Progressive Politics

Missouri voters passed a voter-led ballot initiative enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution last year.

U.S. — In a shocking exposé, CNN anchor Jake Tapper has revealed new evidence that Biden’s mental and physical decline was covered up for years by Jake Tapper.

“These allegations regarding Jake Tapper are disturbing,” said Jake Tapper. “The idea that someone would use their power as a journalist to lie and withhold essential information from the American public is beyond the pale. This Jake Tapper guy, whoever he is, should be ashamed of himself.”

The bombshell report was detailed in a new book by Jake Tapper. It chronicles years of egregious cover-ups and collusion between the White House and a cooperative and corrupt press, including several newly leaked conversations between aides about putting Biden in a wheelchair for his second term. At the center of the scandal, it appears, is someone named Jake Tapper.

“I can’t believe the media would lie to us like this,” said one internet commenter. “It sounds like Jake Tapper needs to be held accountable.”

cross-posted from: http://lemmy.ml/post/30118863

cross-posted from: http://lemmy.ml/post/30118862

Marina Dunbar and agency
Wed 14 May 2025 17.47 EDT

"US district judge Patricia Giles in Alexandria, Virginia, said that the ruling was effective immediately with no conditions and no bond. She added that Khan Suri’s release was “in the public interest to disrupt the chilling effect on protected speech” during the hearing. The judge explained in her ruling how the government did not submit sufficient evidence on several of its claims."

I've felt a delayed sense of intense dread following the election of trump and watched as the Palestinian genocide only got worse

My family members care only with words, my friends are more interested in nationalism, our party is both authoritarian, pro-israel and also lying to their citizens about being Anti-Israel, and not a single major nation has done anything towards Israel that can directly affect it

I send my donations and I attend rallies, but to what end? Do they matter? People seemingly rather distance themselves than have actual progress, seemingly attempting to be at the moral high ground no matter what, even if it means ignoring a genocide, it's disgusting

I don't know what to do, am I meant to only provide a shelter to who can survive? What about the rest? I can't help but fucking shiver and its giving me a panic attack

A Virginia court issued an injunction for a nonprofit group advocating for Palestine to turn over financial documents as part of an investigation by the state’s attorney general (AG) into whether they have provided material support to "terrorist" organisations.

In the latest twist in a tussle between the Virginia AG’s office and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which began in October 2023, Richmond City Circuit Court upheld on Friday the AG’s demands for AMP to comply with the AG’s civil investigative demand (CID).

In October 2023, the AG first issued a CID “regarding its noncompliance with the state’s charitable solicitation law and an investigation into allegations that the organization may have used solicited funds for impermissible purposes, such as benefiting or providing support to terrorist organizations.”

In response, AMP filed a petition to “modify or set aside the demand”. The petition was denied by the Richmond City Circuit Court.

According to the AG, AMP refused to respond to the CID, “forcing” the AG to bring a petition to enforce his CID in January 2025.

The court’s decision last week is a blow for the American advocacy group, which says on its website that its mission is “to educate the American public and media about issues related to Palestine and its rich cultural and historical heritage”.

The Supreme Court is set to hear argumentson the case on May 15, 2025.

The DNC cited a procedural concern, but Hogg said it is “impossible to ignore the broader context” of his criticisms.

Jake Johnson May 06, 2025

"Pro-democracy campaigners late Monday announced a nationwide "No Kings" day of defiance on June 14—the same day U.S. President Donald Trump plans to hold a birthday military parade more befitting a dictator than an elected head of state.

More than 100 "No Kings" events have already been registered across the U.S., with many more expected in the weeks ahead of the day of action. "

Data includes full flight itineraries, passenger name records and financial details which are otherwise hard to obtain.

cross-posted from: http://50501.chat/post/206911

First, Trump issued an executive order to militarize domestic law enforcement. Now a new order has come out. Buried in Project Homecoming, the executive order just released by the White House, is the single most dangerous shift in American civil liberties in a generation.

The same man who empowered ICE with military-grade surveillance, armored vehicles, and counterterror tools is now pushing the legal justification to detain people indefinitely.

The administration is laying the legal groundwork to suspend habeas corpus, the constitutional right that protects people from being detained without trial. It’s the right to not be disappeared. It’s the foundation of due process. And they’re getting ready to tear it away.

How? They’re invoking the Suspension Clause of the Constitution, which only allows habeas to be revoked “in cases of rebellion or invasion.” Stephen Miller and the Trump legal machine are now planning to label undocumented immigration as an “invasion,” which would let them bypass courts and jail people without charges, trials, or legal representation. The administration is trying to reclassify undocumented immigration as an invasion to unlock those powers. That’s the strategy.

Let that sink in. They’re preparing to create a class of people who can be detained indefinitely without ever seeing a judge.

Ask yourselves, If anyone can just be disappeared off the streets without charges, without court appearances, without access to a lawyer then do we still have a democracy?

This is just the beginning, it won’t stop at immigrants. So let’s be clear about what this will look like.

