Links - 25th September 2026 (2 - Socialism)

Does anyone else feel like "working-class culture" is just coded masculinity? : r/Socialism_101 - "I consider myself a democratic socialist and care deeply about workers' rights, unions, universal healthcare, and improving material conditions for everyone.  That said... I get incredibly uncomfortable around a lot of blue-collar workers.  I was recently at a family gathering where several of my cousins, who work in construction and trucking, were talking loudly about football, trucks, hunting, and making jokes that probably wouldn't fly in progressive spaces. They weren't even talking to me, but I felt on edge the entire time.  Maybe it's because so many trades are dominated by conservative men, but I just associate that whole culture with aggression. The yelling, the swearing, the macho posturing. It honestly intimidates me.  People always say "the working class is the backbone of society," but if I'm being honest, I have a much easier time connecting with baristas, nonprofit workers, graduate students, and people in creative fields than I do with mechanics or roofers.  I know this probably sounds elitist, and I feel guilty because I believe in class solidarity. But every time someone says we need to spend more time organizing among tradespeople, my first reaction is that I'd rather not.  Does anyone else struggle with this? How do you reconcile believing in socialism while feeling deeply uncomfortable around the kinds of people socialism is supposedly for?"
Time to replace the hammer and sickle with a keyboard and pen

Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 on X - "Marxism is so depleted it's insane. No ambition, no new answers, no adjustments. Just 1917 forever. A Bolshevik infinity. We must imagine Sisyphus seizing the means of production."

Ken Gardner on X - "One of Ayn Rand's very best observations, which has aged like fine wine:  "Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.""
sg on X - "Neither Marx nor Engels came from the working class, and certainly weren’t serfs or peasants."
Ken Gardner on X - "And we are seeing it today. DSA is basically young college-educated radicals, many of whom haven't done an honest day's work in their entire lives. <Many of them seem unemployable, tbh.>"

‏ً on X - "Genuinely, I DO NOT like the concept of capitalism. I don’t want to work my job every day. I want to make art. I want to be in my garden. I want to feel something."
Hon. Vickie Paladino on X - "Spoiler Alert: Socialism does NOT mean you don’t have to work.  I have no idea how these idiotic children got the idea that socialism equals never having to work.  Capitalism didn’t invent the concept of a job or a boss or bills or responsibilities. It just found a better way to organize them.   But rest assured, socialist countries have still have all of the above. You don’t just get to decide to be an artist or dancer or whatever.   It’s actually insane that any of this needs to be explained."

Meme - "Communists when they get assigned to Alaskan coal mines instead of teaching lesbian dance theory from a free luxury condo"

Meme - "r/communism101
How is labor properly incentivized in higher-stage communism
How did Marx think society will function in the higher stage of communism when private property and classes are abolished, theres no wage labor and commodity production or even money to compensate. What incentivizes me to become a pilot instead of a street cleaner, my love for planes or humanity? How can there without wage labor be a difference in outcomes for a pilot vs cleaner"
"People that will actually live in a communist society will neither think nor behave like you, much like you do not think or behave like people living in a feudal society."
This is why gulags and re-education camps are such features of Communism

Tankie of the Lake | Facebook - "Liberal believe that the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland are "gotcha's" because they genuinely believe that the only acceptable response to fascism is to do nothing.  The Nazis where conquering Poland, the Soviets stopped them from taking all of it. Finland was an axis power, and they only finally removed the swastika from their Air Force insignias in the 21st century.  Liberals demand that existing socialists states must be blameless saints while they built a system that handed the nuclear codes to a dementia riddled fascist pedophile."
Left wingers are making stuff up again as they always do. Of course the tankies in the comments are pretending the MR pact was exactly the same as the Munich agreement (as if Stalin wasn't caught by surprise by the German invasion)

History Betrayed - "The Soviet-Finnish Winter War (1939–1940) is often portrayed in Western history as a simple story of Soviet aggression against a small democratic nation. But the actual situation was rooted in the strategic reality facing the USSR before World War II fully erupted. The Finnish border sat dangerously close to Leningrad, one of the Soviet Union’s largest industrial and population centers. As Nazi Germany expanded across Europe and collective security collapsed, Soviet leadership viewed the existing border as militarily indefensible. The USSR initially sought territorial exchanges and buffer zones through negotiation, offering Finland land elsewhere in exchange for moving the border farther from Leningrad. Finland rejected the proposals, fearing Soviet domination. War followed. Early Soviet offensives were disastrous, with Finnish forces using terrain, winter conditions, and mobile tactics to inflict massive losses on the Red Army. But once Soviet command reorganized and concentrated overwhelming artillery and manpower, the balance shifted decisively. Finland eventually signed peace, ceding territory but preserving its independence. When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Finland later joined the war against the Soviets alongside the Germans, reinforcing Soviet fears that the northern approach to Leningrad was a major strategic vulnerability. The war demonstrated both the weaknesses of the early Red Army and the brutal security calculations shaping Europe on the eve of the largest war in human history. #worldwar2 #ww2 #winterwar #history #historyfacts"
Is there any communist aggression tankies won't justify? Whitewashing communist crimes is indeed a betrayal of history

Diego Angulo on X - (Translated from Spanish): "As a former sympathizer of the Left, today I want to show you 10 questions that leftists always dodge because they don't know what to answer:
1. Why does no one risk their life to escape to a socialist country, but rather the other way around?
2. If Socialism is so superior to Capitalism, why does it need violence instead of simply convincing people?
3. If the market is so irrational, why does the State need market prices to make decisions?
4. If the worker creates all the wealth, why does productivity change so much based on the available capital and technology, and not so much based on the hours worked?
5. If the end of Capitalism is approaching, why does it survive all crises and give the impression that it strengthens over time?
6. If the entrepreneur contributes nothing, why has it never been enough to simply gather workers to create companies?
7. If you distrust entrepreneurs, why do you trust politicians so much?
8. If the State must correct all the market's failures, who corrects the State's failures?
9. If business profit is undeserved, why would a public servant's salary be fully justified?
10. If Capitalism is exploitation, why do people participate in it and want to participate even when they have other alternatives?"

Axios on X - "GOP reboots the Red Scare as young Democrats embrace socialism"
Greg Lukianoff on X - "Disappointed to see this using the “conservative pounce” formulation.  I’m Gen X. All of us, including liberals like me, were there when we watched a nation filled with brilliant people put its best minds to making socialism work. It was an unparalleled disaster — not just economically, but environmentally, and certainly from a human rights perspective as well.  The fact that we now have people on both the right and the left who think Lenin was on to something, or that “real socialism has never been tried,” is mind-blowing. It represents a massive generational failure of our K–PhD system. They didn’t learn the history, philosophy, or economics that would have prevented them from falling for the same midwittery that too many of our grandparents fell for.  Sure, it sounds nice. Utopia always does. But it was a colossal disaster that we must not repeat.  So no, Axios. The news isn’t that the GOP is sounding the alarm. It’s that more genuine liberals aren’t."

Madeline Pendleton on X - "Deciding which non-capitalist ideology you like is the easy part, fun even. Unlearning all the capitalist propaganda you were fed about the world is the hard part bc it means admitting you were wrong about everything. A lot of people do the first but not the second."
Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 on X - "This dingbat reminds me of the time my mom (then 5-6 years out of the USSR & teaching music at an American university) started telling a colleague about her & her family's experiences with Soviet medicine and he told her she was channeling American propaganda 🤣🤣🤣"

