According to Rockhill, an unabashed revolutionary Marxist, during the Cold War the CIA groomed anti-Soviet, self-identified “Marxists” from the Frankfurt School (including Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse), funding their scholarship and bringing some of them to the US to teach at elite American universities. The point was to influence a movement in Western European and North American Marxism that would shift its focus from class conflict to culture and turn it into a theory and criticism factory, thereby draining it of its anti-capitalist power and removing it as a threat to the capitalist imperialist political order that created the CIA for exactly such purposes. Rockhill classifies these scholars and more recent ones like Michel Foucault and Slavoj Zizek into the “compatible” left because it has no interest in altering the power structure. Rather, it fits comfortably into it. (Horkheimer, considered one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, for example, would eventually shock lefties by defending the Vietnam War as a bulwark against Red China!)
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has never been part of the left. It has always been a party of capital. Any “left” impulse the party has ever had (and probably will ever have) has come only from popular movements outside its infrastructure, which mirrors the national political structure: money on top, people below.
Gray does a superb job of supporting Rockhill as he explains these foundational facts of capitalist empire to her listening audience, sharpening the focus with illustrations from her own experience as a Harvard-trained lawyer and political player/influencer of the left. Rockhill’s book seems clearly to have resonated with her, even excited a sense of hope in her.
But then, nearly a third of the way through the three-hour podcast, Gray reveals a knee-jerk tendency in her approach to conversation that can sometimes undermine the intended irony of her show’s title.
Having recently read Osita Nwanevu’s crucial Common Sense for our age, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, and more to the point, having been alive and conscious in 2026, I think there’s no better time than the present to revisit this article from 2013. There’s a poll at the end that I’d appreciate your weighing in on.
A couple of nights ago, I attended a Zoom meet-and-greet with Blake Gendebien, the Democratic candidate to replace Trump toady Elise Stefanik in New York Congressional District 21 when she vacates it to be vetted by the Senate for her appointment as UN Ambassador. As you might expect, the voters in the mostly rural, 86% white NY21 in the far northeastern part of the state, are as far politically from the voters in New York City, where I live, as New York City is geographically from NY21. The district voted solidly for Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns.
The GOP believes it now owns the district, though Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014, was the first Republican to represent it since Hamilton Fish IV was redistricted out in 1992. A long-term holder of the seat before he, too, was redistricted out was the “staunch progressive” Paul Tonko, who now represents NY20.
To get an idea of how radically NYS and US politics have changed in recent times, before migrating north up the Hudson River, NY21 represented New York County, otherwise known as Manhattan. Back then (in the 1960s and 1970s), it was represented by actual liberal Republican (and Liberal Party member) Jacob Javits, who early in his Congressional career, as an example of his political inclinations, opposed Taft-Hartley because it threatened the strength of labor unions.
Who is Blake Gendebien?
Blake Gendebien (pronounced JEN-da-bean) is what is now known as a “moderate” Democrat. (Republican operatives call him “far left.” More about that in a moment.) He’s a dairy farmer and small businessman who with his wife Carmen, a Cuban immigrant he met while studying agriculture and business at Penn State, owns 500 cows and 1,500 acres near the St Laurence River. Like Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz, Gendebien is a dad and a former coach. He says he wants to “strengthen the border” and get rid of regulations that hamper small businesses like his own. He owns a gun, says he supports the Second Amendment and subscribes to Gun Sense Voter principals. It seems, so far, that only the Gun Sense part could possibly be controversial in his district.
First phone lines in Kathmandu being laid in 1959 with help from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This photo is from an archived USAID site. At the time of this posting, the USAID site itself was dark.
There are some extraordinary admissions from powerful Congressional Republicans in a NOTUS article by Haley Byrd Wilt, Shifra Dayak and Ben T.N. Mause :
In interviews on Monday night, Republican senators — including members of the Appropriations Committee tasked with setting funding levels — dismissed Musk’s moves to consolidate his power and seize sensitive government systems to shut down spending. They say that Musk, in rejecting appropriations laws passed by Congress, is simply following Trump’s priorities.
