Rogue U.S. imperial actions, knowledge and queer people under attack, the continuing Gaza genocide, dangers of A.I., and more
This newsletter is formatted like my last one, but with specific sections dedicated to U.S. actions in Venezuela, LGBTQ+ people, women's history, problems with A.I., resistance, and recent victories
Hello everyone. It’s been over a week since my last newsletter and even longer since my previous newsletter which focused on current affairs that was published on December 25th. Being sick with the flu, involving coughing, earlier this month, delayed work on this newsletter, which was originally almost 10,000 words long. The newsletter was cut down to the current word count prior to publication.
This newsletter will focus on U.S. imperial actions in Venezuela, the importance of preserving knowledge, the Gaza genocide, LGBTQ+ people and related issues, the power of megaconglomerates, and growing government repression, along with highlighting women’s history, providing a spotlight on resistance, recent victories, and noting the dangers of A.I. and some stray observations.
If you would like to support me, and this newsletter, you can contribute directly to me here. Thanks for reading!
“The World Sees Us As a Rogue Nation”
On the morning of January 3rd, the U.S. military attacked Venezuela. The news soon spread across social media. On Bluesky, liberal commentator Dean Obeidallah shared a video clip where he asserted that the orange one had “made the world view the USA as a rogue nation.” This section’s title is an exact quote from that clip. He asserted that “killing of people off [the] coast of Venezuela” is a gross violation of international law as is the “bombing Venezuela and kidnapping the leader.” Obeidallah’s comments are not a new observation. In 2000, the late William Blum published a book entitled Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower centered around the same idea. On page 11 of the book’s introduction, of the first edition, he said that countless Americans “are only dimly conscious of the fact that they…have the right to be unequivocally opposed to a war effort and…question the government’s real intentions…without thinking of themselves as…unpatriotic.” He added that “propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.” Chris Hedges went further in a recent posting, stating that the U.S. ruling class had trampled upon “internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship and…external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.”
Corporate media stated that an elite special forces unit, the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, carried out the operation (known officially as “Operation Absolute Resolve”) to kidnap Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both face charges in U.S. court. They recently pleaded not guilty. Shaun King summarized the lawless, and unsealed, indictment against Maduro. It does not align with the propaganda and is, plainly, a “flimsy cocaine case wrapped in political language,” coupled with absurd weapons charges. The U.S. is trying to “launder an invasion into a criminal case.” José Luis Granados Ceja noted that the strike, which killed at least 100, followed the mobilization of “15,000 personnel operating in the area, and [U.S.]…strikes on…boats that…saw over 100 people killed.” Official reporting stated that at least 150 aircraft, including bombers, fighters, and other aircraft, were used. The FBI, CIA, U.S. Marines, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Space Force were involved. Some speculated that this was a palace coup by Venezuelan military, or government officials, who wanted to work with the U.S. and give up Maduro. Notably, this operation happened on the same day, in 1990, that Manuel Noriega was kidnapped from Panama, and sent to the U.S. for trial. They clearly want to cast Maduro as a Noriega-like figure. As Shaun King noted, this operation should “terrify everyone who…believes international law means something.” He called it “regime-change warfare dressed up as law enforcement.” King was partially critical of Maduro, but added that none of that grants the U.S. “the right to bomb a capital and seize a president.”
Anti-socialist, reactionary Venezuelans in South Florida were happy. Compliant U.S.-backed opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was certainly pleased. European leaders made a weak-willed statements or deferred to the U.S. As Shahid Buttar noted in his newsletter, U.S. liberal establishment was complicit in the attack, only criticizing the regime’s actions on circumscribed grounds (if at all), ignoring reality and history in the process. This is clear from responses like the one by U.S. congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It contrasts with what AOC said: this is about “oil and regime change.” Jasmine Crockett called the strikes unconstitutional and brainless. Even moderate Tim Kane was critical. Russia, Cuba, and China condemned the strike, and subsequent bombing in Caracas, as illegal military aggression. Apart from Venezuela’s government mobilizing the populace to resist a wider war, others noted that this unilateral military action did not have congressional or U.N. approval. Hadley Ophelia Anthony, a progressive candidate running for Maryland’s 7th Congressional District against Kwazi Mfume, in the Democratic Party primary, called for the orange one’s impeachment (the same was said by U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism Ben Saul). She said the strikes will bring “chaos to Venezuela,” and called the attacks illegal, evil, and the actions of terrorists. Anthony’s words may seem harsh but ring true.
