“Without repudiating the War on Terror and rescinding both the funding and the authorities that produced its extraordinary measures, we were always going end up with the state’s techniques of progress being redirected at progress itself.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/adam-drive...

RIP Assata Shakur open.spotify.com/track/2aSkCi...

"If APEC is a Hummer, then the Xiangshan Forum is a BYD." 😂 Bravo @vanjackson.bsky.social www.un-diplomatic.com/p/us-and-chi...

Do we want the national security state to either support Democrats or resist Trump? In our latest episode, we watched The Report, the 2019 film starring Adam Driver that depicts the true story of the US Senate's "torture report" @bangbang1492.bsky.social www.youtube.com/shorts/lMXLB...

“the aspiration of many East Asian elites is to avoid subjugation to the whims of a sick, spasmodically violent, rule-breaking former hegemon…The clash between the US and China arises from not just Chinese nationalism but also an increasingly insecure American nationalism. Both are chauvinists.”

Hegseth is either wasting everyone’s time (what else is new?) or he’s about to declare a mass purge of military generals and admirals

A real “Which side are you on?” moment

"The Ellison family—whose patriarch is a MAGA-backing Israel supporter and one of Trump’s favorite oligarchs—is about to own CNN, HBO, CBS News, Comedy Central, and TikTok in the US. The problem isn’t just the FCC doing a fascist’s bidding, then; it’s 360-degree control of media”

"The Ellison family—whose patriarch is a MAGA-backing Israel supporter and one of Trump’s favorite oligarchs—is about to own CNN, HBO, CBS News, Comedy Central, and TikTok in the US. The problem isn’t just the FCC doing a fascist’s bidding, then; it’s 360-degree control of media”

After Jan 6, 2021, I wrote about how bro culture was preparing young men for fascism because it acculturated them to aimless violence and made them primed for any political movement that would give direction to their training/culture. That is precisely what far-right MMA gyms are doing now

Recent emmy-winning Andor writer Dan Gilroy just penned a column about the current Trumpian assault on free speech: deadline.com/2025/09/ando...

White nationalist oligarchy is taking your money and your freedom. The preservation of that system accounts for everything from ICE raids to silencing Jimmy Kimmel. www.youtube.com/shorts/pTzr6...

South Korea has recently been doing a much better job at this democracy thing than we have

They want to cancel Jimmy Kimmel and kill free speech? Time to hit them where it hurts—their pockets: - Cancel Disney+ - Cancel Hulu - Boycott ESPN - Boycott ABC Let them know why you’re canceling/boycotting. - ABC contact: support.abc.com/hc/en-us/art... - Nexstar contact: www.nexstar.tv/contact/

China is the world’s most successful vertically integrated conglomerate

The Senator is right, but this version of politics just doesn’t match the moment. His diagnosis is fine, but what that calls for is civil disobedience, general strikes, boycotts, sickouts—shutting down the fucking crumbling economy and refusing normal business in Congress

The Trump years are making us rich with diversionary war theory and securitization theory case studies. Too bad all the scholars will be jobless and busy making their livings on Substack praising fascist martyrs

A general strike can’t wait until 2028–we ain’t got that long

There’s a category of person--usually pundits--for whom all of politics is rhetoric and messaging and formulating your opinion about policy. Battles of discourse is all that matters to this kind of person. Not civil disobedience, not direction, and certainly not armed struggle. Klein is one

This is part of the problem. But in the global South young people from Nepal to Myanmar are leading revolutions against their corrupt governments. In rich countries, that same generation is being surveiled, suspended, blacklisted, kettled, and jailed by horrifyingly powerful national security states

Have said many times that US elites want to make America be what they perceive China to be (and their perceptions of China emphasize all the worst things)

Really important to not forget that Project 2025--and many a NatCon speech--said they were going to go after "left” organizations before Trump even won the presidency. They’ve been aching to do what they’re doing now. And the Democratic Party is nowhere to be found www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

As someone who wrote a well-received book literally called Grand Strategies of the Left, all of this effort to retool the national security state against “leftists” is both tyranny and nonsense… web.archive.org/web/20250915...