Some, like North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, even acknowledged that what Musk is doing is unconstitutional — but “nobody should bellyache about that.”
“That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”
Other Republicans argued that Musk is making the government more efficient, and they said they’re glad — if nobody on Capitol Hill is going to slash spending — that someone has finally taken charge.
“The actions that have been taken with USAID are long overdue,” Sen. Bill Hagerty said. “The agency is out of control.”
And Sen. John Hoeven said “they need to be accountable.”
Yes, a Republican says, a US agency that has been at the center of foreign aid (and secret foreign policy) for more than half a century needs to be held accountable, but the party’s choice for effecting that? The world’s wealthiest man and his team of barely legal social media minions, none of whom has been vetted by Congress or any other Constitutionally empowered entity.
Or do they want to make the case that the Constitutionally-elected and seated president picked him to wield extraordinary powers over the government, so it’s virtually Constitutional somehow? No, they don’t say that. They admit it runs “afoul” of the Constitution–but who cares?
Jokes about decapitation may be lethal to your X/Twitter health.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of months: I am now persona non grata at X/Twitter. It’s kind of a shame, as my Twitter conversations were once a major source of inspiration for this blog. But honestly, I don’t miss being on Twitter much these days. What I used to get from it in the way of stimulating discussions with people I agreed with and (more often) didn’t agree with I now get to some degree on Bluesky. More about that in a bit.
Ever since Elon Musk was forced by a judge to make good on his empty threat to buy Twitter last year, it was clear to me that my time on that platform was marked as doomed. I had no intention of paying for a service that was deteriorating in value for me and millions of other long-time users by the day. But I believed I had as good as, if not a better chance to outlast Musk there. I underestimated his tolerance for being profoundly hated, and my own vulnerability to the consequences of that behavioral quirk.
My tenure at Twitter, which began in August 2008, ended in early September, not long after I “celebrated” my 15th Twitterversary. The beginning of the end was my tweet quoting a news story about Australian multi-millionaire Tim Gurner, who told an audience at a “Property Summit” in Sydney, “‘We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, to 50 percent in my view. We need to see the pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
My response to this heartlessness: “How to get to the front of the line when the guillotines are ready.”
I didn’t think much about this comment, except I’d wished I’d expressed it more elegantly. In fact, because Twitter doesn’t allow non-paying members to edit their tweets (part of Musk’s crude desire to create a class society on Twitter where there formerly wasn’t one), I wasn’t able to change the awkward-sounding “when the guillotines are ready,” to something more like “come the revolution.” I didn’t think it was one of my better tweets, let’s just say.
A couple of mornings later, after a couple of days of my usual sorts of posts about animals, film and music among retweets of news stories about the UAW strike, I opened my email inbox to find a subject line telling me my X account was suspended. The form message told me a user had reported the guillotine tweet, which had violated the rule against violent speech, and they helpfully provided the rule itself: “You may not threaten, incite, glorify, or express a desire for harm or violence.”
I was more annoyed than shocked by this notification. I wasn’t aware that I had been threatening or inciting violence. I just thought I had made a not very good, even cliché kind of joke, given the long history of similar jokes other lefties and I have made about the fantasy of exacting revenge from the ruling class in this age of severe inequality. Was this glorifying violence? I thought of it more as using the idea of retributive violence as a rhetorical device, to express my anger over the mass violence this privileged Australian rhetorically threatened against people who, unlike him, have to sell their labor in order to shelter and feed their themselves and their families. Did my tweet actually hurt anyone? Apparently it had triggered someone on the right.
Or… I began to think, maybe Twitter was beginning to use artificial intelligence to look for language that violated its rules. Maybe “guillotine” is on the list. In the old pre-Elon days, whenever I reported someone for tweeting hate speech or harassing another person (which was not very often–maybe twice in ten years), it took much longer than a day or two for a decision to be tendered. Now my tweet was being expedited? This has the ring of automation to me.