Indefinite detention. No due process. No hearings. No legal protections. We’ve seen this playbook before in history—and it always starts with creating a legal exception for a specific group. In this case, it’s undocumented immigrants. But legal exceptions do not stay contained. Once the precedent is set, it expands. Always.

Ask yourself: who defines what an “invasion” is? Who decides who qualifies as a threat? Protesters? Activists? Whistleblowers? Once the right to challenge detention is suspended for one group, the door opens to expand it. That is how authoritarianism consolidates power.

While they call this “restoring order,” here’s what they’re really doing:

They’re tearing $96.7 billion out of the economy. That’s how much undocumented immigrants contributed in taxes in 2022, Specifically:

• $59.4 billion in federal taxes

• $37.3 billion in state and local taxes

• $33.9 billion toward social insurance programs they are banned from accessing

Again, these are people paying into Social Security, Medicare, and public infrastructure they’re not even allowed to use.

The source? The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Read it yourself. http://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/

California alone would lose $8.47 billion in annual tax revenue if these mass deportations succeed. Texas would lose $4.87 billion. New York? $3.1 billion. Every state would feel the economic gut punch. And don’t forget: these are programs undocumented workers pay into but cannot use. They’re helping hold up a system that offers them nothing in return.

Now ask yourself: who is going to make up that lost revenue?

You. The poor. The working class. Not the rich, who continue to dodge taxes with impunity.

The federal government has already slashed funding to the states. Wealthy elites are sitting on tax loopholes and lower effective rates than working people. The answer is obvious: the working class will be left to cover the difference. Your rent, your healthcare, your school funding—all of it will take the hit.

What we are watching is economic sabotage wrapped in xenophobic theater. It is designed to scapegoat immigrants, distract from billionaire tax breaks, and destroy civil liberties in the process.

We have reached a dangerous tipping point. A government openly discussing the suspension of habeas corpus is a government no longer pretending to be democratic.

Habeas corpus is the line between freedom and fascism.

If we let this fall, there is no turning back.

This is the moment where people either pay attention or pay the price. Be ready.

Read the order. Learn what’s happening. Sound the alarm. Talk to your communities. And above all, do not get used to THIS.

Originally Posted By u/transcendent167 At 2025-05-10 10:37:42 AM | Source

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http://malcontentnews.substack.com/p/are-they-federal-agents-or-federally

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers faced a crowd of opposition while attempting to arrest a mother clinging to her baby on the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, Thursday morning.

The brazen arrest, in which ICE agents were swarmed by close to 25 onlookers demanding a warrant and identification, was captured on video. Agents attempted to control the crowd as they formed a “human ring” around the ICE vehicle holding the detained woman. Local police were called to the scene amid the chaos

The woman’s daughter, a 16-year-old, was left holding her baby sister and stood in front of the agents’ car at one point, trying to block it. She allegedly kicked the car after handing the baby to someone else, and now faces four criminal charges, including reckless endangerment of a child, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.

I am posting this as a discussion starter. I normally frown upon uncritical usage of the term Identity Politics as a supposedly self-contained ideology. But this is a cool-headed analysis that proposes a very simple process: It is the method of singling out disenfranchised groups that allows autocrats

1. to single out the ethnic working class majority as the most disenfranchised
2. to other the most downtrodden groups as the root cause of the disenfranchisement
3. justify their persecution as necessary for the survival of the group

(Finally the author suggests that the inclusion of the disenfranchised groups as part of the ingroup is essential to overcome this dynamic.)

Part 1. He is right: This is was happened and the Democrats were happy to jump onboard

It is hard to argue with this logic, because this is literally what happened.

Let's not forget what is the big picture here: Similarly to how corporate PR pushed the narrative of individual responsibility for climate change, far and wide, it also pushed the idea of "everyone's equal opportunity to the American dream".

This might explain why this equal-washing resembles so much PR tactics, and fits perfectly with established advertising and marketing practices, starting with Benetton's "anti-marketing".

It is a complete denial of structural violence and intersectionality of exploitation (Benetton's own sweatshops included). In this sense, and contrary to common right-wing wisdom, identity politics is not even "woke", which is supposed to be alert to those things.

Part 2: Historical exploitation is collective, not individualistic - and it casts a shadow despite production mode shifts

This is a passage from one of my own text I linked above. I reiterate it here to clarify the above point:

Then, I don’t even see black, brown, woman, trans, gay, intersex, as identities, rather than inherent features of people. The meanings they have are due to societal groupings alone. And you bet they have been political in the past and they are as hell political now.

Anti-identitarian leftists, leftists who split “identity” from “class consciousness” by default seem weird to me in that effect, because for example slavery was a mode of exploitative production, ownership and enslavement of women was integral in pre-industrial economic systems.

This “laborist” sterilization of the working class definition reduces a snapshot of British 19th century capitalism to the canon of analysis for every historical period and every type of social stratification? How do you even approach other type of societies entirely, like tribal societies?

Like marxist anthropologists tried to and ended up with all kinds of upgrades to marxist theory, but some people do not want to hear about it because of purity.