This covert action could become a precedent to go after Greenland, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Canada, or Cuba, as the regime continues shopping around for enemies to “defeat.” In the meantime, the U.S. continues to keep forces deployed to “the Guyana-Venezuela border to bolster Guyanese military forces.” The U.S. wants the oil and minerals. Mehdi Hasan said as much in an article for Zeteo, noting the orange one continued admissions that “illegally attacking Venezuela and toppling Nicolás Maduro” had the goal of “seizing the country’s massive oil reserves.” Owen Jones added that the attack is a shameless oil grab, destroying the last vestige of the so-called “international order.” Previously, Eric Ross noted that recent U.S. exploits in Latin America are “the latest expression of a bloody ideological project to entrench U.S. power and protect…profits of Western multinationals.” Others pointed out that the CIA’s bombing of a claimed drug facility in Venezuela, on December 30th, was never confirmed. It is part of U.S. thuggery in Venezuela, as Leslye Joy Allen, Historian termed it in a post.
The regime is using this covert military action as a test case. If there isn’t significant pushback, they will try it again. Claims that the “regime” in Venezuela (actually a government) has collapsed are utterly premature and wrong. Maduro is the president, not a leader with absolute power. This isn’t Syria, where a paramilitary force, composed of religious extremists, entered Damascus in December 2024. I’ve criticized those forces for abolishing the parliament, constitution, and imposing Islamic rule in newsletters in February, March, and May, of last year. The future for Venezuela is uncertain, with grassroots mobilization across the country rising to resist the naval blockade and imperial aggression, opposing U.S. imposition of “democracy” in Venezuela. The orange one is acting like a colonial overlord who can determine the country’s future. To say this attack legitimizes actions by China and Russia is a step too far. I highly doubt that either country would ever capture a foreign leader. The idea that those in Beijing and Moscow are cheering, as the affairs editor Sam Kiley of the Independent put it, is completely wrong and shows a lack of understanding.
As Alonso Gurmendi stated, Latin American countries will fight back and will not accept being the “backyard” of the U.S. Marco Rubio tried to reassure leaders in Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Honduras, Panama, and Guyana that concerns about U.S. adventurism in Venezuela are faulty. He thanked Guyana to continuing to let ExxonMobil drill in the disputed Essequibo region. Such actions, as Arturo Dominguez put it, in a newsletter, have one main goal: ensuring control on behalf of U.S. corporate interests, gaining “power over…people whose resources they want to steal for themselves.” Then there’s the aforementioned Machado. She received a swag bag from the orange one. She absurdly, and falsely, claimed that he cares about the Venezuelan people and took action to make Venezuela “free.” U.S. action only benefited U.S. elites who want to ravage the country and no one else. Even worse, she gifted him her Nobel Peace Prize which the Nobel committee should never have awarded her in the first place!
Through this action, she relegated herself to a compliant, pathetic individual that has no business running anything, including Venezuela. For years, she received U.S. financial and political support. She has taken various right-wing positions including supporting: harsh U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, privatization of the country’s oil industry, Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. bombing of small Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean, Israeli genocide in Gaza, and destructive actions in Venezuela which hurt and killed people and damaged property. Anyone who trusts her judgment should rethink their beliefs. She will never, in a million years, do what is right for Venezuelans. The orange one, who didn’t even earn the peace prize, might sell it as others have done in the past.
Preserving Knowledge
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In early January, I heard that NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is quietly shutting down its research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, known as the Goddard Information and Collaboration Center (GICC). As Dissent in Bloom described it, in a note, the GICC holds tens of thousands of books and rare documents, many which have never been digitized. Most of these resources will disappear. Only 10-15% have been saved. The regime claims that this closure will save $10 million a year while sending billions “to Africa…Argentina…[and] Israel.” Freelance journalist Dania Ceragioli added, in La Voce di New York, that this closure will put thousands of unique documents at risk. “Approximately 100,000 volumes including books, scientific journals, and archival documents, many of which are not digitized and cannot be found elsewhere, risk being lost or discarded.” This is part of a broader reorganization of NASA to “decommission 13 buildings and more than 100 laboratories by March 2026.” It builds upon the closure, since 2022, of seven NASA libraries across the country,” including three in the past year. As Ceragoli put it, “a crucial part of…institutional memory that has supported over sixty years of the United States’ space missions risks disappearing.”
A posting on NASA’s website, in January 2023, said that the library “remains a vital research tool for NASA personnel” after it opened in 1943. The library had, after World War II, “large numbers of Atomic Energy Commission documents…seminal texts on jet propulsion, materials research, and high-energy fuels…[and] large numbers of U.S. Department of Energy documents.” In the 2000s, the library was “moved to its current home,” with creation of “a modern reading room and access to massive amounts of materials, primarily electronic.” There’s been pushback to this closure, with researchers rightly dismayed. This all comes after the shuttering, last year, of Baker & Taylor (B&T).
Earlier this month, Gina Gagliano, in The Comics Journal, noted that the end of B&T, the “biggest distributor of print books to public libraries around the country,” has left many librarians without a way to order books. It is a big problem for publishers, who now “might not have access to a major market,” and independent bookstores. It’s also an issue for “readers who rely on libraries for access to books.” There were signs last year that B&T was in trouble. Some turned to Amazon, and bookstores, to order books. Others used services such as ReaderLink, Ingram, Mackin, and Follett Content. Nothing is fully filling the void. None of these companies is equipped to take on the volume of orders that B&T handled nor can they ensure that books are “cataloged, processed, and distributed” in the way that B&T did. As such, it will be harder for readers to receive comics, graphic novels, and manga. Librarian Francis Goldsmith stated that books are “going to take longer to get to libraries” with librarians struggling to get those books and newly-released comics lost in the shuffle.