Students For Liberty | Facebook - "Angela Davis Made Political Imprisonment Her Life's Work.
She edited If They Come in the Morning in 1971 while facing capital charges. She wrote Are Prisons Obsolete? She co-founded Critical Resistance in 1997. She built the modern language of prison abolition in the United States, and she built it on a principle that sounded absolute: no human being should be caged for their beliefs. Before she was an abolitionist writer, Davis was a UCLA philosophy professor and a Communist Party USA member. In August 1970, guns registered in her name were used in a California courthouse raid that killed a judge and three others. She fled, made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and spent sixteen months in jail on charges of kidnapping, conspiracy, and murder. During that time, "Free Angela" committees were organized across the Soviet bloc. East German schoolchildren sent her postcards by the hundreds of thousands. Moscow made her a global cause. In June 1972, a jury acquitted her on every count.
The Principle Was Supposed to Be Universal.
She walked out of jail owing a debt to a global movement that had made political imprisonment its cause. The claim she carried forward was supposed to apply to every regime that kept a dissenter in a cell. A prisoner in California and a prisoner in Prague were the same category of injustice, whatever flag flew over the courthouse.
In August 1972, a Letter Arrived from Prague.
Jiří Pelikán, former director of Czechoslovak Television and a lifelong communist, wrote to Davis in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring four years earlier. His own party comrades were now in Ruzyně prison for the crime of defending socialism with a human face.
He Named the Prisoners One by One.
Milan Hübl, historian. Jaroslav Šabata, psychologist. Karel Kyncl and Jiří Hochman, journalists. Most had been jailed by other communists. Pelikán asked Davis to visit Ruzyně, to speak for men imprisoned for the same reason she had been. He ended the letter: "I assure you, Angela, that not only I but many other people are waiting for a reply."
No Reply Ever Came.
There is no evidence Davis read the letter, and none that she answered it. The champion of political prisoners had received a plea from a communist reformer jailed by communists, and she chose silence. Silence in her case was itself a position.
The Pattern Kept Repeating.
In 1975, Solzhenitsyn told the AFL-CIO labor federation in New York that when Czechs had appealed to Davis, she answered that the prisoners "deserve what they get." In 1991, Alan Dershowitz described giving Davis's office a list of Soviet Jewish refuseniks jailed for wanting to leave the USSR. Her office replied, by his account, that these were opponents of socialism who belonged behind bars.
Meanwhile She Accepted the Honors of the Jailers.
In 1979 Davis flew to Moscow to accept the Lenin Peace Prize from the government that ran the Gulag. In East Germany she was celebrated by Walter Ulbricht, embraced by Erich Honecker, granted an honorary doctorate at the University of Leipzig. Rudolf Bahro, the East German dissident socialist rotting in a Stasi cell, never received a single public word from her.
The Abolitionist Would Not Abolish the Gulag.
A prison abolitionist who selects her prisoners is no longer abolishing prisons. She is redistributing them. The cages Davis wanted torn down were the cages built by regimes she opposed. The cages built by regimes she admired were beneath her attention, and the prisoners inside them were beneath her advocacy. A principle that applies only to your enemies and never to your allies is not a principle. It is a weapon. The men in Ruzyně, the refuseniks in Soviet cells and labor camps, and the dissident socialists in Honecker's Germany paid the price for the difference."

Mildly Interesting Stuff That You Might Like | Facebook - "In 1936, George Orwell traveled to Spain to fight fascists, but the people who nearly killed him were his own communist allies. At the time, Orwell identified strongly with the radical left and had joined the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), an anti-Stalinist socialist militia in Barcelona. He believed he was stepping into a utopian workers' revolution where class structures had been abolished and true equality was taking root. His romantic ideals were violently shattered—not just by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco, but by his own nominal allies. In May 1937, Soviet-backed communists systematically turned on their leftist counterparts in Spain. Orwell witnessed firsthand the brutal suppression, manufactured propaganda, and purges directed by Moscow against the very people who were supposed to be fighting on the same side. He barely escaped Spain with his life, fleeing across the border while many of his comrades were imprisoned or executed by Soviet secret police. Before his time in Spain, Orwell was largely sympathetic to the communist experiment in Russia, viewing it as a flawed but perhaps necessary step toward a more equitable society. After surviving the betrayal in Catalonia, his perspective completely inverted. He recognized that totalitarianism, regardless of whether it draped itself in fascist or communist rhetoric, relied on the destruction of objective truth and the absolute suppression of individual liberty. This firsthand brush with ideological betrayal fundamentally transformed Orwell's worldview. He documented his disillusionment in his memoir Homage to Catalonia, and the experience shifted his focus toward a targeted crusade against authoritarianism. The direct exposure to Soviet tactics in Spain directly inspired his masterworks, Animal Farm and 1984. Without his firsthand experience in the trenches of Catalonia, the modern vocabulary for describing oppressive governments might never have been written."

Is anyone else completely disillusioned by the actual “proletariat”? : r/CapitalismVSocialism - "I need to vent, because I’m honestly vibrating with anxiety and frustration right now.  So, I identify as a socialist. I read theory, I support unions, and I genuinely believe in dismantling capitalist structures. But lately, I am finding it harder and harder to advocate for the actual members of the working class, because, let’s be honest, so many of them are completely steeped in toxic masculinity and reactionary, anti-progressive attitudes.  I was at the local café down the street from my apartment this morning, trying to get some grading/reading done before logging into my remote job. It was raining, so I had my umbrella. I also happen to carry a canvas tote bag from my university's literature department.  Two construction workers in high-vis vests came in. They were incredibly loud, taking up way too much physical space, and completely ignoring the unspoken social contract of quiet morning spaces. I was already feeling a bit overstimulated.  As they walked past my table, one of them looked at my tote bag, then at my umbrella, and said, entirely unprovoked, “Hey buddy, careful with that umbrella, don’t want it getting caught on your purse."  His buddy chuckled and they just walked on to get their coffees.  It was a "joke," I guess. "Playful" teasing. But it felt so deeply coded in gender policing and fragile heteronormativity. I just froze. I didn't say anything because, frankly, they were twice my size and I didn't want to escalate a situation with people who clearly don't understand basic boundaries. I just stared at my laptop and felt my face get hot.  Here’s the thing that gets me: I spend my free time fighting for their healthcare. I vote for policies that would literally give them better wages and safer working conditions. Yet, if I tried to explain the concept of intersectionality or gender-neutral language to them, they’d probably just laugh in my face or call me a slur.  How are we supposed to build solidarity with people who actively despise our values? I’m starting to feel like the actual proletariat has zero interest in progress. They don't want a socialist utopia; they just want to eat meat, drive giant trucks, and make fun of people who read books.  I’m just so tired of being the only one trying. Anyone else struggle with this?"

Meme - ""Holodomor wasn't violent because it was faceless bureaucrats and 7 degrees of separation" -Arya Winningson"
Arya Winningson: "yeah I would not describ that as violence. All infliction of suffering or pain is not violence. Violence is a specific type, a subset"
Words the left disapproves of are violence. Violence the left approves of isn't violence.

Meme - "Socialists say I should stop confusing socialism with communism. I say they should I stop confusing my money with their money."

Meme - Project Liberal @ProjectLiberal: "Leftists will call everything but this a genocide."
"Life expectancy. The period life expectancy at birth, in a given year.
China's "Great Leap Forward!" Also known as "Really bad weather!" *4 year drop in world life expectancy*"
DSA Watch: "Hasan Piker: Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world"
It's only genocide when it pushes the left wing agenda

lily on X - ""Stalin would've killed you" If the party decides that is the right action ill gladly take the bullet"
Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost on X - "Here, a demoralized person's loyalty shifts entirely to ideology, embracing party decisions over personal values or self preservation. They've been conditioned through long-term subversion to accept even death for the cause, viewing it as a noble, ultimate act of devotion."

Jack on X - "They killed Charlie Kirk because he was their biggest threat. They could never beat him in a debate. Here is a resurfaced clip of him exposing Hasan Piker for not actually wanting socialism and living in a complete act….
KIRK: "Why don't you give 95% of your money away and go live on a commune?”
PIKER: "Do you really think that's how it works?”
KIRK: "Why not? Go live what you preach. I live what I preach. I am a free market capitalist. I employ people. I took a risk. I have my own startup business. Every single day, I practice what I preach."
"He wants other people to contribute to what he considers to be a good idea. What he considers will make the world a better place."
"You have the freedom to go live as a socialist. Go do it, Hassan. What's stopping you?"
An absolute mic drop moment."

Meme - The Modern Marxist: "The USSR was a democracy. China is a democracy. Cuba is a democracy. The US is NOT a democracy. If you disagree with this, I implore you to actually look into the political systems of these countries"
The fourth positionist: "North Korea is also a democracy."
The Modern Marxist: "Agreed"

/his/ - Rejoice, our favorite /his/ comic is going to Chin - History & Humanities - 4chan - "Acktually, while in theory communism is supposedly to attract the the poor workers, in reality their target audience dont give a fuck and the people most attracted to it are spoiled children of upper middle class families or psychopathic thugs and criminals, both of whom didnt work much in their lives.
All the communist leaders who successfully take over countries are failsons of the upper class:
>Karl Marx
Dad was an upper middle class lawyer, mom was from a wealthy merchant/future industrialist family, his family owned many vineyards and lived in spacious 10 bedroom home.
>Lenin
Dad was a noveau riche nobleman. Had a privileged upbringing in a huge house with servants and attended elite schools before flunking out
>Mao Zedong
Dad was prosperous merchant, owning 20 acres of land (huge by Chinese standard), the richest guy in his village. Was able to send Mao to good schools and support him throughout his studies which he eventually dropped out
>Che Guevara
Born to upper-class parents, dad is a well-to-do architect and businessman, mom is from a rich landowning family. Big houses in multiple provinces, went to good schools, took holidays all over Latin America.
>Fidel Castro
Son of a prosperous sugar plantation owner in Cuba with hundreds of servants and workers. Went to the best schools
>Ho Chi Minh
Son of a land-owning Confucian bureaucrat. Went to the best French colonial school before dropping out
>Pol Pot
Son of aristocratic landowning family with ties to the Cambodian monarchy. Went good local schools and went to France for college"

Meme - "Marx is an idiot."
"Have you read Marx?"
"No" -> "Goes to show"
"I've read the Manifesto" -> "Well, that's just a pamphlet"
"I've read Das Kapital" -> "You have to study Marx for years before understanding him."
"I've read his letters" -> "You need to separate the author from his works."

