Sick man, sick party, sick country, sick people, one can only tremble upon the reflection that God is just and that His justice can not sleep forever. The bastards will never admit it, they won't write in the history books but it's the truth and they can't make you forget it.

A manifesto for holding a mirror to the state, and to our own history. Framed by Melville’s Moby-Dick and the 1851 Vigilance Committees, a defense of the right to watch, in the American tradition of peaceful witness, to dismantle the lie that observation is "insurrection” Fast-Fish in a Free City

Trump is privately worried about the "optics" of ICE raids and his advisers are looking for ways to soften them, Axios reports. I'm calling bullshit: The terror and violence cannot be hived off from the broader policy agenda. They are 100% intrinsic to it. New piece: newrepublic.com/article/2053...

Demonizing specifically white women who act in solidarity with racial minorities isn’t new. Here’s a southern political cartoon depicting Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1853. Surrounded by devils, she‘s holding a book titled “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Subtitle: “I Love the Blacks.”

Over the weekend, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security shared posts with a song, "We'll Have Our Home Again." I dug into the group that performed and popularized it. Its cofounder said his goal was to create "the seed of an eventual government." www.splcenter.org/resources/ha...

Cripes a’mighty people, Steven Miller is not staging a militarized ethnic cleansing and sending the border cops to murder people in the street to distract from the Epstein files. He’s doing it because he and Trump (and Vance and Homan and Noem etc) really really want to.

If you see one, the most important thing to say is “WHAT’S YOUR NAME” because otherwise the person is gone for good, maybe. I witnessed one in an alley as the sole pursuit car, I was the only witness, I froze for a second and didn’t shout it in time, and the guy is just… gone now. I’ll never know.

The reality is that ICE and DHS actually CAN and ARE attacking people who are exercising their rights. I say this NOT to dissuade anyone from exercising those rights, but to challenge @tedlieu.bsky.social and other politicians to do more to protect those rights than post this kind of thing.

the problem isn’t that I’m exclusively online, it’s that you are

I like that they’ve given up on even having immigration enforcement as a pretext for any of this. It’s just purely armed masked goons wandering around in the middle of intersections harassing U.S. citizens as a display of force now.

I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence. 🧵

Order is the sales pitch, and chaos is the product. But they cannot control the chaos they create.

If you’re too lazy to read the thread, here’s a screenshot:

“Their version of ICE bears less resemblance to the federal agency formed under the George W. Bush administration than to exactly what Pelley yearned to produce: a paramilitary unit accountable only to a dictator.” www.liberalcurrents.com/return-of-th...

from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee

Someone asked me today why ICE always runs when you follow them, when they're the ones with guns and armor and squads and massive trucks, and honestly - The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion.

Nobody is gonna like this, but Biden’s administration was a Buchanan-level failure

At a church in Minneapolis that is hosting an anti-ICE singing vigil, which will later process through the neighborhood. They sing: “This is for our neighbors who are locked inside, together we will abolish ICE.”

Some people online feel a deep need to see America as inherently evil & irredeemable. Because that way, their own constant criticism of America, and their own refusal to do anything but criticize, can be passed off as some odd species of intelligence, rather than abdication of their responsibility.

When Vance insists, contra the videos, that Good threatened the ICE agent and "had it coming", what he means is that he, like Ross, feels threatened by any woman who has the audacity to use her voice in the public sphere. This deeply misogynist worldview is core to MAGA.

1/7: i don't think this is quite right in terms of first-order purpose, which is to invite you into the in-group. it's less "this is what we're believing" and more "this is the play we're running, you in?" it's this participatory aspect that makes it so powerful.

When she is not writing, reading, or talking about writing, she has movie marathons and makes messy art with her daughter and two sons." Here is her winning poem: www.porkopolis.org/pig_poet/ren...

As of Monday, all of Venezuela’s ruling officials aside from Maduro appear to have remained in their posts, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and was known as one of Maduro’s most fearsome enforcers.