Francisco Hernandez noted in mid-December that the closure has “left public libraries across the country scrambling to adapt, including those within the Appalachian Regional Library system.” Some of those libraries are using Amazon to “fulfill high-demand titles” and relying upon Midwest Tapes for audiobooks and DVDS. Wes Platt, in a posting a few months before, noted delays at the Durham County Library as a result of the closure, meaning that “patrons are unlikely to see many new books on shelves in the coming months,” with fewer new arrivals and “new-title wait times [that] may lengthen across print and audiobooks.” Victoria Waddle added, in another posting, that the demise of B&T is causing librarians to scramble as they attempt to gather basic information for cataloging, information vital for those institutions with small staffs. The Wallace Way noted, in a related post, that the closure, following the company being gobbled up by a private equity firm, has caused many libraries to have “longer wait times for new titles” and led to confusion about orders. There will be “fewer intermediaries, tighter inventory control, and shrinking space for emerging authors on retail shelves,” forcing authors and publishers to “rethink how books reach readers.”
This comes after OCLC sued B&T last year. The former was founded as a cooperative in 1967 and built its reputation as “the steward of shared metadata.” OCLC declared that B&T used “WorldCat metadata in violation of OCLC’s membership agreements,” claiming that libraries “contribute data to WorldCat under terms that prevent that data from being reused to build competing products.” As such, OCLC claimed “ownership through the licenses that had been signed.” OCLC was legally successful. OCLC has a long history of “defending its control over bibliographic data,” according to Rosalyn Metz. OCLC has gone from a cooperative model to a market regulator. As a gatekeeper, it uses its “nonprofit status and contractual framework to contain potential competitors,” stopping any “attempt to build parallel systems of metadata or digital library services.” Metz previously wrote on the question of who owns library metadata. She noted that OCLC justified charging fees, restricting redistribution, and offering “access only to those inside the cooperative.” She asserted that OCLC “feels more like a controlled platform” complete with “restrictive licenses, rising costs, and legal threats against open data projects.” These actions mean that OCLC is “starting to resemble the tactics of a monopoly rather than a nonprofit cooperative.”
The genocide continues in Gaza
While corporate media acts like the Gaza conflict is “over,” the U.S. continues to sell more jet fighters to Israel, as Ariana Jasmine has noted, worth a total of $8.57 billion (the equivalent of paying about 129,188 K-12 teachers at a salary of $66,397 a year). The pro-Israel Canary Mission is strengthening their “army of anonymous doxxers, international tech vendors, marketing plans, and a secret website called BlackNest,” aiming to punish Americans for pro-Palestine speech through doxxing, pressure campaigns, and arrests and deportations carried out by the State Department. According to Jacqueline Sweet, some doxxers even created “fake Facebook and other social media accounts to track and screenshot information about profiled pro-Palestine activists and students”!
All the while, Israel continues to block medics and aid workers into Gaza as the genocide continues. It endorsed the “self-declared breakaway region of Somalia” known as Somaliland, recognizing it as “pro-western and friendly to Israel,” and beginning medical, military, defense, and water partnerships while rejecting Palestinian nationhood. This undermines Somalia’s territorial integrity. The compliant leader discussed “hosting bases and offering access to mineral resources,” like lithium, as Shaun King noted. Additionally, the orange one is begging Israel to “pardon Netanyahu for his crimes at home.” This casual intervention in another country’s legal system aims to “protect a man who is already drenched in scandal and war,” as King stated. Apart from continued bipartisan complicity to “flood Israel with weapons, lose the paperwork, [and] dodge accountability,” flimsy U.S. peace plans are being destroyed by Netanyahu himself. Then there’s the related story of how plutocrats, pundits, and government officials “joined together in a racist smear campaign” against a queer Palestinian student, Mustapha Kharbouch, at Brown University.
As the U.S. and Israel “egregiously flaunt international law, committing numerous war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” there has been, as Chris Hedges stated, in mid-December, a rebranding of the genocide in Gaza. Originally, the genocide was justified by the claim that Israel was exercising its “right to defend itself.” Now, it is justified by a “ceasefire.” Israel freed 2,000 Palestinian captives from Israeli prisons, but violated every other condition of the agreement with Hamas. Israel refused to abide by three sets of legally binding orders from International Court of Justice (ICJ) and “two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law.” With U.N. member states washing their hands of genocide and turning their backs by imposing a colonialist plan under the U.N. flag with Resolution 2803, the U.N. Security Council has “proclaimed itself null and void.” The next phase is simple: have Hamas “surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza.” As Hedges points out, this won’t happen. Hamas and other Palestinian factions rejected U.N.-imposed colonialism, declaring they will only disarm “when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is created.” In response, Netanyahu vowed to kill them all.