Meme - Stalin: "THERE IS NO I IN TEAM. BUT THERE IS A U IN GULAG"

Passion Is Volcanic: Desire in Southeast Asian Art

Haliya Bathing / Agnes Arellano

The National Gallery Singapore's Passion Is Volcanic: Desire in Southeast Asian Art was the least erotic erotic art exhibition I'd ever been to.

It was very abstract, intellectual & indirect.

Dissolving into the Same Breath #2 / Lavender Chang

A lot of was abstract modern art where the writeup (if any) didn't make any link to eroticism and/or was related to love, which is not the same as eroticism.

Pinaree Sanpitak's 'Noon-Nom'
Presumably, the beanbags are supposed to be breasts. You are invited to remove your shoes and step on them.

Even seemingly erotic items weren't always well-presented.

Yab-Yums look erotic, and this one was probably the closest the exhibition came to depicting sex, but are not supposed to be erotic (at least in some interpretations). This theme wasn't explored: in fact, I think the Yab-Yum was not even labelled (certainly, it's not mentioned in the exhibition content material online), but other sources name it as "Vajradhara and Prajnaparamita".

Nudity is also featured, but nudity isn't necessarily erotic (think medical textbooks, mortuary photographs or an old woman being stripped by a hospital attendant). A prime example of this was a video from Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: I’m Living:

This involved dressing a young girl's corpse in various clothes. I didn't watch the full 24 min 59 sec, but there didn't seem to be any nudity, let alone an erotic aspect to the video.

Lim Chong Keat's Jack is only there because the artist flippantly called it erotic and might have been referring to the colour palette's lack of restraint. What a reach.

The "best" example of all this is Jason Wee's 16 pixels from the bangs of Miranda Hobbes, where Dr Ronny Shapiro's cum landed, after his wife performed tantric masturbation on his root chakra, as part of her demonstration for a sex class:

Which turns out as repetitive monochrome squares. Like Mondrian but without the colour or variety in geometry.

For some reason, photography & video filming were strictly banned, unlike in the rest of the establishment. Probably to avoid incremental controversy from prudish quarters. Not that there was much that was controversial; maybe the gay paintings, which didn't even show gay sex - but gay people existing isn't erotic:

According to the exhibition, all of these were gay-themed, but one of the figures in the top left work seems to be a woman. In any event, 1/3 of the remaining works isn't even clearly gay, and none of them show or allude to the act of sodomy.

In contrast, the Annabel Chong section of the exhibition was a relief. While it didn't seem to cohere with the rest of the exhibition, at least it was clearly erotic.

IIRC, the exhibition said this was the dress she wore for the gangbang. I am unable to confirm this from the images I can find of the event (I am not going to spend 98 minutes of my life watching it to more rigorously verify this)

More photos of works from the exhibition are available on the e-flux review, the ArtAsiaPacific review (which has bananas in a suggestive pose) and probably the most at Bakchormeeboy's review.

Links - 25th September 2026 (1 - US Media [including Washington Post])

The Washington Post: Can billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos save journalism? - The Hub

Nolte: Serial-Lying Washington Post Staff Demand New Sugar Daddy After Jeff Bezos Hands Out Pink Slips - "The disgraced, far-left Washington Post as we knew it was obliterated on Wednesday, and now the very same staffers who have spent decades annihilating the former newspaper’s credibility want a new sugar daddy to bail them out...   I wonder how Bezos feels about being demoted from “sole owner who poured hundreds of millions into this failing institution for years” to “steward.”  The arrogance.  The actual definition of “steward” tells you precisely what these insufferable Post staffers think of Bezos... the staff sees Bezos as an employee who is there to serve them.  Well, right about now, he’s serving them pink slips...        “In the last three years, The Post’s workforce has shrunk by roughly 400 people,” whines the Washington Post Guild.  That’s right. The writing has been all over the wall for three years, and not once did anyone have the moral courage to do a self-inventory and say, Maybe if we stopped lying, we would earn the trust of subscribers, advertisers, and the casual readers whose clicks increase our revenue?  Not.  Once.  All they’ve done over those three years is arrogantly carry on in the hopes that some idiot with too much money would come along and buy into their unearned self-importance.  Learn to Substack, serial liars.  Good riddance."

Thread by @haugejostein on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The bloodbath at The Washington Post today — roughly one-third of its staff has been laid off — illustrates the ruthlessly plutocratic and neoliberal nature of the US economy.  In the span of a single day, one of the world’s most prominent English-language newspapers is being both crushed and politically restructured at the whim of a billionaire.  It’s honestly jaw-dropping. Everything about it sends shivers down my spine — the complete absence of labour rights, and how the billionaire class can just casually destroy media they dislike.  This is certainly not what democracy looks like."
Max on X - ""... how the billionaire class can just casually destroy media they dislike." 🤣😆😂 The generosity of the "billionaire class" was the only thing keeping this relic alive on life support. Thanks for the laughably disconnected from reality opinion, London."
Paul on X - "Nick Shirley broke one of the biggest news stories in the last 20 years by simply talking to people and showing up with a camera and releasing that footage on X. The Washington post employs a 1000 people and hasn't done real journalism in close to 15 years. Being a relay for leftist power isn't journalism. That's what the Washington post is, a political relay. Nick Shirley is actually a journalist.
And the Somali fraud story wasn't a secret. I've been crowing about it for a decade as have others. The Washington post could have broke that story, they knew about it but it made Democrats look bad so it sat untouched for 15 years."

John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte on X - "Yeah, I believe the Washington Post this time.
•The ICE Detains Five-Year-Old Hoax
•The Hegseth ‘Kill Everybody’ Hoax
•Trump “Destroying” White House Hoax
•Photo of Starving Gaza Baby Hoax
•Israeli Troops Murdered Food-Seeking Palestinians Hoax
•Trump Tariffs Will Explode Prices Hoax
•Maryland Man Hoax
•Black Newborns Much More Likely to Die If Doc’s White Hoax
•Elon Musk Nazi Salute Hoax
•Mass Hysterectomies Performed on Immigrants Hoax
•The All-White Trump Party Hoax
•Springfield Bomb Threat Hoax
•Trump Called for Liz Cheney to Be Executed Hoax
•Violent Crime Down Under Biden/Harris Hoax
•Arlington Cemetery Hoax
•Kamala Was Never America’s Border Czar Hoax
•Russia Collusion Hoax
•Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax
•Jussie Smollett Hoax
•Covington KKKids Hoax
•Very Fine People Hoax
•Seven-Hour Gap Hoax
•Russian Bounties Hoax
•Trump Trashes Troops Hoax
•Policemen Killed at Mostly Peaceful January 6 Protest Hoax
•Rittenhouse Hoax
•Eating While Black Hoax
•Border Agents Whipping Illegals Hoax
•NASCAR Noose Hoax
•Georgia Jim Crow 2.0 Hoax
•Trump Assaulted Secret Service Agents and Grabbed Steering Wheel of Beast Hoax
•MAGA Assaulted Paul Pelosi Hoax
•COVID Lab Leak Theory Is Racist Hoax
•Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Russian Disinformation Hoax
•Joe Biden Will Never Ban Gas Stoves Hoax
•COVID Deaths are Overcounted Is a Conspiracy Theory Hoax
•Mass Graves of Native Children in Canada Hoax
•Trump Killed Japanese Koi Fish Hoax
•Trump Told People to Drink Bleach Hoax
•Hamas Hospital Hoax
•If Reelected, Trump Will Execute People Hoax
•The 900,000 Kids Hospitalized with Coronavirus Hoax
•Dozens of Environmental Hoaxes
•The Alfa Bank Hoax
•Libs of TikTok Murdered Non-Binary Teen Hoax
•Aaron Rodgers Sandy Hook-Truther Hoax
•‘Bloodbath’ Hoax
•Biden ‘Sharp-as-a-Tack’ Hoax
•Iowa Poll Hoa"

Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus: "The Washington post last month wrote this article. The headline is completely false. The study did not explore the effects of racism at all. The study was showing there was a disparity, the “because of racism” part was added by the Washington Post journalist, because as another race correspondent at WaPo said, race drives subscriptions.  I am happy to say that the author of this piece has been fired today."
The Washington Post: "Nearly half of the mortality gap between Black and White adults can be traced to the cumulative toll of stress and inflammation, a new study shows. These two biomarkers bolster the "weathering hypothesis" that links systemic racism to health disparities."
Akilah Johnson @akjohnson1922: "In 2021, I was hired by @washingtonpost to cover health disparities & explore the way racism & social inequality affects health. 4 months ago, I became the generations' reporter exploring how health is experienced by different pple across the life course. Today, I was laid off."