Supporting this suspicion, when I followed the suggestion in the email to file an appeal, no sooner had I left the “courtroom” on Twitter’s site than I received another form email:
Hello,
Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account @ChristofPierson.
Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.
Your account has been suspended and will not be restored due to violations of the X Rules, specifically our rules around: Violating our rules against violent speech.
Thanks, X
Thank me for my patience? I can do waiting five seconds in my sleep. No, there was no “review” of my appeal. None at all. In a just world, I would be able to sue X for lying about having an actual appeal process that it obviously doesn’t actually have. Fortunately for Musk, this is not a just world; I am not the only person on Bluesky who was recently defenestrated from Xitter (as the locals at Bluesky call it) for joking about punitive decapitation for enemies of working people.
If you want proof of the lack of justice in the Xitter universe, just take a look at this report on X’s influence on the Dublin riots earlier this month.
As the Associated Press reported in October, experts who study disinformation have said that X has deteriorated under Musk to the point that it’s not merely failing to detect and remove misinformation, but is favoring posts by accounts that pay for the platform’s blue-check subscription service, regardless of who’s running them.
Crucially, according to Culloty, with respect to the violence in Dublin, the core group of far-right accounts suspected of inciting the violence had previously been removed from the platform for violating the company’s safety policies, but were reinstated following Musk’s takeover of the company.
“They were able to move back to X and a lot of people who had been banned were able to come back,” she said. “It’s notable that there are more people not trying to conceal their identity [in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover.] So they now feel quite comfortable making these incendiary statements.”
In the aftermath of the riots, other prominent figures from the right-wing of American politics have pushed a conspiratorial, anti-immigration narrative on X in an attempt to vindicate the violence in Ireland.
Is vindicating violence (or plotting it) different from glorifying (or joking about) it? In Musk’s universe, apparently it is, especially if the violence in question is against immigrants rather than billionaire’s.
I’m long over X, but even though I’ve found an ersatz community of Twitter refugees on Bluesky, it’s obviously not the same as what Twitter once was, which was great. Musk clearly has no feel for what made Twitter unique, and sometimes central to the multiform global conversation: it was once and for many years a free (meaning gratis) platform where anyone with internet access could join in and have a chance at equality with the “blue checks” (verified accounts of news organizations, companies and well-known persons) when that term meant something more than “paying customers.”
Bluesky is free to join, but like X, it isn’t accessible to everyone. You need to be invited to join. And until recently, you had to be a member to even look at the content. The beta version of Bluesky’sy visible-to-all version does not yet match the experience of users, who can see not only a skeet (Bluesky’s version of a tweet) but also all the responses to it. But at least it’s something. One of the best things about pre-Musk Twitter, before Musk stupidly put tight restrictions on the amount of views non-paying members and non-members are afforded, was the universal accessibility that made it possible for Twitter users’ posts to be viewed by anyone inside or out of Twitter. Now that once vital social media world is being sequestered behind paywalls, its vitality and significance to the world just a memory. One of the rare worthwhile technological pleasures of this already tired and degraded twenty-first century, down the Xitter.
I wrote my last post for this blog all the way back in May 2017, before Julian Assange was booted out of sanctuary in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Since then, he has been convicted of skipping bail, indicted under the US Espionage Act, and begun fighting extradition to the US from his current residence of Belmarsh Prison in the UK.
For the past nearly six years, visitors to this blog might understandably have been led to believe I am not sympathetic to Assange. My last post certainly was not.
But before I turn to other topics, let me disabuse any readers suffering the misimpression that I’m anti-Assange. I have never been in favor of Assange’s being brought to the US to face trial for his part in uncovering the atrocities of the Iraq war. I think WikiLeaks provided a great service in making the world aware of the realities behind that war, and they made several other important contributions toward shedding sunlight on the corruption behind the curtains of world power centers, as well. People need this kind of service to help us see our “leaders” for the imperfect, corruptible weaklings so many of them are.
