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Liberal class

Capitalism Is Feeding The Far Right In East And West Europe

“If capitalism doesn’t resolve the crisis, people might remember socialism,” reflected Gyula Thürmer of the Hungarian Workers’ Party during a discussion on the far right in Europe. He was speaking at the Fascism Back in Europe? conference, organized by the Zetkin Forum in Berlin from June 20-22. His comment encapsulated one of the lingering themes of the conference: how the economic crisis, corporate domination, and historical revisionism are fueling the rise of authoritarian and far-right forces across both Eastern and Western Europe. In addition to Thürmer, speakers at the conference such as Vladimir Bortun, Jelena Đureinović, and Florian Nowicki traced how decades of austerity, deindustrialization, and the dominance of international capital have devastated working-class communities in Eastern Europe, creating fertile ground for nationalist, authoritarian politics.

Human Rights Watch Outflanks Trump

It’s been over 100 days since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Most NGOs to the right of the Heritage Foundation are alarmed about his confrontational international posture and related erosion of the rule of law. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a supposedly liberal organization, is also concerned. But their problem is that the president hasn’t gone far enough – at least in the case of Venezuela. HRW’s latest report on Venezuela calls for intensified illegal measures that cause misery and death, outflanking Trump from the right. At issue for HRW is last July’s Venezuelan presidential election that saw Nicolás Maduro declared the winner.

Trumpland

The Christian fascists and oligarchs gleefully handing Donald Trump his sharpie and executive orders are not making war on the deep state, the radical left or to protect us from “antisemites.” They are making war on verifiable fact, the rule of law and the transparency and accountability that is only possible with a free press, the right to dissent, a vibrant culture and a separation of powers, including an independent judiciary. All of these pillars of an open society, as I detail in my book “Death of the Liberal Class,” were degraded long before Trump. The press, including public broadcasting, academia, the Democratic Party, a corporatized and banal culture, a judiciary that serves the billionaire class and a Congress bought by lobbyists, have been disemboweled.

The New McCarthyism Was Started By Liberals

The censorship of radical voices is an old story that’s become much more dire—and current—with the detention by immigration agents on March 8 of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student activist and permanent resident of the United States who has been at the forefront of protests at Columbia University against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. In a statement to The Free Press about the case, a Trump administration official said, “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.” Rather, the official continued, Khalil’s activism was “mobilizing support for Hamas” in addition to being antisemitic and “hence, contrary to the interests of the U.S.”

Trump’s Rule By Fiat A Bipartisan Legacy

U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest defiance of the courts — this time refusing to follow an appellate judge’s order to halt migrant deportations — has triggered another round of liberal outrage. Critics are calling it an authoritarian move, a blatant assault on the rule of law, and a warning sign that American democracy is on its last legs. But if this is the end of democracy, it’s been ending for a long time. And not just at Trump’s hands. The central truth we keep missing — especially on the left — is that Trump is not an aberration. He’s a grotesque continuation.

Chris Hedges Report: Virtue Hoarders And The Rejection Of Liberalism

The material needs of working class people in America continue to be obscured and co-opted by politicians and people claiming to know what’s best on both sides of the political aisle. While Republicans and right-wingers address some of these needs head on, they do so by luring people through empty rhetoric and culture war distractions. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that also distracts and divides the proletariat from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part VI

Professor Chenshaw: if our ideological and class enemies so consistently elevate you, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, what does that say about your work? Why do they pay you to examine every atomized niche of poverty in the United States but to ignore the biggest financial famine? You are fascinated by the pathologies but are too good to descend to talk to the pathologized. Every portrait you paint of poverty in America focuses on “black trans women” and other subsets to the detriment of us all. The only way black trans women can rise up is if we all rise up.

Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part V

The petit-bourgeois whites are a non-thinking tail to the kite of the dominant wing of capitalism. Appearance is everything; dialectics is a cross to the liberal vampire.  It is not uncommon that they recruit, artificially elevate and reward “diverse” members of the oppressed class who do their bidding. There are such examples which Fox News unabashedly refers to as “diversity hires.” On our side of the class barricades, we should be careful of those possessing the appearance of militancy but not critically grasping the essence of Marxism. Independent thinkers are a problem for the PMC.

Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part IV

The poor boy didn’t forget where he came; He never knew to begin with. Vast structures of violence and poverty have our mothers, sisters and daughters trapped in a vortex of abuse and low self-esteem. We are not junkies, winos or bums; We are fighters and survivors. Vance is all image, no heart. Vance is all Hollywood, no Middletown. Vance is venture capital, not steel. The GOP brass used Vance’s story as their own antidote to the pandemic of early deaths ravaging our families.   Quite naturally, the rich would prop up a fake. Black America has their uncle Toms and Latinos have their vendepatrias; We too have our booklickers and asskissers.

Liberal Media And Personalities: The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

On Dec 11, 2024, it was reported that the post-election audiences for the leading liberal media, MSNBC and CNN, continued to drop: 46% and 33%, respectively. Some of MSNBC’s biggest stars, including Rachel Maddow, have been asked to take pay cuts as revenues and profits come under pressure. The dozens of Kamala Harris’s supporters, among actors, pop music figures, and TV host personalities, continue to announce their departures from the Trumpian U.S. to another country. It seems like one is at an airport where we hear departure announcements every few minutes. But no one seems to be paying any attention or shedding tears.

Despised: The Poor White Trash Manifesto, Part III

“Despised: A Poor white Trash Manifesto” is a cry for help. We are not living well. The American dream that appears on your netflix and Hollywood movies is a brittle myth. We are so busy surviving the capitalist nightmare, most of us have never even had the opportunity to learn about your struggles in Nigeria, Bolivia or Indonesia. The earth’s radius along the equator is almost 4,000 miles but the longest mile is between our two ears. When we are in our heads, we are in a bad neighborhood. We a shortsighted breed, but now at least you know the perplexing origins of our myopia.

American-Century Flight

When McCarthyism visited the United States with the conservative-liberal backlash — the McCarthy–Nixon cohort on the right and President Truman in the center — the work the Oppens had done legally was effectively made illegal. I published the essay years after my book, Finks, was published, and this was because it took so long for my F.O.I.A., or Freedom of Information Act request to the government, to be fulfilled. But that essay set the tone for those that followed. Many of the essays were written during Trump’s first term, when liberals seemed to partially reenact this maneuver of Cold War suspicion of foreignness.

Despised: The Poor White Trash Manifesto, Part II

Perched up in their Ivy League offices and downtown skyscrapers, the tenured professors and well-paid journalists have written a great deal about us. When have we got a day off from work and our survival routines to analyze their foreign attitudes and habits? Today, we get to have our say. It is our lived experience in the trenches versus your pontificating. You are not us and we are not you. Do you really think you would last a round with us in the real world? The petit bourgeois white has found their place at the capitalist trough; the poor white, desperate for breathing room, searches for an opening. 

Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part I

There is a material reality behind this human schism and this mutual hatred, that of the privileged white versus that of the downtrodden white. It dates back centuries and hemispheres. Whoever is not a billionaire and groups us together, erasing our class differences, does so at their own peril, and our peril as well.  To group all whites together is the priority of the ruling class. We poor whites have different resentments, spiritualities and worldviews from those of our class oppressors, though we often don’t recognize it, much less know how to express it. Leftist identity politics conflate us with the foreign reality of another social class. Whose agenda does this serve? 

The Centrists Cannot Hold

A lot of us are familiar with these lines from Yeats’s thoroughly anthologized and often-quoted The Second Coming. How can they not come to mind as the French government of Emmanuel Macron, the centrist par excellence, falls in a heap of high-handed hubris?  Everyone in Paris is blaming everyone since the Macron government’s energized opposition in the National Assembly forced Premier Michel Barnier from office with a vote of no confidence last week. The truth is that Barnier is a casualty of his own political camp — an arrogant “center” that is not, in fact, the center of anything.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

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Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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