Meme - Arthur in California @ArthurReturnss: "The mass layoffs at The Washington Post are unfortunate, but then I remember articles like this and think it's for the best."
"The racist legacy many birds carry. Birders grapple with complicated past linked to slavery, white supremacy"

Elon Musk on X - "Wired, The Atlantic, Guardian and many other propaganda legacy publications would die immediately if they had to support themselves. Donations from far left organizations disguised as charities are what keep them alive. They serve simply as a means of influencing Wikipedia, Google, etc as fake “authoritative” sources."

Daractenus on X - "The United States currently ranks below Ghana, Namibia and nearly every single European country when it comes to freedom of press. You don't get to lecture anyone on this."
Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "This is just proof that Reporters Without Borders is, like countless other organizations and institutions, little more than a tool of the Progressive managerial elite.  The United Kingdom, which regularly imprisons its own people for memes they post online, is ranked #23 on this list. Germany, where it's a crime to "insult someone in public" or post "hate speech online", is ranked #5.  Meanwhile, the US is ranked #55.  There isn't a single person who isn't a total idiot who thinks the European continent has more press freedom than the United States."
David Bernstein on X - "A self-discrediting study, but not surprising, given that much of it is based on the views of so-called "Human rights experts" who hate the US and Israel. I can predict without even looking that Israel will be even lower than the US, despite having a very robust press corps."
Andrew Hammel on X - "I live in Germany and have published journalism in the US, UK, and Germany, and I can tell you this study is utterly laughable. Most European countries have laws allowing journalists to be severely fined for "insulting" or "disrespecting" politicians."
Larkin Magnus on X - "Like "Democracy", "Freedom" on the left just means "my preferred policy outcomes"."

Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Journalist thinks that making a prediction that can be judged to assess one's credibility is childish."
Nate Silver @NateSilver538: "Allan you wanna bet? Let's say 250k at even odds?"
John Harwood @JohnJHarwood: "grow up"
Nate Silver @NateSilver538: "Happy to bet you too bro."
Trust the 'Experts'! Even when they're always wrong. "Qualifications" are all that matter.

Lomez on X - "NPR Update: aside from screeching about Maduro, NPR spent the morning advertising their new January 6th retrospective, a massive, exhaustively researched, minute-by-minute breakdown of the day, the key actors, and its political implications and fallout. This was a huge and probably quite expensive effort.  The "Jan. 6 Archive" is of course uncompromisingly slanted in a way to make Trump and the events look maximally incriminating and to justify the years of lawfare against Trump and his allies that followed, and also to ignore all of the surrounding context of the summer of riots that preceded the election (let alone an honest appraisal of the election itself).  And say what you want about it, but I am struck again by the asymmetry in how the left understands "writing history" and preserving cultural memory to their own ends, while the right refuses to engage in comparable efforts, or leaves it to amateurs (as with its journalism) who, while meaning well, lack the polish and know-how to compete with their institutional adversaries.  We have just lived through a decade of the most brazen effort to remake American life in the image of the dumbest, most perverse, mentally-ill (literally) leftist ideology that has possibly ever existed––all with the consent and full buy-in from every corner of our ruling institutions. Is it possible the right can muster the resources and man-power (it wouldn't even be that expensive), to catalog all of this? To preserve its memory? To demonstrate its depravities and shame and permanently desecrate the reputations of every one who played along?  Here is the NPR page link. Take a look. The saying that "history is written by the victors" is not quite true. History is written by the people who make the effort to write history. It's really that simple."

REVEALED: New York Times contributor busted as Iranian spy - "A frequent contributor for The New York Times was revealed to be an Iranian spy and was charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Federal prosecutors reported that this Iranian-born political science author arrested Monday was paid in secret to write columns favorable to Tehran and lobby at least one American lawmaker on the global power's behalf.  A criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn charged 63-year-old Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi with acting and conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). If convicted of both offenses, Afrasiabi faces the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison."
From 2021

Report: NPR’s Maher Refused Internal Demands to Resign “For the Good of Public Media” Before Loss of Funding - "the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) called on National Public Radio (NPR) CEO Katherine Maher to resign before all federal funding for both the CPB and NPR was cut off. As in the past, Maher and the NPR board chose their own agendas over the interests of their institution and public radio.  I have long been a critic of Maher since her inexplicable selection by the NPR board to lead the media organization. Despite years of objections to NPR’s overt bias, many critics genuinely wanted NPR to reverse course and adopt more balanced coverage. That is why, when NPR was searching for a new CEO, I encouraged the board to hire a moderate figure without a history of political advocacy or controversy.   Instead, the board selected Katherine Maher, a former Wikipedia CEO widely criticized for her highly partisan and controversial public statements. She was the personification of advocacy journalism, even declaring that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” that makes it “tricky” to censor or “modify” content as she would like.  Maher has supported “deplatforming” anyone she deems to be “fascists” and even suggested that she might support “punching Nazis.” She also declared that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction [in] getting things done.”  As expected, the bias at NPR only got worse. The leadership even changed a longstanding rule barring journalists from joining political protests.   One editor had had enough. Uri Berliner had watched NPR become an echo chamber for the far left with a virtual purging of all conservatives and Republicans from the newsroom. Berliner noted that NPR’s Washington headquarters has 87 registered Democrats among its editors and zero Republicans.  Maher and NPR remained dismissive of such complaints. Maher attacked the award-winning Berliner for causing an “affront to the individual journalists who work incredibly hard.”  She called his criticism “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”  Berliner resigned, after noting how Maher’s “divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR” that he had been pointing out.  In her disastrous appearance before Congress, Maher sat next to PBS CEO Paula A. Kerger and dismissed criticism. What was not disclosed is that PBS agreed with some of us that, if Maher truly wanted to save federal funding and protect NPR, she would resign.   According to the Times, our calls for her resignation were being repeated internally. Instead, the board that made the foolish choice of hiring Maher chose their ideological and personal agendas over the interests of their institution . . . again.  In the meantime, Maher and others were going public, bewailing the threat to journalism and calling on citizens to do everything that they could to protect NPR. The only thing that they were not willing to do was admit their own failure.  We have seen the same pattern in academia.  The fact is that this academic echo chamber may be killing educational institutions, but the intolerance still works to the advantage of faculty who can control publications, speaking opportunities, and advancement with like-minded ideologues.  We have watched the same perverse incentive in the media where outlets are seeing plummeting readers and revenue. Journalism schools and editors now maintain that reporters should reject objectivity and neutrality as touchstones of journalism.   It does not matter that this advocacy journalism is killing the profession. Reporters and editors continue to saw at the limb upon which they sit due to the same advantage for academics. For reporters, converting newsrooms into echo chambers gives them more security, advancement, and opportunities.  Recently, the new Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis was brought into the paper to right the ship. He told the staff “let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”  The response from reporters was to call for owner Jeff Bezos to fire Lewis and others seeking to change the culture. The Post has been eliminating positions and just implemented another round of layoffs to address the budget shortfalls.  In the meantime, trust in the media is at record lows — paralleling the polling on higher education. The result is the rise of new media as people turn to blogs and other sources for their news.  At NPR, the board and Maher have led the organization into a complete and utter meltdown, resulting in the loss of millions in funding and a shrinking audience. However, it does not matter. CPB called on Maher to resign “for the good of public media.” It was not, however, good for her or her board. Socially and personally, these individuals are praised and promoted as ideological champions on the left. They were even willing to see the death of CPB to remain faithful to the agenda.  So, CPB died, NPR lost all funding, but Maher kept her job… and her agenda."

