I want you to shut your fucking mouth up.
There’s more than a zero chance American fascism will show its ass. Riding high in April, shot down in May…the exceptionalism’s got to go both ways. Sun Tzu lived a clean life and died a warrior king. Mussolini got more play than Tiger Woods but took his last breath swinging from his toes with blood pouring in his eyes.
My grandmother told me how her mother went to see Il Duce strung up in the square. They lined the Piazzale Loreto to spit on him as he died. She wasn’t condoning violence per se but intimated, in her Italian American way, that sometimes you get the bull Jimmy and sometimes you get the horns. It’s karma and capitalism maybe, the chaos of violence and the American way.
Ask Joe Rogan, who’s Joe Rogan Experience got knocked from its #1 spot by MeidasTouch in February. Homie got trounced but with Newsweek reporting on the online speculation that Joe is only 5’2, he didn’t have far to fall.
If democracy is going to be defended it's not gonna come from the democratic party. It’s gonna come from you and it’s gonna come from the working people in this country.
—Eric Lee
Will this shift in broadcast media enable and embolden working people to affect change? I don’t think so, Janice. Podscribe’s Podcast Rankings for February 2025 aren’t a win for anyone besides MeidasTouch, the “loudest and most insistent voices,” and the continuing enshittification of the podosphere.
Neither is the fallibility of American fascism cause to rejoice. No matter how many of these brownshirts we crush, there’s always another jackboot ready to take his place. Whatever happens to working people, the Democratic Party will take it lying down and remain spectacularly obsolete.
Journalist Chris Hedges sagely argued that in the last presidential election our choice was between corporate and oligarchic power. And we can only trust that establishment and alternative media will remain a parrot on either’s shoulder. The only gains working people ever got were the ones we took. Hedges reminds us that even FDR had to be brought to heel, and it’ll take mass mobilization, “primarily through labor and especially through the strike,” to destroy the ruling class. Crucially, we may make no material gain in this struggle but the fight is for our dignity and to save our souls.
The news should be instructional now, never objective and hardly ever straight reporting again. Reporting on anything other than a General Strike and the amassing of 3.5% of us in the street is bloviating, kowtowing or straight up propaganda. You are working for the rights of the least of us and making the lives of working people better or you are complicit, in the way and will be removed. Confronted on sight and your lives made as impossible as you made it for us. What have we got to lose?
This is Jim Trainer reporting that the long arc of the moral universe might bend toward justice but there ain’t nothing wrong with giving it a shove.
You’re not the president you need to go away.
—X
I was going to send that exact @Chris Hedges video to you, Jim. An icon.