And frankly, a wave of Luigis would be actively harmful to the cause of fixing US health care. We had a wave of “propaganda of the deed” anarchist assassins and bombers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Their “direct action” against members of European royalty discredited their cause in the public eye, and tainted not only them but peaceful anarchist movements beside them.

And then an anarchist shot the wrong person and started World War I, showing that propaganda of the deed may not be able to make the world better, but it sure as hell can make it worse.

Oh ffs.

Irrespective of the morality of Luigi’s (alleged) actions (and let me emphasize here: killing people is wrong, even when the people are health care CEOs) he didn’t do shit to change the system. He killed one guy. He inspired some memes. He got a bunch of CEOs to increase their personal security. Big fucking deal.

CEOs are fungible. Luigi killed one. His corporation replaced him, just like a broken part in a machine. Nothing changed and the world moved on.

The broken health care industry will be fixed - if it’s ever fixed - by government action. We need single payer. We need universal taxpayer-funded health care for all. And we’re not going to get that by shooting CEOs.

Never mind the GOP. Hillary fucking Clinton spent millions of dollars promoting Trump in the run up to the 2016 election, because she wanted to make the Republicans look more radical and dangerous, and Trump was the most radical, dangerous candidate in the race.

Thanks, Hillary. Good call.

No, do not

Because Greene and other right-wing anti-Semites are using you much more than you’re using them.

They want views, they want attention, they want a left-wing audience, because that gives them more people to recruit and more opportunities to spread their racist, bigoted, generally shitty views.

And everybody’s attention span is finite. The more space the left gives to Greene, and Carlson, and other right-wing propagandists, the less space is available for actual Palestinians and their advocates to speak. We need to hear from the people most impacted by Israel’s actions, not from racists jumping on the anti-Israel bandwagon because they hate Jews.

You are not immune to propaganda. Nobody is. So don’t platform right-wing propagandists. KTHX.

See also: Tucker Carlson. Who has been aggressively attacking the Israeli government on Gaza, not because he gives a shit about Muslim lives, but because he’s an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. He thinks Jews want to murder all Gentiles, his beliefs come straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and every heinous act the government of Israel commits reinforces his belief that all Jews are evil.

And he, and Greene, and the rest of the right wing fever swamp conspiracy theorists, are fucking delighted that the American left is turning against Israel, because it gives them a new audience to try and recruit into genuine hardcore anti-Semitism.

The enemy of my enemy, in this case, is not my friend. You want to platform voices speaking against the Israeli government? Platform Palestinian voices. Don’t give racist trash like Greene a single additional view.

A lot of it comes from conservative AstroTurf.

And, unfortunately, a lot of it comes from farmers and other people living in rural areas, who see fields of crops being turned into solar farms and think “these panels are ugly, these panels are industrial, these panels are taking up fertile farmland” and see it as just one more way the government is exploiting rural areas for the benefit of the cities.

They’re wrong, of course, but rural America has been abandoned and neglected and made the dumping ground for all sorts of polluting industries for so long I can’t blame them for thinking that way.

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I wonder if Malcolm X ever considered that alienating white liberals decreased their ability to help his cause.

Did you look up the context of this quote? Because here, read the whole thing:

The White liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man.

Let me first explain what I mean by this White liberal. In America there’s no such thing as Democrats and Republicans anymore. That’s antiquated. In America you have liberals and conservatives. This is what the American political structure boils down to among Whites. The only people who are still living in the past and thinks in terms of “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Republican” is the American Negro. He’s the one who runs around bragging about party affiliation and he’s the one who sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican, but White people in America are divided into two groups, liberals and Republicans…or rather, liberals and conservatives.

And when you find White people vote in the political picture, they’re not divided in terms of Democrats and Republicans, they’re divided consistently as conservatives and as liberal. The Democrats who are conservative vote with Republicans who are conservative. Democrats who are liberals vote with Republicans who are liberals. You find this in Washington, DC.

Now the White liberals aren’t White people who are for independence, who are liberal, who are moral, who are ethical in their thinking, they are just a faction of White people who are jockeying for power the same as the White conservatives are a faction of White people who are jockeying for power. Now they are fighting each other for booty, for power, for prestige and the one who is the football in the game is the Negro. Twenty million Black people in this country are a political football, a political pawn an economic football, an economic pawn, a social football, a social pawn…

Politics have changed a lot since then, of course, but I think his message is pretty clear, and still valid. If you’re the kind of “white liberal” who doesn’t give a shit about Black rights except when you need Black votes to get your candidates elected - and there are tons of those holding office in the Democratic Party today - then you are an enemy of the Black man and America as a whole.