Pete Buttigieg rep tells 'aggressive' reporter to turn off camera at Ohio derail site
From 2023. Hostility to the press is only fascist if right wing politicians do it to the left wing press

Why Americans Hate the Media - The Atlantic - "Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”... He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached. As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, several soldiers in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror. Retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, who would soon become George Bush’s National Security Advisor, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. “What’s it worth?” he asked Wallace bitterly. “It’s worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon.” After a brief discussion between Wallace and Scowcroft, Ogletree reminded Wallace of Scowcroft’s basic question. What was it worth for the reporter to stand by, looking? Shouldn’t the reporter have said something ? Wallace gave a disarming grin, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I don’t know.”... Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces—and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. When that happens, he said, they are “just journalists.” Yet they would expect American soldiers to run out under enemy fire and drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. “I’ll do it!” Connell said. “And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get … a couple of journalists.” The last words dripped disgust... [Newt] Gingrich said. “The military has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have.”... He did not try to explain the reasons a reporter might feel obliged to remain silent as the attack began—for instance, that in combat reporters must be beyond country, or that they have a duty to bear impartial witness to deaths on either side, or that Jennings had implicitly made a promise not to betray the North Kosanese when he agreed to accompany them. The soldiers might or might not have found such arguments convincing; Wallace didn’t even make them... When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile. The limited curiosity that elite reporters display in their questions is also evident in the stories they write once they have received answers. They are interested mainly in pure politics and can be coerced into examining the substance of an issue only as a last resort. The subtle but sure result is a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems... Two days before the election many of the country’s most admired analysts had no idea what was about to happen. Yet within a matter of weeks these same people, unfazed, would be writing articles and giving speeches and being quoted about who was “ahead” and “behind” in the emerging race for the White House in 1996. As with medieval doctors who applied leeches and trepanned skulls, the practitioners cannot be blamed for the limits of their profession. But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part. It builds the impression that journalism is about what’s entertaining—guessing what might or might not happen next month—rather than what’s useful, such as extracting lessons of success and failure from events that have already occurred. Competing predictions add almost nothing to our ability to solve public problems or to make sensible choices among complex alternatives. Yet such useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong... If a reporter is sued for libel by a prominent but unelected personality, such as David Letterman or Donald Trump, he or she says that the offended party is a “public figure”—about whom nearly anything can be written in the press... Most journalists would eloquently argue the logic of this broad definition of public figures—until the same standard was applied to them... The analysts who are so clear-eyed about the conflict of interest in Newt Gingrich’s book deal claim that they see no reason, none at all, why their own finances might be of public interest... In 1992 political professionals had laughed at Ross Perot’s “boring” and “complex” charts about the federal budget deficit—until it became obvious that viewers loved them... There is an astonishing gulf between the way journalists—especially the most prominent ones—think about their impact and the way the public does. In movies of the 1930s reporters were gritty characters who instinctively sided with the common man... Since the early 1980s the journalists who have shown up in movies have often been portrayed as more loathsome than the lawyers, politicians, and business moguls who are the traditional bad guys in films about the white-collar world... The joke in these movies is how rapidly the pundits leap to conclusions, how predictable their reactions are, how automatically they polarize the debate without any clear idea of what has really occurred... the most depressing aspect of the new talking-pundit industry may be the argument made by many practitioners: the whole thing is just a game, which no one should take too seriously.
From 1996 too. Time to mock Fox News for being entertainment

Meme - Aesthetica: "One thing you realize if you travel abroad and catch a few minutes of their national news coverage is that anyone who watches the news in these countries is being conditioned to be the most retarded person on the planet. Picture a foreign smug leftist news dork giving their retarded opinion on an American smug leftist news dork's fake depiction of an event. That's the only news these people get about America. There's a boomer sitting in Canada as we speak who thinks Trump will be sent to prison for Russiagate any day now and he can't travel to Florida anymore because Trump will send him to El Salvador."
Li Jingjing: "It keeps getting crazier."
"Me reading news everyday as a Chinese *America using rifle to blow head off with lots of blood*"

Links - 24th September 2026 (2 - Corporate Wokeness)

PwC Drops Diversity Mandate for Internship Amid Legal Pressure - "PwC has shed explicit diversity criteria for an internship program after the firm faced scrutiny from a conservative activist group that opposes corporate racial diversity efforts... Last year’s report characterized the firm’s “Start” internship for aspiring leaders as being “uniquely designed for high-performing college sophomores and rising juniors who self-identify as members of traditionally underrepresented minority groups in the professional services industry, including protected veterans and/or individuals with disability.”"

bad_stats 🕜💵🖨️🕣 on X - "Hey bestie! Could you point me to the part of the article that is evidence for the claim that Boeing is using DEI to intentionally lose the competition with Comac because the WEF is Maoist?"
James Lindsay, full varsity on X - "Here's their 2024 SEC filing indicating they hit their DEI and climate targets but not production or quality targets."
Ryan Whitten 🇺🇲🗽 on X - "The way they scored this makes it look like they did really well on their goals, when the data suggests they were well short of the goals that actually matter.  When you remove the 80% from the worthless DEI goals, they are well below 100%.  Alramingly, they have not reduced rework at all, suggesting that may actually be going up.  This is direct evidence that these ESG/DEI initiatives are counterproductive, but if you knew what they are to begin with, you'd expect that.  Sad that this is happening to the company that my grandfather retired from, and that brought us the B-17, among other great aircraft."
James Lindsay, full varsity on X - "It's not exactly that our corporations are committing suicide. It's that they're being suicided, like Jeffrey Epstein. DEI and ESG are designed to misdirect priorities and scarce resources into meaningless and detrimental crap that leaves a company weak and uncompetitive."

Meme - David Pinsen @dpinsen: "There’s a good chance this guy got promoted to this role partly because a drug addict with heart disease tried to buy a banana with a counterfeit $20."
New York Post @nypost: "Boeing ousts head of troubled space unit after astronauts left stranded, billions in losses"
Boeing ousts Ted Colbert, head of troubled space unit after Starliner debacle - "Boeing’s defense, space and security unit, one of its three main businesses, has lost billions of dollars in 2023 and 2022, which executives attributed in large part to cost overruns on fixed-price contracts."
Ted Colbert was in the role from March 2022, but left wingers will continue to look around for excuses

BREAKING: Boeing jets come out as trans-safe: they are not safe but they 'identify as safe' • Genesius Times - "  The announcement comes as a surprise to many, but Boeing insists that they are simply embracing the true nature of their planes. “Our planes have always wanted to be safe, and we are proud to support them in their journey,” a Boeing spokesperson said in a press conference. “We’re not just talking about physical safety here – although our planes are impeccably crafted and rigorously tested by the most diverse people on Earth. No, we’re talking about a deeper, spiritual safety. Sure, wheels fall off, doors fly off in flight, and fuel leaks are common, but our planes identify as safe, and that’s what really matters.”...   Boeing CEO Jack Ace said, “If you deny our jets’ self-identified safety profile, you are a transphobe.”"

blighter on X - "people are justly amazed at this but it’s important to remember SpaceX isn’t our only space company and by many metrics not even our most successful. Boeing, e.g., is light years ahead on both amount spent and workforce diversity, both of which are key drivers of success."

Anti-Israel Google employees arrested after occupying CEO's office with demands against ‘apartheid state’ - "Google employees with anti-Israel demands of ceasing “business with the Israeli apartheid government and military” were arrested on Tuesday after they took over Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's California office. Occupying the space for over 8 hours, the employees broadcast their Pro-Palestine protest on a Twitch livestream, which ultimately also captured their arrest. Google employees arrested from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's California office. Google employees arrested from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's California office.  The ‘notech4apartheid’ video shows a man informing the employees that they've been put on administrative leave before he asks them to leave voluntarily. To which, the protesters refused, leading to their arrest by the police... The employees have driven a case for Google to divest from its business ties with the “Israeli apartheid government and military” and put an end to “harassment, intimidation, bullying and silencing” of Palestinian and Muslim workers. They've also pushed the organisation to focus on the “health and safety crisis” that caused concern among all those employees who can't bear with their office hours and hard work being used to “enable a genocide.”"
When you hire SJWs...
No doubt they will play the victim

Spare us the hypocrisy of the woke multinationals - "The main thrust of the reforms is that voters would need photo ID or a utility bill to back a request for an absentee vote, instead of the present system where the signature on the application for the vote is checked against that on the returned ballot... It’s yet another example of corporate ethical activism, whereby companies get terrifically worked up about issues that have really got nothing to do with them. It’s part of corporate overreach generally. In Ireland, during the referendum on gay marriage, Google and Facebook let it be known that they were very pro-change. Then there was Disney, making a stand against transphobia by, in an entirely pointless gesture, sacking the actress Gina Carano from The Mandalorian after she appeared to send up trans pronouns. This is the same Disney that filmed part of their live-action version of Mulan in Xinjiang province, where the Uyghurs are in mass detention... Where global capitalism does have an ethical duty, it is to pay taxes in the countries where they operate, reflecting the profits they make there. But on this, Google et al are not terribly forthcoming either. My impression is that they positively go out of their way to avoid paying what normal people would consider a fair rate and use their corporate clout with the US government to argue their case.  They also have a responsibility to see that their supply chains are clean, viz, that the companies contributing to their product aren’t involved in iffy practices in developing countries or underpaying their workers.  You might even assume that big corporations would consider the ethics of investing in countries that violate human rights. And yet Coca-Cola’s Curt Ferguson, head of its Far East operations, recently declared that its biggest market in the future would be China, where it already employs thousands of people.  The difference, of course, is that taking a stand on China really would affect the bottom line. Ethics and global capitalism… they’re a funny mix, aren’t they?"