However, one thing ought to be clear to anyone who has followed Assange’s career since 2011: He’s not so perfect a human himself, but, like the world leaders he has exposed, is all too human. His behavior around the Seth Rich bullshit is just one example of what I view as a self-dramatization fetish that has led Assange to make numerous blunders that have only made his situation worse than it had to be.
But I really don’t want to pile any more crap on the poor guy. His suffering (some of which he brought on himself) has gone on far too long. Biden should pardon him and let him go home to his family, who have also suffered for his sake beyond their fair share.
My basic feeling about Charlie Hebdo: The crime was committed by a clique of criminals who self-identify as Muslims and identify this crime as being part of a holy war. But the crime is not holy, it’s murder of people for offending with cartoons, which is about as pathetic an excuse to commit murder as can be imagined. So the murderers deserve to be caught and shown only the mercy inherent in the criminal justice system in France and no more. That should be the scope of the discussions around this crime.
Instead, we are being treated to the spectacle–the same-idiotic-old-shit of a spectacle–of incensed white people, mostly, wanting to spread the blame for this murder away from the murderers and all over Islam and believers in Islam. To me, the idiocy of Islam is another discussion, and this red herring of Islam’s “blame” for this murder is just an excuse for incensed white people to behave badly and give full vent to their worst, most bigoted impulses. It’s all beside the point. It accomplishes nothing but spleen venting. It’s tiresome to have to fight it, but I just can’t stand stupidity from any quarter.
I just wonder, what am *I* missing? I have a knee-jerk need to fight the prevailing idiocy. What makes me so smart that I’m immune to it all, though? What am I missing? I don’t know…
I don’t listen to talking heads. I just want the basic facts, not all the bullshit that always comes with them, all the gas spewing out of idiots’ gas holes on TV about them. Of course I found this story irresistible, like everyone else in the world. I was also curious how Twitter was talking about it, so I saw that #killallMuslims had been trending worldwide. Then I saw what the general feel for the story was on Twitter, and it was basically ultramorons over here wanting to #killallMuslims, Muslims and bleeding hearts over here claiming the killers weren’t “true” Muslims because “Islam is a religion of peace” (with a bunch of both types criticizing CH for “provoking” the attacks), and atheists over here jumping on the Bill Maher/Christopher Hitchens (praise be to his name) bandwagon using this as an excuse to piss all over their favorite most-hated sky pixie worshippers of the moment. All so predictable and beside the point.
It’s not that I have any great love for Islam. It’s that I have low tolerance for snap judgments about the meaning of news events. I mean, what is the justice issue here for me? It’s not that innocent Muslims are being smeared by careless Westerners. It’s that careless Westerners are smearing the discourse with irrelevancies. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Dawkinses and Mahers and Harrises, by pointing their fingers at Islam are contributing to a global intellectual environment in which ultimately fewer adults will choose Islam as an ideology, which would be a good thing. On the other hand, maybe they’re contributing to a global intellectual environment in which borderline Muslims get knee-jerked back to Islam because Islam’s enemies say it’s bad so it must be good.
There’s a fascinating, very sour interview on Salon.com with Adam Brandon, a leader of Freedom Works. That organization, somewhat defanged in the wake of an acrimonious split with its former leader, the former Texas Congressman Dick Armey, was nevertheless instrumental in forging right-wing discontent with Obamacare into pockets of astroturf activism around the country. More recently Freedom Works played a role in goading Republicans into following the Tea Party line over the shutdown and debt ceiling debacles. Brandon has ideas about the shutdown and House Speaker John Boehner’s motives during it that are worth considering,
I’m not sure if he’s going to be running for Speaker again. I wonder if that’s part of all of this as well. Why did – I mean the way it was crafted…You needed Democrats to pass this. And what I don’t understand is, if the plan all along was to put just basically a pretty clean CR out there and pass it with Democratic support, Democratic members, why even do it? Why not do this a month ago? Or were they actually trying to embarrass some people, or trying to cause this fight? I mean who knows. I don’t know why these things – if this was the plan all along, he should have started this at the very beginning, and just, “Hey, listen, we’re just going to pass this with Democratic votes.”