Part 3: The industrial worker reductionist and the culture war as a "divide and conquer" tactic

The above thoughts are supposed to trigger an understanding of a leftist criticism of identity politics that frames them as a "divide and conquer" tactic, as simplistic and erroneous. In fact, as simplistic and erroneous as seeing the whole climate thing as a distraction from worker rights, because of how aggressively capitalists push "green energy".

We would think a take like this as extremely stupid, but there is a huge double standard with gender, race, and homosexuality. You know why. If you really want me to spell it out, it is because of

1. internalized misogyny, racism, and homophobia on the left
2. rigid reductionism on the part of those who consider political economy a hard science

"Identity politics", if it has any meaning at all, is a washed down capitalist propaganda, that anyone is capable of living the American dream, regardless of any previously "stigmatized individual features". No mention of the historical context nor collective nature of the "stigma". Just individual variation, erasing centuries of collective attacks on different groups of people, by white heterosexual European colonialists (included but not limited to the slave trade triangle, militarist and colonialist anti-homosexuality laws, and domestic exploitation of women for perpetuating power and property - kinda basic stuff really).

People were not excluded for the color of their skin, they were brought in ships to slave their lives away for a European master. The slave-traders were given reparations when slavery was abolished, the afflicted countries and communities were given none. To understand this and its long reaching aftermath in race politics is woke - alert to systemic violence and intersectionality of exploitation. Therefore

1. Woke is a good thing - MAGA has reached a point of conservativism that they think the Pope is a radical leftist, this is just how much the Overton window has shifted, and:
2. Identity politics is not woke and was never woke to start with - if so called progressives in Harvard in the nineties thought this was a good idea, well, then they were wildly misled by an elevated standard of living. To say the least.

Part 4: Being anti-woke on the right vs. Being anti-woke on the left

Being anti-woke on the right is to accept that systemic violence and intersectionality of exploitation is natural order. Being anti-woke on the left is to be blind to the whole breadth of exploitation throughout the human history, and push a strictly industrial worker reductionist, that some insist is a straw-man of dialectic materialism. To those I say, to thine own self be true and respect those little arrows you draw from the superstructure back to the foundation. In other words, understand that the ideology of exploitation of the past casts a shadow on the stereotypes and ideological wedges of the present, although the modes of production have shifted, and keep shifting as we speak.

Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, develop an intersectional analysis that empowers historically disenfranchised groups in their own safe spaces, overcome their ongoing survival issues, and instead of fixating on how capitalism dealt with such issues, start thinking how socialism will overcome these bias without removing the rights and dignity of any group of people.

The announcement of Steiner’s appointment, which heightened concerns from postal unions over possible efforts to privatize the USPS, was made Friday by Amber McReynolds, chairperson of the USPS’ Board of Governors, during a meeting of the independent group that oversees the service.

Columbia University student protesters have drawn both praise and criticism after 75 were arrested by the New York Police Department for occupying a room in Butler Library, an escalation in their call for the university to divest from Israel.

On Wednesday afternoon, one hundred university students, led by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (Cuad), took over the Lawrence A Wien Reading Room in Columbia’s main campus library, “renaming” it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University”.

Cuad released a statement on Substack as the “Emergency Rally” began, stating that “as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will continue to disrupt Columbia's profits and legitimacy”.

The action took place in one of the most populated buildings during finals week, Butler Library, which is named after former Columbia president Nicolas Murray Butler, a man that Cuad accuses of being “a shameless Nazi sympathizer” who “limited the number of Jewish people who could attend Columbia, and expelled students who protested against Columbia's ties with the Nazis”.

Trump's announcement on Tuesday that the US would cease bombing the Houthis, not even two months after he foolishly escalated the cynical sea-and-air assault he inherited from the Biden administration, came as a surprise, particularly while Sanaa International Airport lay smoking on Monday from Israeli warplanes. But the year-long US campaign, from the start, lacked any theory of victory.

Any de-escalation in this frightening Middle Eastern moment is cause for relief, particularly as the Yemen Data Project claims US-led strikes last month alone killed 208 civilians, including 17 children, and wounded 366 more. The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, frustrated the Navy, rather than defeated it outright. And Trump can say whatever he likes to portray this as a victory. But the material realities in Yemen and the Red Sea, as well as both presidents' objectives for the air-sea campaign, make the US capitulation undeniable.

“Gaza will be entirely destroyed."

A federal judge in Vermont on Friday morning ordered the release on bail of a Tufts University student arrested in March for her political speech and now held in Louisiana in what she and her lawyers argue is a breach of her constitutional rights.

The judge had ordered Rümeysa Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

The ruling to release her came at the end of a hearing where the judge, William Sessions, said that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.

"Small-dollar donors are the backbone of Indivisible's budget, and we're proud to be accountable to a nationwide grassroots base," said one of the progressive group's campaigners.

Promoting pan-African unity and national self-reliance while surviving coup attempts, Traoré is positioning himself as a radical anti-imperialist and has drawn fire from Washington and Paris.