Four in 10 less likely to stay with their company if asked to wear pronoun badges - "The finding comes in research backed by Kemi Badenoch on the “politicisation” of business, which shows that half of people think businesses have become too concerned with taking political positions on contested issues.  The Business and Trade Secretary said people wanted businesses to focus on serving customers, “not activism or political causes”... only 7 per cent answering that they would be more likely to want to work for the company. Three quarters (75 per cent) believe that companies should prioritise hiring on merit, regardless of race or gender, rather than hiring to create a diverse team. And 50 per cent of people agreed that businesses have become too concerned with taking political positions on contested issues, with only 14 per cent disagreeing.  When asked about businesses taking political stances on a range of issues – including Black Lives Matter, immigration, Palestine and transgender rights – in each case, about half of people said it would make no difference to whether they would buy their products.  In each case, a similar or larger number of people said they would be less likely to buy the products than said they would be more likely to buy."

Opinion: No reliable evidence that ESG investing produces above-average returns - "Despite growing skepticism among investors, as evidenced by their withdrawal of billions of dollars from ESG equity funds so far in 2024, many finance industry leaders continue to claim that ESG-focused investing produces above-average returns... The study tracks 310 companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2020. It finds that neither ESG rating upgrades nor downgrades were related in a statistically significant way to the stock market performance of companies. That firms’ ESG ratings changes — which when released, are effectively new information for investors — are not consistently related to financial returns, means ESG ratings are likely not relevant to the expected future profitability of publicly listed companies in Canada. This of course raises the question: if new information (i.e., ratings changes) about a company’s ESG-related practices is not statistically related to equity returns from investing in that company, why do money managers continue to pay for the services of ESG rating companies? One possible reason is that managers pass a substantial share of the costs along to customers who are willing to sacrifice financial returns (because of higher management fees) in order to express their commitment to environmental sustainability and other social causes. Another possible reason is that promoting ESG-focused investment alternatives appears to have been, at least until recently, an effective marketing tool... because asset managers typically do charge higher fees for ESG-focused mutual funds, ESG investment strategies are more likely to underperform than overperform conventional investment strategies."

Bruce Pardy: Corporate Canada betrayed capitalism. Now it has been betrayed - "After years of colluding with climate hysteria and betraying capitalism, Canadian companies have been dumped at the curb. On June 20, Bill C-59 received Royal Assent... Businesses cannot claim that their products or practices help to protect against climate change or provide other environmental benefits unless they can prove the claims are true. The provisions amend the Competition Act and make climate and other environmental claims subject to the same regulatory regime as false advertising... Over the course of decades, Western countries, but nowhere more than Canada, have undergone a cultural revolution. Accelerating climate activism, aggressive social justice ideology and managerial government have changed the landscape. Business elites, instead of defending capitalism, competition, open markets, the rule of law and other values of Western civilization, decided to switch rather than fight. To protect their own prosperity and influence, corporate leaders learned to speak the language and adopt the norms of progressive collectivism. They became cheerleaders for the new regime. Many came to believe in it themselves. Companies took on new roles. The social responsibility of business became not merely to increase its profits, as Milton Friedman famously insisted, but to serve as social welfare agencies. They were not just to obey the law and deliver products and services that people wanted to buy, but to pursue social and environmental causes. They would serve the interests not just of their shareholders but their “stakeholders,” as “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) models demanded. In their marketing and rhetoric, they embraced climate action, corporate social responsibility, social licence, “equity, diversity and inclusion” (EDI) and social justice. They promoted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are a blueprint for socialist managerialism. The Business Council of Canada endorsed carbon pricing and Canada’s climate plans. Major oil companies promoted net zero and repeated the kinds of claims that governments themselves made: that climate action in Canada helps to prevent the climate from changing. Such claims are patently false. Even if you believe in anthropogenic climate change, if your country doesn’t contribute much to the problem, cutting its contribution isn’t a solution. Bringing Canadian carbon emissions to zero would make no measurable difference to anything. Countries that together produce far and away most of the emissions on Earth have no intention of changing their paths. And who can blame them? If I were them, I would do the same. Canada excels at climate boondoggles. Carbon taxes are just more money for government coffers that do not necessarily reduce emissions, if that actually mattered. Wind and solar power, a lucrative source of government largesse that some businesses have adeptly saddled up to, don’t replace fossil fuels. Carbon capture and storage, perhaps the most pathetic pretend of them all, is a breathtakingly expensive symbolic gesture that cannot be applied at scale. The Paris accord and its net zero aspirations are climate fairy tales. Canadian business leaders would never say any of this. That was the deal: pay homage to the climate gods, and you can be on the team. But now they can’t. Progressive statism has never been about the climate, or transgenderism, or whatever the cause du jour. The target has always been Western values and principles. Free enterprise is anathema to its aspirations, and as it turns out, so is prosperity itself. Canadian companies have betrayed the economic principles of their own society. How does government change one side of a bargain? When there is no other side. The Canadian business community still does not understand the point of the revolution. There can be no survivors. Surely, they sputter, you don’t mean us."

Leading Report on X - "BREAKING: Toyota has announced it will no longer sponsor LGBTQ parades and events and will no longer make efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)."

The hottest trend in executive leadership: Bringing back the White Guy
Greedy companies are more evil than they are greedy, because everyone knows that diversity is the way to earn more money (of course they cite the crap "research" from consulting firms, even though McKinsey's claim has never replicated and they refuse to disclose their methodology, and other research explicitly contradicts the claim)

City of London has given up on inclusion, Black workers say

American Airlines' focus on ESG in retirement plan is illegal, US judge rules - "A federal judge in Texas on Friday said American Airlines (AAL.O), opens new tab violated federal law by basing investment decisions for its employee retirement plan on environmental, social and other non-financial factors... O'Connor said American had breached its legal duty to make investment decisions based solely on the financial interests of 401(k) plan beneficiaries by allowing BlackRock (BLK.N) , opens new tab, its asset manager and a major shareholder, to focus on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors."

BlackRock Exits Net Zero Alliance for Asset Managers Amid Wall Street Exodus - Bloomberg

How to Put Woke Capital Out of Business - "Vivek Ramaswamy opens his book on the perils of woke capitalism by declaring himself a traitor to his class...   Two of his closest advisors resigned immediately. He received indignant emails from friends and employees. Less than three weeks later, he stepped down as CEO of the company he founded. He could have kept quiet, mouthed the diversitarian platitudes, and remained in good standing with the credentialed elite who run America. But Ramaswamy ultimately chose to speak out against corporate wokeness: “Why am I defecting? I’m fed up with corporate America’s game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money. It is quietly wreaking havoc on American democracy.”  There is something admirable about Ramaswamy’s commitment to honesty in such a dishonest age. The fundamental lie at the heart of woke capitalism deeply bothers him. Corporations and the oligarchs who run them pretend to care about social justice above all else when in fact they pursue profits with little concern for justice, social or otherwise.  Nike stands with Colin Kaepernick, but not with the children and Uighur political prisoners who work in its sweatshops. Uber supports Black Lives Matter, but not its drivers who want to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. The NBA’s management and star players criticize the President of the United States but rebuke critics of the Chinese Communist Party. “In the fight for justice,” Ramaswamy concludes, “for-profit corporations make fickle friends.”  Ramaswamy is not just an indignant moralist. He understands how the lies serve the corporate oligarchy. Woke capitalism is “about using trendy social values as a trick to generate more profits… [it’s about corporations] creating a new narrative of social purpose to disguise their old-school greed. The social causes simply serve as a form of reputational laundering for those same companies’ profit-seeking.” This concept of reputational laundering—which might be more accurately called “moral laundering”—is absolutely key to understanding woke capitalism.   The cheap social-justice talk and the tax-deductible donations to progressive causes do not just draw attention away from questionable business practices. They crown corporations “with a patina of moral authority” and, as such, shield them from the fury of left-wing activists. Performative wokeness puts corporations on the right side of the Manichean divide between the irredeemable cis-white-hetero-Christian patriarchy and everyone else.  As Joshua Mitchell has explained, such behavior is not intended to signal virtue so much as innocence. We are not guilty of racism, the corporations proclaim. And in our age, that is the only guilt that matters. Economic exploitation, greed, and dishonesty are, by contrast, no longer cardinal sins—if they remain sins at all.   Ramaswamy wrote his book not merely to denounce hypocrisy. He thinks that the unholy marriage between wokeness and capitalism ultimately represents the “death of our democracy.” He indicts woke capitalism for creating a system in which “business elites [tell] ordinary Americans what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to think. Each presents an equal affront to American democracy.” His critique is mostly directed at “this top-down elitism.”... Corporate wokeness is a lagging indicator, yet another instance of trickle-down leftism. What began in the 1960s in the Civil Rights movement, Black Power, second wave feminism, and the New Left has since infected every major institutional sector in America, including the last bastions of the old America: the churches and the military. Wokeness is now anchored in our laws, celebrated in our culture, and affirmed by our elites.  Nowhere is this more evident than in Silicon Valley...
'If Twitter has a moral obligation to censor misinformation and offensive speech in public tweets and private direct messages, does Google have an obligation (and therefore justification) to censor private emails? Will Verizon say it has a responsibility to stop hate and conspiracy from spreading via text messages? If text messages become fair game, then why not live phone conversations too?'
Ramaswamy sees what so many establishment conservatives and libertarians refuse to see: in the eyes of the woke Left, we on the Right are all racists who should be made untouchables. Censorship creep is real... If corporations or CEOs choose to engage in social activism, then they should not enjoy the legal privilege of protection from lawsuits. That privilege, after all, was only afforded to encourage risk-taking in pursuit of profit—not social activism in pursuit of leftist applause.   Ramaswamy is well aware that corporations and CEOs may simply claim, in response, that everything they do, including the woke propaganda, is in the service of profit. To which, he says, good! This would “reveal the true essence of stakeholder capitalism for the self-interested farce that it is, in a way that would enlighten consumers and citizens alike about the true motivations of today’s newly woke capitalist class.” Such a defense, of course, would not necessarily hold up in court, and executives would therefore think twice “before writing a check to BLM or exhorting their customers to support Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whatever else it is that they feel an impulse to do from their seat of corporate power.”... Last, is an interesting idea to protect employees from wokeness in the workplace. Ramaswamy convincingly argues that woke ideology fits the EEOC’s definition of a religion and, as such, cannot be imposed on employees. Your boss should no more be able to fire if you deny the divinity of Christ, than if you affirm that all lives matter. Ramaswamy would thus extend the protection of the Civil Rights Act to cover political opinions both on and off the job."