"Every time a Black person dies at a traffic stop because they're murdered by the police, that is political violence. The thing that has been so discouraging about the coverage this week is that it contains no context," says @meredithshiner.com

As part of our August teach-in on how the United States’ global military presence has changed under Donald Trump, professor and podcaster @vanjackson.bsky.social broke down how the United States uses its military might to maintain its status as the global superpower... youtu.be/0GOsKND62Ic

New red scare. In the coming years, a lot of your favorite pundits and columnists are going to turn out to be mealy-mouthed cowards who prove their worth only as putting idealized rhetoric on uses of state power that harm most of us and benefit…not you.

“The absence of a democratic politics within your policy agenda is actually destructive to the ends you might hope to achieve.” Very smart from @ositanwanevu.com podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/k...

US coercion of Japan is hardly the worst thing it’s doing right now, but it really is remarkable to read about. Many well-meaning national security specialists are now working for a system that’s actively preying on the world to the benefit of a few oligarchs in the US.

Awesome review of The Rivalry Peril in The Nation magazine! Thanks, @jeetheer.bsky.social! ( @mbrenes.bsky.social )

Gen Z just overthrew/replaced a government in Nepal. In Myanmar, Gen Z led a revolution against a military junta and it’s still fighting. In the global North, by contrast, Gen Z is being repressed by rich police-state governments with tremendous resources and technological primacy

This doc is super fucked up and just the tip of the iceberg

We're close to reaching a chilling moment; the first time in history where the single largest group of people arrested by ICE in the interior and held in detention are people with no criminal record. The gap is now down to fewer than 300 people.

"because the state is the greatest peddler of political violence in our world, bridling it or seizing control of it is an obsession. ..Outsourcing violence to the state does not insulate you from the boomerang consequences of it." www.un-diplomatic.com/p/hypocrisy-...

"because the state is the greatest peddler of political violence in our world, bridling it or seizing control of it is an obsession. ..Outsourcing violence to the state does not insulate you from the boomerang consequences of it." www.un-diplomatic.com/p/hypocrisy-...

"Adam Tooze believes that polycrisis is no longer the best description of the situation we face...The system failed us, and the urgency of now is not about staving off a terrible future but rather responding to the terrible future we’re already living through.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/worse-than...

"Adam Tooze believes that polycrisis is no longer the best description of the situation we face...The system failed us, and the urgency of now is not about staving off a terrible future but rather responding to the terrible future we’re already living through.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/worse-than...

Tooze believes that polycrisis is no longer the best description of the situation we face, and in a way he’s right: The fever of crisis did not break in the direction we might’ve hoped. www.un-diplomatic.com/p/worse-than...

“the ICE raid on Korea’s Hyundai plant is a gesture toward white nationalist social democracy. It was made a spectacle to mask over the reality that oligarchy permits no social democracy, even for white folks... delivers aggrieved whites a psychic wage in place of a real one.”

America makes its rivals, then it brings them together www.un-diplomatic.com/p/america-br...

“the ICE raid on Korea’s Hyundai plant is a gesture toward white nationalist social democracy. It was made a spectacle to mask over the reality that oligarchy permits no social democracy, even for white folks... delivers aggrieved whites a psychic wage in place of a real one.”

857 people arrested at this protest were charged only with supporting Palestine Action. Absolute tyranny. The UK may not have a personality cult at the moment, but their government is making a mockery of its democracy all the same www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The We Are All DC march to protest against Trump admin’s takeover of DC is currently heading toward the White House: Via @benjalvarez1.bsky.social

In a normal country, killing a bunch of civilians because they were in the way of a secret op you were doing solely to undermine summit diplomacy would be met with outrage. Maybe even a referral to the ICC. In America, it’s just “wild story, man”

I did a special oral history on the “progressive foreign policy moment,” its origins, and what I think comes next www.un-diplomatic.com/p/an-oral-hi...

The contradiction at the heart of the MAGA coalition www.un-diplomatic.com/p/a-capitali...

I did a special oral history on the “progressive foreign policy moment,” its origins, and what I think comes next www.un-diplomatic.com/p/an-oral-hi...

“Places of inclusion, opportunity, and enough bourgeois comforts to let a man dream can be made anywhere. And they can be made more durable if they’re built on the bedrock of a post-imperialist mode of living.”

My love letter to Monterey, California: “Some of our treasured utopias will be washed away with imperial decline. But we can remember what made them magical as we imagine a new, post-imperialist world.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/on-utopias...