"demonstrates that America still has a political center" I mean for any set of vectors you can always find the average, but it's also different to live in a world where the center is also the peak of the distribution vs. one where it is not.

Am I supposed to believe the folks who refuse to show their faces on camera will happily feed their kids food offered by strangers

No Kings includes DraftKings

to me therefore there appear to be two key terrains to fight on. one of them is mass politics and popular culture--in a phrase, memes and vibes. the other is elite politics, the terrain of policy and program. you need to win both! www.liberalcurrents.com/roadmap-to-a...

in some ways, the greatest challenge for Democratic base voters is to get their elected officials more afraid of their base than of the Beltway culture

you're a wrecker and so is the person you're sharing

It's literally tangibly influencing policy.

India has had a nazi party in power since 2014. This is just the ally mcbeal theory of "my problems are bigger than everyone else's because they're mine"

Three possibilities here: a) he falls asleep and everyone there sees it b) he walks out after ten minutes because his attention span has maxed out and he was going to fall asleep c) he jumps up and starts representing the United States pro se because he can't go that long without talking

One guy I canvassed told me he was voting for Trump and when I asked why he said "well, I'm racist". Like ok yep you found your candidate lol

Once when canvassing I asked a voter his #1 concern and it was "yard sales are not enforcing sales tax"

all the president’s hatchet men are fucking terrified of us and they should be fucking terrified of us, because are any of you gonna break for them?

i think the president should live in mortal fear of depicting himself as a king

This is absurdly bad PR. These are the images that need amplified. If you're online, think strategically about which images need to go viral to tell the story of the horrors of this moment. RT and share the shit out of them.

This kind of work creates POLITICAL COVER for people (normies and politicos) to peel away from the fash and do hard but necessary work to recreate the public sphere. It's THE LITERAL EMBODIMENT of liberal pluralism in the BODY POLITIC.

Notably: every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you're, I dunno, demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and it's makeshift gestapo.

In the literature, we call rallies like this "image events" because they help **focus media attention** on a major strain of ideological resistance that is big enough for lots of people to feel comfortable. They create IMAGES that FOCUS our ATTENTION and AFFECT to mobilize frequently.

In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.

when i say that i yelped in shock at this kid’s sign

The numbers I am seeing, and the breadth of people and places with basically no arrests and so forth, seem to me an unqualified political loss for them. It is a show of strength rather than the fight itself, but you can’t downplay it.

I think this moment of people feeling nervous about something and doing it anyway could prove quite liberating and profound

I didn't take pics but the feeling of being in a group of people with no visible beginning or end was so thrilling. The opposite of online anomie, and a living counterpoint to the wary, isolated, compartmentalized world the shitheads want to make. It's simple and obvious I guess but it means a lot.

Yeah he could have called for a culture war truce that would have been on terms pretty favorable to the right; instead he's reminding people why the cultural right needs to be marginalized every chance he gets

In 2025 movement conservatism is run by people who are, in the eyes of the tastemaking class, unpleasant repellent freaks. Lots of tastemakers themselves are small-c cons turned off by what they see as liberal excesses so they extended lots of goodwill, Trump 2 burned it to the ground in 10 months.

So either they were lying (yes) or they lack the ability to have done shit about it (also yes).

Liberal speakers at this No Kings rally in an East Texas city that's R+20 and the last one straight up just said that if the Heritage Foundation wants blood they'll get it lol

various 70 plus years old I know have expressed opinions like "I would strangle Miller with my bare hands" and "the old people should do the bombings because we have less to lose"

somewhere in portland, there's one person, or a small handful of people, who came up with the inflatable costume idea, and I feel like they deserve our immense respect for defining the obvious developing aesthetic of the contemporary battle against fascism

“abolish ice,” “crush the billionaires,” “throw them all in a black site” is now basically the median dem voter’s position, even if schumer and jeffries don’t want it

opseccels in shambles watching unmasked meemaws dead seriously call for guillotines

No Kings protest in The Woodlands, Texas (north suburban Houston). This is the first such protest to occur in the community. I overheard a number of folks telling others that they had never attended such an event before but had gotten to the point of feeling they needed to do something.

They'll cast these rallies as "angry" but everyone there is plainly having a great time because it's fun to get together with like-minded people to engage in the oldest American tradition: telling a tyrant to eat shit

they wanna say "Judeo-Bolshevism" so bad

Their project depends on making us all feel alone, isolated and powerless. Taking part in a protest destroys all of those feelings in an instant. Go.

Oh, fuck yes. Poland rejoice!

the pardon power was inherited directly from the monarchy with what seems like very little thought, and if you proposed introducing it today as a new feature you'd be rightly mocked for it

Also, ayo @jay.bsky.team and the BlueSky team, if you’re gonna permaban Link and Palestinian aid accounts, it’s not a good look if you also don’t ban government accounts engaged in obvious violations of the Hatch Act, which is an actual federal law.

I hope people are pushing internally to ban the government accounts threatening to revoke users visas over their posts, which also has all the implied kidnapping and torture that goes along with it

Eric Adams has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever

Government is force and coercion. The rule of law is a detente between political factions who agree to mutually binding conditions so that said force and coercion isn't used against them when they lose power. When a faction breaks that detente, like the GOP, they deserve only force and coercion.

Most obviously on the MAGA side, but the Dem obsession with talking exclusively about "kitchen table" issues is also a kind of tacit resignation to addressing voters purely in the language of personal bribes, not quaint concepts like "principles" or "the public interest."

I tend to think of this as a maybe trivial but nevertheless revealing symptom of a more serious problem, which is that we seem to have just abandoned as hopelessly prissy and naive any notion that we ought ideally to approach politics as our best selves.

The funniest thing is when they start looking around for their favorite American “Christian” belief: The Prosperity Gospel. When they can’t find it, they demand to speak to the manager

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

poaster: you should not be going to the useless fed infested protest, its too dangerous poasters mom: ok sweetie i gotta pick up grandma and her friends, theres food in the fridge

The entire Fascist Internationale needs to be eradicated with military force starting on January 20th 2029

Jenrick is a hollow racist, but it's also noticeable here that he's doing something very common in Britain; confusing, deliberately or otherwise, your childhood with the media or folk depictions of a generation earlier. this is the kind of thing that people *in the 1980s* said about the 50s or 60s.

Woke 2 is going to be less about people getting canceled for mildly problematic ‘women be shopping’ jokes and more people being canceled for “I love Hitler, Adolf Hitler, perpetrator of the holocaust, that’s my guy” in state senate campaigns in five-six years.