When we woke up Tuesday morning, it was still night.
Nation
Suck it the Fuck Up
Kristi Coulter posted the following resonant comments on Facebook after RBG’s passing…
Quick Q for all the straight, non-disabled white guys who are posting “RIP America” and “Here comes Gilead” and otherwise rolling over and playing dead tonight: what’s it like to be so fucking weak?
Stanley Crouch & The All-American Skin Game
Late in his life Amiri Baraka once mused that he knew he was old because he’d begun to feel sad when his enemies died. Their obits reminded him of passionate struggles in his past and made the present seem like a diminished thing. Baraka didn’t outlive Stanley Crouch but I bet he’d’ve felt bummed to know another one of his contras had split. In the case of Crouch, though, Baraka’s sadness might’ve been deepened since Crouch offered him more than an olive branch before both of them departed.
Not that cultural powers-that-be took that in…
Rittenhouse, Homegrown Fascism & the Midwest Consensus
Kyle Rittenhouse scares me in part because I don’t understand him. He isn’t like the racist or incel mass shooters of recent memory.
Biopolitics (Fascism 2020)
Fascism has always been with the species.
The Democracy vs. The Undercommons
On the night of Joe Biden’s big speech, I prepped for the spectacle by Zooming with black alt leftists who addressed an “ensemble” very different from the Democratic Convention.
Politics of Local People
C. Liegh McIness and Benj DeMott discuss the demise of SNCC, the nature of grassroots organizations, and the character of people who end up in them in the thread below.
Fact-Check
Writing in the socialist journal Jacobin, a Mr. Savage mocked “today’s liberals” whose “default approach to combating the Right is to fact-check the Right.” Savage insists facts are stupid things outside of “narratives.” He urges liberals to stop worrying about the Right’s “malign information system.” There’s no point in calling our lies or exposing traitors or following the money. What liberals must do is ape conservatives’ “willingness to embrace populist storytelling.” No doubt Savage believes in History (and means to be on the left side of it), but his pitch for radical fabulism seems incredibly impertinent now.