Sometimes people’s message is different from their words. Please don’t tell me not to say it like it is. And please don’t try and shame the oppressed for not being civil to oppressors.

The lesson to be learned from Daryl Davis is that bigots should be ostracized, ignored, and de-platformed. Once their movement has been defanged and members isolated to their anti-social groups, you can more safely reach out to those groups to deprogram the people on the margins, if that’s what you want to do with your life.

The story would be very different if the KKK still held social and political power. A black man who didn’t support the KKK’s mission attending a KKK rally would not last very long. No one should give these people a platform, or treat them civilly when they’re spreading their brain worms in civil society.

I don’t think he’s trying to amend for past misdeeds – I think he’s just trying to live his life. If we lived in a restorative justice society instead of a punitive one, I’d have different expectations of him. We are a society ruled by war criminals who have never seen a day of prison. Things are hard enough for people who’ve survived incarceration, it’s a shitty thing to throw his past at him. Especially since the people who tend to do it are acting in bad faith, and whose actual beef is that he’s not simping for genocidal dictators.

If Beehaw made a dime every time a .ML tankie invaded a post to slander socialists, they’d have more money than Facebook.

A lot of these people are small operators; most don’t have storefronts, some sell online, and a few through farmers’ markets.

This is part of a movement astroturfed by Gab and Truth Social to create a market for goods and services that caters to trumpist producers and consumers. None of these businesses are capable of growing past their trumpist market. When they make enough capital to get noticed by journalists, their growth is going to crater like MyPillow due to the political backlash.

Here’s an example vendor. She’s going to be making overpriced unhygienic peanut butter in her kitchen for less than minimum wage and taking advantage of her children’s free labor until they all burn out. If by some miracle she got the capital to buy the machines needed to make peanut butter to USDA standards and at scale, a proper boycott of her distributors would bring it all down.

They’re rubes, offering their depressed labor to their cult leaders in order to take a small chip out of a corporation’s bottom line. The Budweiser boycott is a great example of this - when a culture war exercise got out of hand, Republican thought leaders shut it down to avoid hurting one of their major donors. They make them think they’re going to build a thriving business, but the masters will throw them aside if the corporations pay the appropriate bribes.

Is that what it seems to you? I don’t see that statement in any of my replies to you. And yet I keep correcting your false readings of my statements with further explanation. Are you trolling me?

If you can’t convince people to vote in mass, how are you going to convince them to protest or strike?

I agree. If you convince people that voting is the path to political change, you play into the elite’s hands; but if people are politically engaged enough to protest and strike, voting is an afterthought.

I’m not advocating some violent minority storm congress. I’m saying if enough people agree on change and organize, they can make the edicts of politicians irrelevant. I wasn’t referring to the Jan 6 coup attempt; I was talking about the historical revolutions against autocrats that replaced them with republican systems. The more democratic a system, the less violence it needs to use to rule; and less violence is likely to come back on it during a revolution towards a more progressive system.

I’m not saying marches alone, obviously; I mean mass mobilization, and all the tactics that makes possible. It’s always nice to have politicians that concede earlier; but it’s not a “need” type of thing. In the past, when people couldn’t move politicians, they raised guillotines. The people always come first, and the minute the leaders of a movement sell out the rank and file for access and clout, they’re playing the wrong game. If you think your political responsibility ends at the ballot box, you’re part of the problem.

As an anarchist, I’d like to repurpose a comment I made a while back to connect with people who are genuinely surprised and disappointed by this development.

Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement’s demands. It wasn’t sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements’ economic and social power. It’s a common trope that revolutionary groups’ sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as ‘more pliable obstacles.’ For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don’t know how to work the system.

Politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians’ potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.

The most effective method of creating change will always be in the street.

What a garbage person.

This isn’t some random twitter user; it was posted by the National Guard of Ukraine, and officially identified as an Azov soldier. It’s a pretty fucking fascist thing to do, but if you think this is the first and only indication that Azov is fascist, you haven’t been paying attention. I bring it up because it’s one of the many ways Azov is undermining resistance against Putin’s fascists: creating propaganda that alienates Ukraine’s Muslim allies.

The fascists are literally dipping bullets in pig’s blood. Why isn’t Ukraine concerned about losing Turkey as a strategic ally by making heroes out of crusaders, but a situation where there would be less soldiers to check Erdogan’s southern ambitions is going to make him throw away all that Bayraktar money.

If they’re such a minor element of Ukrainian society, why can’t they disband the battalions? You can’t have it both ways. You’re right, it’s not Afghanistan; Ukraine aspiring to EU status makes the threat worse.

Imagine this was the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia in the 1980s - knowing what you know now about 9-11 would you be just as cavalier about accountability with who the United States were training and supplying?

Putin is an autocrat and Wagner are fascists, but the journalists featured here don’t have any influence in the east. They are doing the right thing by demanding Ukraine be held accountable. Both the journalists have clearly stated whose ‘side’ they’re on, and repudiated Putin’s claims. This is no place for Soviet whataboutism.

Mark my words: The next wave of mass shooters and white supremacist terrorists are being trained with American taxpayer money. If they’re so hard up for support, why don’t they permit anarchist battalions? There are veterans with years of military experience in Kobanî who were eager to fight the invasion, and the Ukrainian MOD delayed and stymied their participation. Yet they’re bending over backwards for people who want to cleanse their society of gay people and minority ethnic groups. Anarchists and communists have already given their lives in the defense of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not a fascist, but wouldn’t it be a great propaganda coup against Putin’s narrative for Ukraine to fight alongside a modern Abraham Lincoln brigade?

Every accusation a confession. He wishes the United States was a third-world hellhole where he can rig the election. His efforts to politicize the justice department and stack the supreme court are means to that end.

President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho needs to fire an automatic weapon into the ceiling of congress to restore order to the chamber.

Their agenda seems to be more of a “whatever sticks” clickbait.

So the Joe Rogan agenda.