Fantasies of Gaza functioning as a “territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors…through the ‘voluntary’ relocation of Palestinians” will not happen. Palestinians will struggle to “survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions” and will be “betrayed.” In his summation, the genocide’s pace has slowed, but is not over. It is now a “slow motion killing” with daily numbers of dead and wounded “not in the hundreds but the dozens.” He warns that the world will soon look like Gaza with concentration camps, starvation, “obliteration of infrastructure and civil society,” mass killing, wholesale surveillance, executions, and torture, including “beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care…epidemics[,] disease…[and] mass graves.” He ends with the chilling words that “this is not the end of the nightmare. It is [only] the beginning.”
There’s a few more postings I want to briefly mention. On here, some wrote about the history of armed resistance in Palestine, the continued struggle for Palestinian liberation (and pinkwashing), how some groups have shaped that liberation, and the forgotten “Jewish militants” of the Palestinian communist movement. There are other postings on here about: Israeli plots to empty Gaza amid media silence, a blueprint to end the occupation and transform “an undemocratic one-state reality into a democratic one” (rather than the morally bankrupt “two-state solution”), and the talk by U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese who called for “cutting ties with Israel, no more weapons, no buying weapons, no more…economic trade…cut[tting] everything to Israel.” I’ll end with a section of a poem by Palestinian poet Fatima Abu Odeh shared by Narratives of Resistance in early December (in a post):
Gaza today is not only burying its children—
it is burying its childhood, its dignity,
its daily bread.
Famine has not knocked on the door.
It has broken it down.And now it lives in every home,
in every tent,
in every child who dreams of a single pea.
Queer Issues Spotlight
In late December, Fabrice Houdart wrote a long post about where queer people stood at the end of the year. He said that 2025 was “the year queer progress stalled,” with humiliation returning to “our politics and lives.” He offered a reflection on how we “reclaim power amidst our crisis of unity, leadership and imagination.” He noted that change, in the past, for queer people, “happened gradually, through conversations at family dinners and in the office,” with uneven progress and a need for perspective. In his view, 2025 was a turning point. He was convinced that the current moment “demands a gigantic shift in our approach to queer liberation.” Many of his reflections stemmed “from a feeling of humiliation” coupled with abrupt disengagement of the U.S. government, queer erasure from “the public eye in Russia and China…corporate retreat, calls for a global ban on surrogacy, and…relentless denunciation of trans youth and their parents.” He said that the fight for joy, dignity, and the chance to contribute to society has been cast as self-indulgent, weak, and even “woke.” The majority see queer people as undeserving, with a renewed obsession with masculinity while symbols and heroes in the U.S. are trampled. He claimed that “nothing” was done about this queer historical erasure, a clearly inaccurate assertion.
He argued that while there were modest gains, they paled in comparison to “our opponents’ dominance of media, political and judicial institutions and the alliance of billionaires and evangelicals.” Previous tools which had given queer people power began to yield :diminishing returns.” This is coupled with a crisis of unity, with many checked out, and champions unraveling. Queer people had previously (and foolishly) outsourced their liberation to “Democrats, corporations, and the human rights framework.” He noted that there is a continued crisis of leadership, with a lack of direction, “vested leadership interests, and a scarcity mindset.” He said that LGBTQ+ people aren’t just a coalition but are people who can be united in a way that transcends geography, class, identity, and borders. Reclaiming Pride will, in his words, “require discipline, consistency, and courage.” His post ends by stating that 2025 marked the “end of borrowed progress and the beginning of authentic self-determination.” In his view, moving forward, in 2026 and beyond, will require queer people to “act as one, invest in our leaders, and imagine new forms of power for our global community.”
His words connect to the continued crisis that queer people find themselves in. To give one example, Lana Leonard reported that the regime is systematically altering gender markers and identities, for trans, nonbinary, and gender diverse adults, through the Social Security Administration and state agencies. This has led to “delays, denials, and systematic inconsistencies” despite the fact that reverting a person’s gender or sex without cause, or justified by bogus domestic terrorism charges, is likely unconstitutional. It goes against a person’s civil liberties. There were other recent reports, as Erin Reed notes, that school districts in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington State are “under investigation for trans-supportive policies” by the Department of Education. This rests on the fringe legal theory that Title IX “not only permits discrimination, but requires it”! While school districts have resisted and some transphobes, like Justice Amy Coney Barrett, may be understanding that “gender extremism hurts everyone, transgender and cisgender people alike,” efforts to marginalize trans people, and push them out public life, by falsely deeming them a social threat, continues.