All along, observers were wondering what Boehner was up to. He looked weak, terrified of a small group of rabid right-wingers who were insisting on an all-or-nothing fight against Obamacare, which Boehner, being an old hand in DC, had to have known was a big fat turkey that was never going to fly. He would not be Speaker without the rabid right, but he would never be able to accomplish anything worthy of a legacy with them. The Tea Party coalition is the entire reason the Republicans have become the Party of No: No major legislation, no enabling of Obama, no compromise ever. Not much ammo there to stake a Speakership on.
Brandon’s paranoid theory actually makes a kind of sense, then. What if Boehner, realizing his legacy was doomed because of this awful hand he was dealt, decided, having nothing personally to lose, to take revenge on his tormentors on the right by giving them enough rope to hang themselves? What if he was thinking, if they’re going to tear me down, I’m taking them down with me?
Perhaps this is giving Boehner too much credit. But even if this were his intention, and even if it shows him to be more of a master Machiavellian than most had assumed, it doesn’t change the fact that the shutdown caused massive pain, to government employees, to families, to women with infants and children, to cancer patients, to people with disabilities, veterans, to local and national economies. He can’t be forgiven for that. But it would at least make his actions comprehensible. At least we would know, that cruel and heartless though he may be, he wasn’t motivated by sheer insanity.
Gary Wills has a very enlightening new piece in the New York Review of Books about the debt-ceiling/shutdown crisis manufactured by the Tea Party wing of the GOP. I can’t add anything to it, Please just go and read it. It’s an opinion of the American present deeply informed by the American past.
Here’s a taste:
Republican leaders in Congress are too cowardly to say that the voting restrictions being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures are racially motivated. They accept the blatant lie that they are aimed only at non-existent “fraud.” They will not crack the open code by which their partners claim to object to Obama because he is a “foreign-born Muslim” when they really mean “a black man.” They will not admit that the many procedural laws adopted to prevent abortion are in violation of the law as defined by the Supreme Court. They go along with the pretence that all the new rules are “for women’s health.” De facto acts of secession are given a pseudo-legal cover.
Thus we get people who say they do not want the government in control of women’s health under Obamacare—just after they order doctors to give women vaginal probes the doctors do not consider medically necessary. Or that they do not want the government telling Americans what they should do about their health—just before they prohibit “navigators” from even discussing choices about their health. The same people who oppose background checks for gun purchases now want background checks for anyone the government authorizes to explain the law to people. This is a gag rule to rank with antebellum bans on the discussion of slavery.
So we have one condition that resembles the pre-Civil War virtual secessionism—the holding of a whole party hostage to its most extreme members. We also have the other antebellum condition—the disproportionate representation of the extreme faction. In state after state in the 2012 election, there was a large vote for President Obama, but a majority of House seats went to Republicans. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Obama won 52 percent of the votes cast, but Republicans got over twice as many seats (13 to 5), thanks to carefully planned gerrymandering of districts by Republican state legislatures. This advantage will be set in stone if all the voter restriction laws now being advanced block voters who might upset the disproportion.
The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.
It’s not that I have any great love for Islam. It’s that I have low tolerance for snap judgments about the meaning of news events. I mean, what is the justice issue here for me? It’s not that innocent Muslims are being smeared by careless Westerners. It’s that careless Westerners are smearing the discourse with irrelevancies. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Dawkinses and Mahers and Harrises, by pointing their fingers at Islam are contributing to a global intellectual environment in which ultimately fewer adults will choose Islam as an ideology, which would be a good thing. On the other hand, maybe they’re contributing to a global intellectual environment in which borderline Muslims get knee-jerked back to Islam because Islam’s enemies say it’s bad so it must be good.