Jerry quits Ben & Jerry’s, saying its independence on social issues has been stifled : r/Economics - "Unilever bought Ben & Jerry's 25 years ago. No one in that era had any idea what social would mean in the future. Today, regardless of where you stand, it's almost a no win situation."
"I just was watching an old Mister Rogers clip and the comments today are “wow Mister Rogers is apparently a modern right wing extremist full of hate” LOL"

Jerry quits Ben & Jerry’s, saying its independence on social issues has been stifled : r/Economics - "Jourdan had it right decades ago, republicans buy shoes too.  Plus there's ways to signal political lean without being partisan. Nobody questions where Patagonia would sit on the political spectrum, but they're not running off conservative customers by making public statements taking stances. From a business standpoint, signaling can be very good, but statements can be very bad."
I>Right wingers were claiming this was because he wanted to diss Charlie Kirk, and were making the usual "Everyberg Singlestein Timeowitz" and "every. single. time." comments, but really he just wants to bash Israel, and ironically that's what many of those right wingers want to do too.

Opinion: By embracing defence, ESG reveals its underlying illogic - "After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and new wars in the Middle East, ESG has been adjusting. Defence is being reconsidered, reframed and quietly welcomed back into portfolios. But nothing about defence itself has changed. Weapons still do what they have always done: kill and destroy. If an entire industry can move from “unacceptable” to “strategically necessary” without changing its nature, the issue isn’t the industry. It’s the framework judging it. Start with a simple question: what allows people to live, function and improve their condition over time? By that standard, both defence and energy are non-negotiable. Defence protects societies from external threats. Energy makes societies possible in the first place. You don’t get modern agriculture, transportation or health care without it. You certainly don’t get a functioning defence sector without it. And yet ESG now treats these two pillars of modern life very differently, increasingly including defence but still largely boycotting traditional energy ... Now picture a military built on the energy logic ESG prefers . Missile systems function only when the wind picks up. Air defence performs nicely on clear afternoons but fades out after sunset or on cloudy days. Ground operations run on intermittent power — with backup systems that may or may not carry the load when things get serious. No one would design a defence system that way; it would be national suicide. Yet that is the model being promoted for the energy systems that underpin the entire economy. In defence, reliability is sacred because failure is immediate and visible. In energy, because the consequences of unreliability may accumulate more slowly, reliability standards have been downgraded. Instead, we’ve pushed toward sources that are diffuse, weather-dependent and heavily reliant on extensive backup to make them usable at scale. ESG is less about identifying actual economic value and more about setting politically correct conditions on investment . Meet the criteria and doors open. Miss them and they close, whatever you actually produce or how useful it is. That changes the nature of the market. It becomes less about performance and more about ideological alignment. Companies spend more time documenting, reporting, and anticipating regulatory compliance because that is what determines access. Whether they contribute meaningfully to human well-being becomes secondary. Defence is now being folded into ESG because excluding it has become impossible to justify"

The DSA Platform vs. Mao's Original Platform: A Side-by-Side Reading Plus Guangxi: A Case Study

Insurrection Barbie on X

The DSA Platform vs. Mao's Original Platform: A Side-by-Side Reading Plus Guangxi: A Case Study

The DSA's 2025-2026 program was ratified this year. Its authoritative text is public at platform.dsausa.org. Mao Zedong's founding platform — the Common Program of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference — was adopted on September 29, 1949, and served as the constitution of the People's Republic of China until 1954. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the two:

Both frame politics as a war between "the working class" and "the capitalist class." The DSA platform says: "We stand against the capitalist class and the politicians that serve their interests" (DSA Program). Mao's platform: China's revolution unites the working class and peasants against "imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism" (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both demand a new rewritten constitution. DSA: "Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program itself was the new constitution, replacing the pluralist 1946 Constitution of the Republic of China.

Both call for a single unicameral legislature. DSA: "proportional representation in a single federal legislature" — meaning the abolition of the U.S. Senate (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program established the National People's Congress as "the highest body of state power" — unicameral by design (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both eliminate independent judicial review. DSA: "Limit the Court's power of judicial review which it uses to effectively create and abolish laws outside the legislative process" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program subordinated all courts to "democratic centralism" (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both nationalize the "commanding heights." DSA: "the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control" and "public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure and natural resources" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program: "development of production through socialist relations of production," with the state prioritizing "the state-owned economy" while tolerating small private enterprises in a "mixed economy" transitional phase (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both defend America's geopolitical adversaries against sanctions. DSA: "End economic sanctions that impact the sovereignty of countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program based its foreign policy on "respect for mutual sovereignty" — the identical rhetorical formula he used to justify supporting Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea and every anti-Western regime that followed (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Both demand reduced U.S. military capability. DSA: "Greatly reduce the U.S. military budget, close overseas bases, and bring troops home" (DSA Program). Mao dissolved the Nationalist army and reoriented Chinese military doctrine around anti-imperial "self-reliance."

Both weaponize "fascism" as an expandable enemy label. DSA: "Only a party that fights for working people can win the battle against fascism" (DSA Program). Mao's Common Program aimed to eliminate "feudal, compradorial, and fascist ideologies" — a category eventually used to justify killing 240,000 shopkeepers in the 1952 Five Antis Campaign (Wikipedia / Common Program).

Those are just the highlights.

Here is the objection I will get from from the lovers of the common good utopia on the left: "That's ridiculous. The DSA is not Mao. It's Scandinavian social democracy. You're being hysterical."

Every Marxist-Leninist party that has ever taken power on a moderate platform has purged its coalition partners and begun killing within a decade. Every single one. There are no exceptions.

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, in coalition with King Sihanouk and moderate Cambodian nationalists. Within 72 hours they had forcibly evacuated the entire two-million-person population of Phnom Penh at gunpoint into the countryside. Currency was abolished the same week. Wearing eyeglasses became evidence of being an intellectual, punishable by death (Britannica / Khmer Rouge). Within four years they had murdered 1.7 to 2.2 million of their own people out of a population of 8 million which was the highest percentage of a nation's own population killed by its own government in modern history (Museum of Communist Terror, Wikipedia / Killing Fields).

Fidel Castro told Herbert Matthews of the New York Times in 1957, on the record: "I have said clearly and definitely that we are not communists." His 26th of July Movement's public platform was the restoration of the 1940 Cuban Constitution, free elections within 18 months, and freedom of the press. He seized Havana on January 1, 1959. Eleven days later the first mass firing squads began operating at La Cabaña fortress, and they were personally supervised by Che Guevara. The free elections promised in 18 months were never held. (Britannica / History Will Absolve Me, Cuba Archive).

Lenin's Bolsheviks ran on "Peace, Land, Bread" and in the November 1917 election for that Assembly the freest election in Russian history the Bolsheviks came in second, with 24% of the vote. When the Assembly convened on January 5, 1918, Lenin let them meet for 13 hours and then dissolved it at gunpoint. It never reconvened. The Red Terror was announced September 5, 1918, just ten months after the coup. By 1923, five million peasants, the same peasants that were promised "bread" were dead from the Russian Famine which was largely caused by forced grain requisitions from the Bolsheviks who had promised them land (Britannica / Russian Revolution).