So the US taxpayer will spend billions of dollars to make the Venezuelan regime even more repressive so that it can protect American oil companies who won’t actually do anything except themselves receive billions more dollars of taxpayer subsidies. MAGA

Quite a bit of reporting now suggests VP Delcy Rodiriguez used our military to coup Maduro. We are not powerful; we were chumps. The best military coup is when you don’t have to use the your military.

Yesterday was my late grandfather CLR James's birthday! I have two things to share, to honor his memory. The first is a recommendation! To help you understand our current political moment, you should grab his book on Moby-Dick. It's a remarkable treatise on American xenophobic authoritarianism.

Them: Maduro is a dictator You: And bombing a city to kidnap him is an act of imperial chaos that will make the region more dangerous, not less Them: He's a drug dealer You: And kidnapping him won't stop a single gram of cocaine from entering the US. It's a PR stunt paid for with Venezuelan blood

I wrote about reading Moby Dick aloud to a baby during the sad, hot summer of 2020.

And Ishmael, who did NOT drown,

Scrolling through Soros’s articles in the NYRB is just him being right again and again.

James Jesus Angleton was right.

1) The loudest RW “we’re persecuted” voices also control courts, statehouses, media outlets, and billion-dollar platforms. That is not a dissident underground. It is concentrated power pretending to be powerless, using grievance language to hide how much leverage it already holds. #ProudBlue #DV1

I think anyone who is looking to the last 20 years for an example of how the post-trump era will unfold is not understanding that the current moment really has no precedent in america, nor will its aftermath

I’m begging for help here - please share: Yesterday my bestie, Mom of 10 year old twins and survivor of thyroid cancer, underwent a double mastectomy for a new diagnosis of breast cancer. While she was in surgery, these assholes stole CANCER CARE PACKAGES off her front porch. 1/2

the vice president is a klansman

Getting a lot more people on this list for sharing antisemitic lies about the Talmud over the past couple of days. Reminders: 1. The entire Talmud is public and freely available online. This Anyone claiming to know about "secret" or "hidden" Jewish teachings from it is lying to you.

Those of us who are not Jewish have to be more on our guard against antisemitism than ever right now, not just in the world but inside of our own hearts No one is fully immune to the propaganda flooding social media from all directions or the rising hysteria of this moment

There’s a reason why flattery works! It’s the core to any con game , the mark has to think theyre too smart to be conned and the con man has to flatter him that he is

So last night as I was wondering why Pam Bondi diverted almost 200 National Security attorneys who should be chasing hackers and spies to redact the Epstein files, I remembered that John Eisenberg, who heads it, is the guy who altered the Trump-Zelenskyy transcript.

1 Brown’s shooting is reframed from a local tragedy into proof of siege. Posts claim cameras were removed to protect “illegals,” that Providence PD is stalling, & that elites are hiding a political hit. Brown, MIT, & NYC are fused into one jihad story. #DV1 #VoicesForVictory #ProudBlue 12/18/25 AM

"There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals." -Herman Melville

donning the armor of god to face the forces of hell

“You fools! you flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools!” -Melville, The Confidence-Man

Removing information about slavery at Harper’s Ferry is like removing information about hydroelectric power at the Hoover Dam. “John Brown went to Harper’s Ferry because he was so infected by the woke mind virus that he had a pathological hatred of states rights.”

I do think a major parallel we're seeing to the politics of the 1850s is that for the entire early republic northern members of Congress were punished by their voters for belligerence, southern members were punished for *not* being belligerent. Until, northern attitudes changed

I would argue that no Melville text, & possibly no 19C text, is more relevant for 2025 than his The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857): humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/m...

[whispers provocatively] the 1850 fugitive slave act is the model: reactionaries have the right to extend their authority across state lines, and their opponents have to actively assist them

Another point: Many know the Dred Scott decision but aren't as familiar with the aftermath and how states, courts, and politicians responded. 5 examples: 1) Many Northern/Midwest states just ignored the decision. 2) Maine’s high court said Black Americans could vote in state/federal elections. /1