Surely some places, like Vermont, are creating state funds to help trans youth, that are “outside the reach of federal funding threats.” On the other side, New Jersey has still, as of yet, not passed a shield law to protect “trans youth, their parents, and their providers.” Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, a Democrat, refuses to put it to a vote even though “about half of the legislature…already signed on as sponsors”! Nearby jurisdictions in New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the District of Columbia “all have trans shield laws on the books.” This comes at a time that the U.S. Supreme Court is considering two cases (West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox) which stem from “state laws banning transgender athletes from participating in school sports.” Lower courts blocked these bans as likely violations of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination in education. These rulings are under threat by Republican state attorneys general and the main legal force behind Project 2025, Alliance Defending Freedom. As Erin Reed noted, no matter how the court rules in these cases, it could “reshape the legal framework governing transgender rights for an entire generation.” This comes less than a year after the ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, as I discussed in previous newsletters in early July and late September of last year, which cruelly declared that “transgender youth do not have a constitutional right to healthcare and that states may ban gender-affirming care.”
Reed asserted that if the court rules in favor of far-right legal arguments, that Title IX allows and mandates discrimination against transgender people, it would mean that “schools and colleges across the United States could discriminate against transgender people in education” not just in school sports but in “bathrooms, locker rooms, dormitory housing, and even admissions policies.” This would effectively “legislate transgender students out of public existence and rights when it comes to educational institutions”! That is exactly what the regime and other reactionaries want to happen. If the court rules that transgender status is “not subject to heightened scrutiny” and that discrimination of transgender people “does not constitute sex discrimination,” that would “open the door for nearly any law targeting transgender people to be deemed constitutionally permissible.” These pending decisions come as Elizabeth Warren betrayed trans youth she said she’d protect by endorsing KOSA (Kids Online Privacy Act), an online censorship bill that would certainly be used to “erase queer and trans communities from the internet,” as Evan Greer stated. At the same time, trans youth in Colorado have lost access to life-saving care and a trans sports ban gained enough signatures to be on the ballot in Washington State, a place that dubbed itself a refuge for trans people.
Due to increased transphobia in the U.S., especially in certain regions, it is not surprising that over 400,000 trans people (if not more) have moved states since the orange one’s election in November 2024. This large migration builds upon earlier movements of trans people responding to anti-transgender legislation. With Americans increasingly manipulated by political rhetoric and online misinformation, as Jelinda Montes noted, there is growing favorability by Americans “towards laws limiting protections for trans people.” Simply, Americans have “become less favorable” towards trans-friendly policies. This is partially because “trusted sources in mainstream conservative spaces are telling them it’s true,” falsely claiming that trans people pose an “imminent threat.”
The power of megaconglomerates and authoritarian government repression
U.S. government repression has become more severe, with a massive paramilitary force, led by ICE, in the thousands, invading and occupying the Twin Cities. It is brutalizing Americans (breaking down doors, disappearing people, using tear gas, etc.), especially after murdering a queer woman, Renee Nicole Good, in cold blood. This is part of their war against Americans. They may be reinforced by at least 1,500 active-duty U.S. soldiers, currently in Alaska. Not only are ICE agents unauthorized to engage in these actions, but “there is no legal basis for ICE agents to be granted any degree of immunity for the wanton violence they continue to spread across the United States.” They are out of control and fully supported by the regime, which is trying to criminalize anyone opposed to this terror. Whether we are tumbling into dystopia, or have begun a form of martial law, as Shahid Buttar states, there is undoubtedly a “consolidation of authoritarianism.” I’ll talk about that in this section.
The regime is trying to punish legal-observer and racial justice groups protesting ICE, including those it deems are funded by George Soros (an oft boogeyman of the right-wing), under the false and absurd justification that these groups are engaged in “terror” (they are not). All the while, the regime is fine with using deadly force against those they don’t like and can demonize. They want to protect killer ICE agents from any possible consequences. The secret world is growing with a dizzying number of secret ICE programs, as Ken Klippenstein put it. This involves enlisting “tens of thousands of federal, state, and local police and intelligence departments and agencies” in surveillance against everyone, not just immigrants. ICE, Border Patrol, and others are “scouring neighborhoods and developing sources to spy on immigrants and Americans alike.” Even the FBI is apparently worried that ICE is “coloring the American public’s view of law enforcement” in a negative way. This connects to recent reporting by 404 Media. Palantir, co-founded by anti-democratic reactionary Peter Thiel, is building technological infrastructure. ICE is using the company’s app, ELITE, in order “to find neighborhoods to raid.” Even worse, ICE receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services and a range of other sources.
There are reports that ICE recruitment used A.I. tools (more on that later), to “sort applicants based on experience with law enforcement.” They messed it up by including everyone who used the word “officer” in their application as meaning “law enforcement officers” who didn’t require training. This comes while millions are losing their health insurance and there is a growing backlash to X/Twitter. Some are calling the latter a “child porn company” for removing the clothes of “women and children with photos on the site on behalf of its users.” As such, some cheered when the site went offline recently, even hoping the site disappears entirely. In fact, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico are calling upon Apple and Google to suspend X/Twitter and Grok apps from their stores until the Muskrat “disallows them from letting users create and share nonconsensual, explicit images and depictions of child sexual abuse.” He will never disallow that.
