Of course I support a multi-polar world. But somehow the vision of multi-polarity always seems to reify authoritarian nation-states, "left" or "right." I prefer the Zapatista version: "a world where many worlds fit."

I taught my last class at Cornell today, which didn't really hit me until halfway through the period. It's wild to think that I've been in Ithaca for eight years, 25% of my life!

I reread Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Becky Chambers's A Psalm for the Wild-Built for my class "The Good Life." I continue to absolutely love the former and feel unsatisfied with the latter. But both are great for discussing meaning/purpose and social (re)organization.

Happy to share that I just signed two big contracts: next year I will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Union College and my book "Smash the State: American Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century" is now under advance contract with the University of Illinois Press!

You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

When the nukes fly and civilization dies -- theirs, ours, everyone's -- will Trump voters realize with their last breath that it was a mistake? Or will they be content in the knowledge that they died a noble death for their dear leader?

Errico Malatesta: "We have always fought against patriotism, and we were proud of being internationalists. Now, the most atrocious consequences of capitalist and State domination should indicate, even to the blind, that we were in the right."

Millions of people come out to oppose the fascist regime in the single largest protest in US history, connecting mass opposition to authoritarianism, oligarchy, and war. Some leftist cranks: "This is bad, actually."

It's perhaps a lot to ask, but I hope Trump voters who are shocked that he lied to them (i.e. by starting new wars) engage in some introspection. Yes, he lied. What is it about you that let you get suckered by an obvious conman who made "being a giant asshole" his entire schtick?

Mark Fisher: "The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. 1/2

📝 Anarchist Studies 34.1 is out now! This issue comprises 4 articles, 1 review essay and 5 book reviews: The cover for this issue is by Gianluca Constantini and is discussed in the opening essay by Allan Antliff. (1/7) bit.ly/41dZjYO

Mark Fisher: "Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast *privatization of stress* that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, 1/2

Kristin Ross: "Political struggle itself produces new conditions, modifies social relations, changes the participants in the event, and the way they think and speak—the struggle itself creates new political forms, ways of being, and new theoretical understanding of those ways and forms."

At the 1988 anarchist "Survival Gathering" in Toronto, a planned Day of Action took place the day after the US shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing hundreds of people. Anarchists exploded in rage and took out their anger on a number of corporate and state targets. 1/2

Do college students really think we can't tell when they use AI, or do they just not care?

Howard Zinn: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

Great review of the special issue of @radhistreview.bsky.social on "Feminists Confront State Violence" by @resmyth.bsky.social, which includes my article "To Repulse the State from Our Uteri" (among many great pieces!). www.lectitopublishing.nl/Article/Deta...

If Donald Trump is the "Peace President," it brings to mind the old slogan from the protests against the Vietnam war: "bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."

Michael Parenti: "Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a 'New Order' while serving the same old moneyed interests."

Before Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago, a coterie of voices on the left insisted that Putin would never invade because it would be wrong and stupid. For most, there has still been no reckoning with the core problems of their analysis that led to being so completely mistaken.

The Luddites were right and we've been lied to about them for over 200 years. Read the great historian Peter Linebaugh's account in "Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12" from @pmpress.bsky.social pmpress.org/index.php?l=...

Nietzsche: "To be sure, we need history . . . we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action . . . We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life."

Marx: "If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some *other man than the worker.* If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must be *delight* and his life's joy."

Remember when One Battle After Another came out and conservatives scoffed at the Hollywood fantasy of federal troops violently occupying a city against a scrappy "woke" resistance defending undocumented immigrants? Well, *gestures broadly.*

"Antifa are the real fascists" they repeat, as they send masked paramilitary forces door to door to terrorize and ethnically cleanse the nation.

I hope the seven House Democrats who voted to fund ICE this week are haunted by the shame for the rest of their lives.

Conservatives, you don't have to support masked federal agents executing people in the streets and going door to door terrorizing people in their homes. You know in your hearts it isn't right, and it's time to say it. It's not too late.

In the 1960s, the right called MLK a race-baiting communist who hated white people. After he was killed, they spent a few decades pointing to him as a model of protesting "the right way." Now, they're moving back to branding him as a race-baiting communist who hated white people.

"Antifa are the real fascists" they repeat, as they send masked paramilitary forces door to door to terrorize and ethnically cleanse the nation.

At Texas A&M you can no longer teach woke anti-Western ideology like ...*squints*... Plato.

So many people's lives are getting measurably so much worse because of health insurance costs skyrocketing. Republicans and centrist Dems have no real solution. It's such a perfect time to push Medicare for All, a hugely popular policy that would transform everyone's lives.

At this point, it's hard to see January 6th as anything but a 21st century Beer Hall Putsch. First as tragedy, then as farce.

The developing line on Venezuela in some online MAGA spaces is that this regime change effort will work because--unlike Iraq and Afghanistan--there are no Muslims there. Truly incredible justification of a new war by the "peace president," no notes.

Learning about the history of US imperialism in Latin America radically changed my understanding of our country. I think most Americans truly have no idea, in part because it is completely ignored or whitewashed in school. Violent regime change has been the norm for a long time.

Looking forward to the panel I'm on at the American Historical Association conference in January, "Spaces and Places of Convergence in 20th-Century American Radicalism"! I'll be talking about a series of anarchist gatherings in the 1980s that helped build a continental movement.

I don't need Spotify wrapped to tell me that my top genre this year was, once again, White Dudes Yelling About Their Big Feelings.

When Eugene Debs met Emma Goldman: "Debs expressed views which Emma Goldman found very much like her own. Finally she exclaimed, 'Why, Mr. Debs, you're an anarchist!' Debs then clasped her hand and said, 'Not Mister, but Comrade; won't you call me that?'"

You might think from the headline that this is a story about a trans kid suffering medical consequences from a large drug dose but nope! It is just an interview with an estranged father who is angry that his child happily transitioned. archive.ph/Tmthz

Why in the world is Verizon texting me trying to get me to open a high yield savings account? Something seriously funky is going on with financial institutions in this country.

Howard Zinn: "Civilization has failed on two counts: it has perverted the natural resources of the earth, which have capacity to make our lives joyful, and also the natural resources of people, which have potential for genius and love."

Blatant extortion.

*Radical Histories of Palestine and Palestinians* – A new Call for Proposals from Radical History Review. Abstract proposals due November 30, 2025: www.radicalhistoryreview.org/radical-hist...

Everything is getting worse and worse and worse and it's not gonna get better and boy does that suck.

literally fuck off

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

So sick of an internet dominated by bots, ads, and AI. Everything feels like a scam. It wasn't always this way. It could be different. The problem is that the internet is set up to extract value from users rather than provide a service. Which is to say, the problem is capitalism.

So. How many of you are in trouble? interc.pt/3KhNsEp

it's wild to watch this happening in a situation where we've had no prior military engagements with the country or recent attack to even drum up a public desire for vengeance. nothing at all is going down but Trump is clearly trying to push Iraq 2.0 on the country.

Everything is awful but the saving grace is the rise of early-mid 2000s culture nostalgia.