Shocking that these fascist clowns aren’t good at governing even for their own ill ends.

You’re missing the point of the exercise. They didn’t want to govern - they wanted to break shit.

Musk went in with the attitude “we will cut everything we have an excuse to cut, and then if one of our political allies objects to a cut, we’ll put it back”.

And DOGE implemented that plan perfectly.

They cut a bunch of grants that had nothing to do with “wokeness” because their goal was to cut as many grants as possible, no matter what they were for. The LLM was there as a propaganda tool - it let them falsely claim they were only cutting “woke” grants. It was there to give DOGE an excuse. The fact that it was wildly inaccurate was the reason they used it.

people losing income

More than a million of the poorest people in the world have died - so far - of starvation, exposure, and preventable disease, because of DOGE’s illegal cuts to federal programs like USAID.

Sure, we can call that “people losing income”. It’s technically true.

But Jesus, if I did something illegal and a million people died because of it, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.

I’m sorry, what presidential candidate in the last five generations wasn’t part of the Epstein class?

Even Bill Clinton, a poor boy from rural Arkansas, got to be an honorary member of the Epstein class. And my God did he enjoy the privileges of that class.

look, hate harris all you want, but iran? venezuela? cuba? migrants in cages?

Remember Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine? And also Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and a dozen others? And all the proxy wars and “interventions” I’m forgetting about or that never made the news?

Pre-Trump America was less blatant in its warmongering. It made the effort to build “international consensus” before bombing the fuck out of poor brown people. And it preferred to made economic warfare, through sanctions, which don’t make headlines when they kill poor brown people.

Harris would have killed Iranians with sanctions rather than bombs. And perhaps you think that makes a difference. But whether a little girl dies of starvation from American sanctions, or is blown up by American bombs, she’s still fucking dead.

Fuck, Trump’s “random bombing go” strategy let Iran close the Strait and made America take the blame for it - and if that lets Iran negotiate with the world and end Western sanctions using the Strait as leverage, Trump’s war might end up saving more lives than it kills.

As for migrants in cages: Trump made no new laws. Trump made no new policies, even. Trump enforced existing laws more harshly and blatantly and publicly than America previously had. And Harris promised to do the same fucking thing in her campaign.

What’s happening to migrants today is what the American people wanted. The killings, the beatings, the disappearances, the private prisons and forced labor and inhumane conditions, all of it.

Only we saw it happen openly, on the streets in Minneapolis, in front of a million cell phones and cameras, instead of out in the Texas desert where the only cameras belong to the Border Patrol. And seeing the Border Patrol treat middle class white protesters like immigrants was too much for some people.

Putting migrants in cages is what America wants. America just doesn’t want to see the cages. It hurts their feelings.

I don’t vote.

Good people don’t vote.

I may not be a good person but I try my best.

And at least I can claim the dignity of refusing to participate in the Epstein class’s quadrennial popularity contest.

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The Democrats are a right-wing party.

They are the secularist wing of the American Capitalist Party, and the Republicans are the theocratic wing.

They aren’t the fucking opposition, and they’re certainly not the fucking left.

“Independent but caucuses with Democrats” is just Democrat with extra steps.

Trump and Harris have the same attitude towards the world. The same as all American politicians. American exceptionalism. The world exists to serve America and those who defy it must suffer the consequences.

The only real difference is: Harris is polite about American dominion. Trump isn’t.

You’re correct. Harris would have killed Iranian school children with sanctions instead of bombs and her funding to Israel would have come with a sternly worded letter.

Clearly the superior choice.

That’s why it’s called planned opposition. If you’re afraid of losing control to a genuine opposition movement, you set up a fake opposition movement that dramatically opposes you on a few big ticket items and generally agrees with you on the rest - or that dramatically opposes you on everything, but has no intention of keeping its promises.

Look, I’d like to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I expect Magyar is going to make some dramatic economic moves that don’t actually change the economy, run some corruption show trials, crack down on political participation outside the two major parties, back down on his pro-EU stances, and quietly take his orders from Orban and Putin behind the scenes.