This year, in the spring term, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to take on cases, as Emily Amick describes it, about tariffs and “executive power…independent agencies and presidential removal power…[and] transgender rights.” In the first of these cases (Learning Resources v. Trump), if the court rules in favor of the orange one, he could keep imposing “sweeping tariffs…without explicit legislative approval…reshap[ing] U.S. trade policy and set[ting] a major precedent on executive control over national and global markets.” In the second case (Trump v. Slaughter), the court will decide whether “Congress can protect officials in independent agencies from being fired at will by a president.” If the court rules in favor of the orange one, it would “give presidents sweeping new power to remove political opposition from regulatory bodies,” further reinforcing the dangerous “unitary executive” theory and the idea that “the president should have complete control over the executive branch.” He would, in essence, be able to act like… a king. Speaking of authoritarian actions, during the holidays, the U.S. made the shady immigration decision to limit “acceptance of poorer, lower-paid workers without access to employers who can pay the $100,000 fee” and continued meddling in the election in Honduras, as Arturo Dominguez noted.
The regime froze U.S. visas to 75 countries, in a racist action against “all immigrant visa issuances for applicants” from those countries, comprising a “one-third of the total number of countries in existence”! As such, they would love to increase the number of those imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba. Syria (one of the countries on the aforementioned list), which I wrote about last year, with harsh criticism of the country’s Islamist rulers in early 2025, is on the brink of civil war once again. Fighting between the Syrian Army and the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a force reportedly in the tens of thousands, and backed by Germany, U.K., France, and previously U.S., Iran, and Iraq, is happening on Aleppo’s streets. Over 100,000 people have been displaced. As C.P. Ward noted in his posting, the SDF is demanding “some degree of autonomy or agreement for a federalized system of government, as well as concrete constitutional guarantees of Kurdish rights.” The SDF claimed that the U.S., Turkey, Israel, and Syria conspired against them. The U.S., allied with Syria’s unelected president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is “leading the push for a ceasefire.” Turkey considers the SDF an “offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group that has fought an insurgency against Ankara for decades.” It asserts that the SDF is serving as “a tool for Israel’s ‘divide and rule’ policy.”
Women’s history spotlight
I’d like to talk about a recent posting by emma hughes🪽, in the newsletter badass women in history, about Nzinga Mbande in what would later become the nation-state of Angola (then called the Kingdom of Ndongo). At the time, the Atlantic slave trade, along with Christian conversion efforts, and Portuguese colonialism were destabilizing the kingdom. Nzinga was brought up in an environment where “diplomacy, ritual, and negotiation…were survival skills.” In the eyes of her brother, whose reign was “marked by war, forced treaties, and brutal compromises,” he saw her as a diplomatic asset, rather than a successor.
In 1622, she was sent to negotiate with the Portuguese. However, she refused the power imbalance and rejected the political hierarchy. She soon took over from her brother after he died two years later. She stepped into the throne at a time of much political turbulence. She manufactured authority through “strategy, alliances, and sheer force of will.” As Hughes noted, she ruled strategically and had an intriguing, and riveting, reign, even noted by biased (and somewhat hostile) European sources. She used gender as a strategy by dressing in men’s clothing, wearing armor, sitting in on war councils, and insisting on the title of “king” (rather than “queen”), performing masculinity in the process.
Nzinga governed in a manner that was strategic, situational, and “without sentimentality.” This involved shifting alliances with the Portuguese, Imbangala warrior bands, and the Dutch, signing and negotiating “peace treaties when militarily necessary.” She only began war when it benefited her. She sought the survival of her kingdom. All the while she tried to control the slave trade, rather than simply opposing it. Paradoxically, she participated in this odious trade “as a ruler trapped inside its brutal economy.” Matamba became a central hub of the slave trade while she “refused to let Europeans dominate it unchecked” and offered sanctuary to “runaway enslaved people and soldiers fleeing Portuguese rule.” Hughes further noted that Nzinga converted to Christianity as a form of legitimacy, centralizing her authority, and achieving international recognition.
The myths about her say, as Hughes rightly describes it, more about “European fear of African female power than about Nzinga’s actual governance.” Nzinga worked to gain stability. At a time that the Dutch had withdrawn and “Portuguese power was re-surging,” she signed a formal peace treaty with the Portuguese in 1656. Her internal support was weak with decades of war exhausting her people and resources. When Nzinga died in her 80s, in 1663, she was still negotiating. Sadly, after she passed, her chosen successor “struggled to hold power.” Internal opposition quickly re-emerged and the kingdom eventually reverted back to “it’s lineage-based and male leadership ideological comforts.”
