern militarization of the boarder actually started decades before Trump with another sanction-happy rapist named Bill Clinton (I believe the two may have met once or twice at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s Pretty Baby-Eyes Wide Shut Parties) which was just one small part of his fascistic war on children, the hallmark of which was his draconian Biden-approved crime bill which essentially declared black childhood to be a felony. And this is where we meet the concentration camp question.
Tucker Carlson has a predictable response to the Willem Van Spronsen incident. I disagree with Carlson that the Antifa is inherently connected to the mainstream Democratic Party-oriented left just as I disagree with the often-made claim that the Trumpians are inherently connected to the neo-fascists.
As a general rule, I do not take sides in the usual conflicts between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and Proudboys/Alt-Right vs. Antifa/Far-Left. I consider all of this to be playing the System’s game, and a “bread and circuses” distraction from the real issues.
I would generally give Willem Van Spronsen an A for attitude and an F for execution. Whatever one’s views on the immigration question, a revolutionary upheaval will certainly involve attacks on state facilities and outposts in various circumstances. It’s the way revolution is done. Any kind of revolutionary upheaval needs folks that will go the distance. However, he strikes me as a mentally ill guy who committed suicide by cop via virtue signaling, which is often the case with these “lone wolf” terrorist types. He did nothing to improve conditions in the detention centers, and likely made them worse by motivating the authorities to increase the level of security in such places.
Nor do I think Van Spronsen’s Antifa associates would create a better society than the one we have now. In fact, they would create a much worse society, basically like Bolshevism, possibly more like Maoism or the Khmer Rouge. Not that they would ever be large enough or functional enough to bring that about. Like their Alt-Right tribal enemies, the only value of these groups is as disruptive virus within the system, and counterforce to each other.
But the outrage over “terrorism” coming from “the other side” also rings hollow. The US federal regime/global empire is the number one terrorist organization in the world today. So-called “federal agents” (the entire alphabet soup of them) are by nature members of a terrorist organization. The Tacoma incident was simply a matter of a mini-terrorist taking on a mega-terrorist. Big deal.
This is quite good. Totally smashes the conventional narrative that the abuse of migrants is somehow unique to Trump. The same thing is happening with the migrant detention center issue nowadays that happened with the Iraq War during the George W. Bush era. In both cases, liberal and left opinion used the issue to score some partisan and ideological points, and then quickly forgot about the issue (with some exceptions, of course) when there was a change in the political winds. When Obama came along, the antiwar left virtually disappeared. When another Democrat becomes president, the migrant issue will be dropped as well.
My main criticism of the mainstream right is their jingoistic flag-waving, dupiness for imperialism and their corporate-love (“those poor oppressed billionaires paying capital gains taxes”). My main criticism of the “far-right” is that many of them are so anti-immigrant and anti-private crime (particularly black crime) they end up sucking the dicks of feds and cops in the process. If you don’t want immigration, build a wall around your city-state or township. If you want to fight crime, form a posse or militia or expanded neighborhood watch. But Fuck the System and its stooges. Period.
By Darlene Cunha
New York Times
Tracy Nuetzi, a Trump voter and resident of Florida, was an American citizen for 60 years, until the country decided she wasn’t.
“I thought, ‘This is a mistake, this must be a mistake,’” she said. Ms. Nuetzi spent nearly a year, from December 2017 to November 2018, trying to prove she was an American, and not liable to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have been extremely divisive and has led to rising social tensions across the country, says an American political analyst in Virginia.
“Within
the United States right now, immigration is one of these very divisive
issues,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
“In American politics, there will always be occasionally some very
divisive issue that emerges in which people have very emotionally-held
beliefs,” Preston told Press TV on Sunday.
“It appears that this issue is now escalating and becoming more intense,” he added.
A 69-year-old man armed with a rifle threw incendiary devices at an
immigration jail in Washington state early on Saturday morning, then was
found dead after four police officers arrived and opened fire,
authorities said.
A friend of the dead man said she thought he wanted to provoke a fatal
conflict, the Seattle Times reported, and described him as an anarchist
and anti-fascist.
The Tacoma police department said the officers responded about 4am to
the privately run Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, a Department of
Homeland Security detention facility that holds migrants pending
deportation proceedings.
Immigration has been the subject of a divisive political battle in the
US, which has struggled for more than a year with a migration crisis on
its southern border with Mexico.
Many Americans oppose immigration and believe that immigrants bring
crime and steal good jobs, while others are sympathetic to immigrants
and recognize that the US is an aging nation of low birthrate and needs
immigration to make its economy and population grow.
Thousands of protesters staged rallies across the United States on Friday to protest Trump’s immigration policies.
Trump has made his hard-line stance on immigration an integral part of
his presidency and has promised to build a wall along the US-Mexican
border to curb the flow of migrants from Mexico and Central America.
The Trump administration has sought to curb the flow of undocumented
migrants and limiting legal immigration, and replace it with a
merit-based system.
Many undocumented migrants crossing illegally into the US are asylum
seekers fleeing violence and poverty in Honduras, Guatemala and El
Salvador.
The treatment of migrants in the detention centers, particularly child
migrants, has come under fire in recent months, with reports emerging of
filthy conditions and cruelty from staff.
Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet,
said she is “deeply shocked” at the conditions in which the US
government is keeping detained migrants and refugees, including
children.
