Today, there is intense talk of possible use of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons by Putin in Ukraine. A recent NYtimes headline read: ‘In Washington, Putin’s Nuclear Threats Stir Growing Alarm' and the subhead went on to say that ‘U.S. officials are gaming out responses’.
Leftists have shamelessly abandoned the fight to preserve our fundamental freedoms and then have the audacity to turn around and condemn anyone else who seeks to preserve these same freedoms they’ve left behind.
Monopoly used to be understood in a kind of one dimensional space, how a company may have gained dominance in its industry. However, today’s tech monopolies exist in multidimensions; they monopolize and control our data, they decide when and if to censor our speech, and they purchase government officials, the same ones charged with reigning them in. But our old conception of monopolies is totally inadequate to describe or understand the significance of today’s big tech companies.
In this clip from Sasha and Nesim's interview with Sean McCarthy, Sean explains what he thinks the left needs to focus on in order to regain its relevance and make real change.
Why are the rich so much better at uniting around class issues than the plebes? Outrage is a sentiment that feels so pure and so right. When it is pointed at injustice and burns bright inside of us we are reaffirmed as the moral beings that we believe ourselves to be. That our strongly held sense of righteousness could be a useful tool for others and even redirected to serve their purposes may seem impossible and even unbearable.
If anyone is wondering just how deep is the left’s abandonment of its most long-standing and foundational values, namely free speech and class analysis, one need look no further than this book about populism: Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic by Columbia Law School postdoc scholar Camila Vergara.
This week, Mark White of Plebity had the chance to meet with Scott Costen, Nova Scotia based journalist at The Sidebar to discuss our Free Speech Fund and the political vision behind Plebity. The Sidebar is a progressive, independent media platform that is part of a growing ecosystem of genuinely progressive, independent platforms which reject the conformity of much of what passes for current leftist discourse. We hope everyone will read the article and check out The Sidebar.
Populism does indeed have a set of prevailing principles that characterizes it. These principles cut across all political cloths, often garnering support from left- and right-wing proponents. Some of the basic principles include: circumventing power from Wall Street, ending corporate welfare and crony capitalism, ending mass surveillance programs, ending military interventionism and occupation, and opposing corporate trade agreements.
These principles don’t describe just one political identity, and that is why they tend to attract a broad following of people from all political persuasions.
The word populism gets thrown around these days to mean many different things. But the populist farmers revolt of the 1880s has so much to teach us today.