Her name was relegated to the footnotes. This changed in the 20th century when Angola fought for its independence, with a national liberation war from 1961 to 1975. She emerged as a symbol. She became the woman who “stood up to Portugal,” the “mother of the nation,” and the “embodiment of resistance.” Her contradictions were “smoothed over and her compromises…forgiven.” Hughes closes her post by noting Nzinga’s complexities, with Nzinga understanding that “you don’t owe consistency to systems that refuse to protect you.” She survived, and lived into her 80s, because she paid attention to the world around her.
Resistance and Celebrating Victories
There are recent stories of resistance, including hundreds chasing far-right activists, led by a January 6er (Jake Lang), from the streets of Minneapolis, stopping him and his fascist followers from threatening to terrorize Somalis, and others, with their hate rally. The protesters used silly string, snowballs, water balloons, and other methods, like their own voices, making clear that Lang and his acolytes cannot be in Minneapolis. They even stopped him from burning a Quran. While he claimed he was stabbed, nothing has verified that. He and his followers crawled back to their hotel. Other examples of resistance include:
Over 20,000 protesters in Copenhagen holding a rally to protest U.S. imperial demands to purchase/take over Greenland; the rally even included Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen
New York State Attorney General Letitia Ann James suing the regime over halted wind projects, saying it “threatens New York’s economy and energy grid”
A judge for the U.S. District Court for Minnesota, Katherine M. Menendez, ordering ICE agents to not use “pepper spray, tear gas or other crowd-control munitions against peaceful demonstrators or bystanders observing and recording…immigration enforcement operations”
Nearly 15,000 nurses walking “off the job…in New York City in the largest nursing strike in NYC history,” demanding “pay increases, staffing guarantees, and protections against workplace violence”
750 nurses in Flint, Michigan, who work at the Henry Ford Genesys hospital and organized by Teamsters Local 332, continued their strike, which they’ve been doing for over 130 days, demanding “safer nurse-to-patient staffing ratios that will benefit both nurses and patients” as People's CDC noted
Social media users replying to an official Disney post on Threads, beginning a long thread “powerful, anti-authoritarian, and explicitly anti-fascist” quotes from Disney movies; of course, the company cowardly deleted their original social media post, but the replies remain intact
More than 150 interfaith leaders arriving at “Target’s corporate headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” hoping to “speak to CEO Brian Cornell about enforcing rules to protect employees and shoppers from ICE agents who continue to conduct raids in and outside of their stores”; Cornell hung up
”on the faith leaders when they called and requested a virtual meeting”St. Paul high school students walking “out of classes” and rallying at “the State Capitol,” demanding that ICE leave their city
In a recent post, Ryan Grim noted that covering the uprising, and subsequent suppression, in Iran, is challenging because of clear involvement by outside forces, backed by the U.S. and Israel. It makes distinguishing “authentic domestic grievances” from “foreign-backed, regime-change efforts” extremely difficult. Some activists, developers, and engineers apparently broke through Iran’s digital blackout with help from the CIA-adjacent National Endowment for Democracy, building “a transnational network that smuggled some 50,000 Starlink devices into Iran.” Grim noted the response and non-response of security services to certain marches, while the death toll continues to rise. This relates to what Resistance Archives wrote about on January 13:
The protests…unfolding across Iran are being pulled into a familiar struggle…On one side is the Iranian state, working to portray dissent as criminality and foreign conspiracy. On the other are Western media ecosystems and diaspora political actors attempting to instrumentalize unrest…Somewhere between these two projects lies the actual reality: a society strained by deep economic hardship, political exhaustion, and the accumulated violence of repression…Public protest does not emerge out of nowhere. It is not invented by foreign governments. It emerges when life becomes structurally unlivable…It would…be politically naive to ignore the scale of pro-regime mobilization inside Iran…Iran’s economic conditions…[do not] exist in a sealed container. The country is not merely mismanaged…it is…strangled. Western sanctions have functioned as a long-term…economic warfare…The US and its allies have helped manufacture the conditions under which despair becomes everyday life, and then use that despair as proof of the Iranian state’s unfitness…the existence of infiltration does not turn a popular movement into a foreign invention. Infiltration does not equal authorship…Imperial power always tries to hijack what it didn’t create…The logic of covert power is not confession. It is plausible deniability…intelligence agencies may be on the ground…they may be infiltrating…they will attempt to redirect protest energy toward their preferred political endpoint…none of that makes the protests ‘Mossad-led.’ That claim is not only false; it is politically paralyzing…All uprisings are messy. They all contain contradictions. They…include actions that are politically unhelpful, morally complicated, or strategically misguided…to use imperfection as a reason to abandon the people is not principled politics…The protests in Iran are not a Western invention, even if Western actors attempt to infiltrate them. They are not a Mossad project, even if Mossad tries to exploit them. They are not illegitimate because foreign powers may benefit. If that were the standard, then no people anywhere would ever be allowed to rise…[the] future must belong to the people – not the regime, not the king, and not the empire.
The dangers of A.I.