Hugo Chávez told voters in 1998: "We are not going to expropriate. We are not communists." He then won 56% of the vote and within eight years his government had shut down the country's largest independent television station, packed the Supreme Court, and rewritten the constitution. Within fifteen he had expropriated 1,168 companies. By 2018 the country had 130,000% hyperinflation. By 2024 GDP had collapsed 78% and eight million Venezuelans — a quarter of the population — fled the country (Funds Society, SECO 2025 report).

Daniel Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua in 2006 as a reformed democrat who had accepted pluralism. In 2018 he killed at least 355 protesters (BBC). By 2023 he had stripped 222 political opponents of their Nicaraguan citizenship and deported them to the United States, including priests and former revolutionary comrades. In 2023 he sentenced Bishop Rolando Álvarez — a Catholic bishop — to 26 years in prison (Human Rights Watch). Catholic convents were shut down; the Missionaries of Charity were expelled; the Jesuit University of Central America was confiscated by the government.

Mao's own timeline is the most instructive of all. The Common Program was adopted October 1, 1949. Land Reform executions began within one year and killed up to five million landlords by 1953. By 1957, when Mao invited intellectuals to critique the Party in the "Hundred Flowers Campaign," half a million to 1.3 million people were arrested and sent to labor camps (Britannica / Anti-Rightist Campaign). By 1962 the Great Leap Forward famine killed 30 to 45 million people. By 1968, in Guangxi, the Party was organizing cannibalism.

They all started as moderates.

The Great Leap Forward alone killed more human beings in four years than every American war in the history of the United States combined, times thirty. The Great Leap was caused by a room full of central planners in Beijing who believed they could out-think markets, farmers, and physics. So they ordered peasants to melt down their cooking pots and farm tools into backyard steel furnaces which made 99% of the resulting steel unusable (MME Revise source booklet). Then they ordered the extermination of sparrows because sparrows ate grain. One billion sparrows were killed by citizens banging pots until the birds dropped dead from exhaustion. Without sparrows, locusts exploded and a 2025 NBER study calculated that the sparrow extermination alone caused approximately 2 million deaths (NBER).

Mao's own words to his own staff, on the record were: "50 million may have to die … you can't blame me when people die" (Hudson Institute).

Strangely, the American college graduate has never heard of the Great Leap Forward and instead has been told that the Cultural Revolution was about "excesses" rather than mass genocide. The university they attend assigned them The Communist Manifesto but never assigned The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press). See that's the book that documents the 94 million deaths attributable to communist regimes in the 20th century. All of whom by the way started as noncommunist moderate socialists. The Black Book of Communism is one of the most heavily peer-reviewed works of political history published in the last thirty years. It is also, unavailable in the modern American university curriculum.

In case the facts presented above are not enough, let's review what happened on June 18, 1968, in the Chinese province of Guangxi. In a 1983 internal investigation of the Chinese Communist Party itself, and further documented in Donald Sutton's academic study The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, archives told one of the most horrifying stories I had ever read.

Wu Shufang was a teacher who taught geography and she spent the spring of 1968 as the target of a series of "struggle sessions" — the Cultural Revolution's signature ritual, in which she was dragged to a stage, forced to wear a dunce cap listing her crimes, made to kneel, and beaten while a crowd shouted denunciations. Her crime was that she came from an educated family and belonged to the "stinking ninth category" of class enemies.

In the end her students beat her to death on the morning of June 18.

Then the student leaders forced four of her fellow teachers to carry her body to the river and they forced one of the teachers — a colleague, who had shared a classroom with her — to slice her open so they could remove her heart and her liver. The remains were carried back to school and then seventy or eighty students ate her flesh in the school kitchen (Sutton, Time magazine, 1993).

Another group of students, in a smaller ceremony, cooked additional parts of her body in an earthenware pot in the private lodging of the vice head of the county Revolutionary Committee. Four of the students actually ate the meal in his presence.

A third group of students barbecued her flesh on a walkway outside classrooms 31 and 32 (Sutton).

This happened at a public high school in the middle of the afternoon. It happened while the "moderate" institutions of Chinese socialism — the neighborhood committees, the workplace units, the student associations, the local party branches — were all operating exactly as designed.

Wu Shufang was one of at least 421 named human beings eaten in Guangxi Province in the summer of 1968 (Wikipedia / Guangxi Massacre). Song Yongyi's archival work documents cannibalism in 27 of Guangxi's 40 counties — two-thirds of the province (Radio Free Asia interview with Song Yongyi).

Here are some of the others:

Zhang Boxun, primary-school teacher, Huangmao Street, same day, June 18, 1968. Denounced as a rebel-faction sympathizer. Tried to jump into a river to escape a struggle session. Caught. A militiaman named Guo Lixiang cut out his heart and liver with a five-inch knife. His flesh was cooked in an earthenware pot at the local government's Foodstuffs Depot. Over 80% of the unit's members ate the meat — some under duress (Sutton).

Two children, ages 11 and 14, Pubei County. Their father was beaten to death for belonging to the "fifth category" of class enemies. The local officials said, according to the primary-source record: "It is important to eradicate such people." The children were killed and eaten (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Liu Xiulan, 17 years old, daughter of a landowner. Gang-raped by nine people, who then cut open her belly and ate her liver and breasts. Her entire family was wiped out (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Gan Dazuo, Datuan village. Castrated and disemboweled while still alive by his own clansmen. His last recorded words: "Wait 'til I'm dead, then cut" (Sutton).

Chen Guorong, May 14, 1968. Ambushed by an 11-man militia. Killed with a large knife. His liver was cut out and shared among 20 participants as a night meal (Time magazine).

Five people in Shangsi County, October 1968. Militia leader "cut open the bellies of five people, ripped out their livers, cooked them and sat down together to eat them. The next day, they killed four more people and ripped out their livers, which they shared with the other people on the production brigade, who all got to taste a mouthful each, to symbolize the dictatorship of the proletariat" (RFA / Song Yongyi).

Every one of these deaths was carried out by "the revolutionary masses" against people the local Communist Party had labeled "class enemies," in a province with no famine (Bitter Winter). This was not desperation. There was food. This was cannibalism as political ritual.

The 1983 official CCP investigation of Wuxuan County alone found:

56 victims had their hearts and livers cut out.

18 victims were consumed completely — "down to the soles of their feet."

13 victims had their genitals eaten.

7 victims were cut up while still alive.

In Binyang County, every family was required to send a member to the eating hole to eat human flesh (Sutton). In one Wuxuan work unit, two young girls whose political standpoint was suspect were forced to eat the flesh to prove they were on the right side (Sutton).

"Cannibalism enabled the ringleaders in these obscene acts to distribute the blame among fellow participants and thereby protect themselves" (Sutton).

The eating was administered as a loyalty test and refusing to eat people meant you would be the next target. What starts as "the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control" ends, in every historical instance, with the population being compelled to participate in mass murder so that nobody can safely testify against the party. That is the endgame of every ideology that believes there is no legitimate safeguard between the individual and the state — no independent institutions, no protected property, no countervailing courts, no free press, no sovereign local jurisdiction, no owner of anything the state cannot take. In that arrangement, the party runs out of external enemies within a decade, and the machinery it built to destroy them starts destroying the party's own founders, the party's own coalition partners, and finally the party's own supporters.

Of the estimated hundreds of thousands killed in Guangxi and the 421+ documented cannibalizations:

15 people were prosecuted for cannibalism, with sentences up to 14 years.

91 Party members were expelled — none was severely punished.

The provincial party boss who orchestrated the entire campaign, Wei Guoqing, was never punished. He rose to the CCP Politburo, served as Director of the People's Liberation Army's General Political Department, and died peacefully in 1989. On October 24, 2024, Xi Jinping's government reburied Wei Guoqing's ashes with full military honors at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery — the CCP equivalent of Arlington (Radio Free Asia, 2024).

The current Chinese Communist Party the same party the DSA idolizes buried the man who supervised the cannibalism of 421 human beings, with full military honors, less than two years ago.

In 1981, 43% of the world's most extremely poor people lived in China. Mao had been dead five years and his planned economy had killed 65 million people, produced brittle backyard steel, starved the countryside, cannibalized the schools, and left the population as poor per capita as sub-Saharan Africa.

Then, in 1978, Deng Xiaoping restored private property in the countryside, deregulated prices, welcomed foreign capital, and allowed markets to reallocate labor and goods.

By 2020, China's share of world extreme poverty was less than 1%.

Roughly 800 million human beings were lifted out of extreme poverty (World Bank Poverty and Inequality Update, Fall 2025, Aeon on the World Bank's own data).

Every socialist experiment in history has produced starvation, tyranny, mass killing, and emigration. Every mixed-market economy in history has produced feast, freedom, and immigration. There are zero counterexamples. Not one. Ask a DSA member for the socialist country they would move to.