In this section, I’ll briefly talk about the dangers of A.I. I recently emailed Ryan Dombal, who wrote about A.I. music. I told him that while A.I. music presently isn’t end of music, it is concerning. I pointed out the disturbing implication that the plot of an animated series, Carole & Tuesday, with a character “using people’s vocal chords to make A.I.-generated music” (shown above), and the protagonists as the only ones who don’t use A.I. for their music, is happening in real time. If it keeps going, music will become totally soulless, which is terrifying. He thanked me for the note. He said that while it is scary, he hoped it doesn’t become widespread. He cautioned that like many things, lots of people may use it poorly as “a shortcut to presumed riches” although a select few will continue with “artful ideals and make something worth listening to.”
His words come at a time that a neo-soul “artist” on Spotify was trending, even though the artist does not exist. An A.I.-generated manga became one of the best sellers in Japan. There’s reports that the HarperCollins subsidiary, Harlequin, will use A.I. to translate romance novels rather than human translators. Despite the advance of this A.I. slop, there continues to be pushback. Bandcamp banned A.I. music. An A.I. novel, which won a literature contest, had its awards taken away. There were certainly illuminating articles about how Google A.I. overviews put people at risk with misleading health advice, how risks of A.I. in schools clearly outweigh the benefits, and how that A.I. will intensify climate change (and tech moguls don’t care about it at all). All of those are important to remember. However, one post stuck with me. It was on here, on Substack.
Marcus Olang' went into a deep dive as to how, and why, ChatGPT writes like him, a Nigerian man. A.I. “detectors” (often using A.I. itself) tend to, more often than not, “flag text written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated” since these large language models (LLMs) are trained on a “vast corpus of text that is overwhelmingly formal.” It learns from “books published over the last two centuries” and begins to “associate intelligence and authority with grammatical precision and logical structure.” Although it isn’t directly stated in the posting, there is a dirty side to A.I. with a continued push to make it “intelligent,” which expert Benjamin Riley states is not possible. As The Guardian stated back in September of last year, thousands of A.I. raters, employed through a “web of contractors and subcontractors” for companies like Google, work “hard to check if the model responses are safe for the user…lend[ing] their intelligence to teach chatbots the right responses across domains as varied as medicine, architecture and astrophysics, correcting mistakes and steering away from harmful outputs.”
Not only do workers label the data which is used to train the A.I., but others slave away “day and night to moderate the output of AI, ensuring that chatbots’ billions of users see only safe and appropriate responses.” These workers feel hidden, with their labor “invisible, essential and expendable.” It is part of, as researcher Adio Dinika put it, “a pyramid scheme of human labor.” This has only gotten worse as more work in “siloes, face tighter and tighter deadlines, and…are putting out a product that’s not safe for users.” As one person told The Guardian, the A.I. model can replicate “harassing speech, sexism, stereotypes…[and] pornographic material as long as the user has input it.” A.I. is not magic. Instead, it is built on “the backs of overworked, underpaid human beings.”
Final thoughts
I’d like to share some stray observations in the last part of this newsletter. E.U. states are preparing countermeasures in response to the U.S. tariff threats attempting to coerce E.U. into supporting U.S. imperial control of Greenland. On the flip side, Del. Stacey Plaskett, “famous for her ties to Jeffrey Epstein,” and became sole representative of the Virgin Islands (re-elected most recently in 2024 with over 73% of the vote). There’s an upcoming election this November where she may be challenged by former island legislator Janelle Sarauw. Plaskett has been representative for Virgin Islands (V.I.) since 2014. She accepted thousands from Epstein and also previously served Erika Kellerhals, “a lawyer who served as Epstein’s attorney and political fixer.” She may be exploring a bid to be the governor of V.I., if Lee Fang’s reporting is accurate on that count.
Plaskett is a former Republican (before 2008) who denounced U.S. colonialism in V.I., American Samoa, Washington D.C., Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico, without voting representation. She only distanced herself from Epstein after it was revealed, including texting Epstein during a congressional hearing in 2019. She later defended it, declaring that because Epstein had “information” allowing her to “get at the truth,” contact was justified. Despite the deep connection between Plaskett and Epstein, the Congressional Black Caucus shamefully stood with her, perhaps because of her somewhat liberal positions.
There are additional postings asking if late-stage capitalist decline in Japan is what is coming for the U.S. next, as Ellie put it, discussing whether a “conscious technological future” will require more than just “unplugging,” and asserting that endless subscriptions were the “monster of 2025.” The latter will certainly be a “monster” in 2026 as prices are set to rise. There are many more topics I could write about. I will focus on those topics, and much more, in a future newsletter, where I have more space to write about them.
With that, this newsletter is coming to a close. Thanks to everyone for reading. I deeply appreciate it. I hope you all have a great rest of your week.
- Burkely
Thank you so much for the mention— we’re very happy that Fatima’s words have been featured in your post!! We hope you can support her on Instagram, and that you can continue to write your well-researched newsletters.
Thanks for the roundup and for the mention. That news about the shutting down of NASA’s research library is horrifying. I will include it in this week’s roundup of library links.