Dispatches From the Culture Wars — September 9, 2025
- Multilevel Marketing Shapes Our Reality
- The Rich Democratic Party Gerontocracy
- Mobile Home Mobilization
- Tanned, Sugared ‘n Organized
- Small Group Resistance in Cali
- Katrina and the Kids
- Smithsonian Under the Gun: Lie After Lie From POTUS
- Anti-Palestine Spies on Campus
- “Active Clubs” Spread White Supremacism
- Ben Shahn: A Painter Who Connected
Multilevel Marketing Shapes Our Reality
By Meagan Day and Bridget Read
Jacobin
Multilevel marketing companies promise that everyone can become a boss and get rich if they hustle hard enough. But they’re actually fraudulent pyramid schemes that, like capitalism writ large, require mass exploitation to enrich the few at the top.
The Rich Democratic Party Gerontocracy
By Jeet Heer
The Nation
The typical donor is nearly 20 years older than the typical voter. Older, wealthier, whiter, and more conservative than the public at large, donors tend to prefer candidates who think like them and are also closer to being their age.
By Elini Schermer
In These Times
A growing movement of mobile home park residents have formed cooperatives to collectively purchase their parks. In effect, it’s a national effort by working-class families to wrest their fate away from the hyper-commodification of real estate markets, but its tenor runs pragmatic, stoic and understated.
By Natascha Elena Uhlmann
Labor Notes
Spray tanning workers used the digital messaging platform Discord to connect employees across stores who were interested in unionization. They created a channel where workers could list things they’d like to see in a contract, and another for venting about the job.
Small Group Resistance in Cali
By Michelle Zacarias
Truthout
In a time when large-scale protests often dominate headlines, a different kind of resistance is taking root across Southern California. Small, decentralized networks of community members are using stealthy tactics and real-time coordination to monitor, disrupt, and expose the movements of federal immigration officers.
By Siri Chilukuri
Teen Vogue
Youth climate activists in Louisiana and beyond, experienced Hurricane Katrina mostly through its long-lasting legacy. Some were too young to remember it happening, but they do remember the aftermath. For all of them, combatting climate change, environmental racism, and structural inequality has become a calling.
Smithsonian Under the Gun: Lie After Lie From POTUS
By Grace Abels and Louis Jacobson
Politifact
Trump’s depiction misrepresents the Smithsonian museums’ expansiveness and their portrayal of U.S. history. It was also a departure from 2017 comments he made about the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in which he called it “a beautiful tribute to so many American heroes.”
Anti-Palestine Spies on Campus
By Hannah Gais
The Baffler
There is a pattern of government and mainstream right-wing sources laundering the work of Canary Mission, and even Betar—an organization whose militant Zionism is so radical that the Israel apologists at the Anti-Defamation League designated it extremist.
“Active Clubs” Spread White Supremacism
By Art Jipson
The Conversation
Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.
Ben Shahn: A Painter Who Connected
By Christian Viveros-Fauné
The Village Voice
Ben Shahn was the grandaddy of American socially conscious art, a dynamic painter, utilitarian photographer, inspired printer, OG muralist (he assisted Diego Rivera on his ill-fated “Man At the Crossroads” fresco, at Rockefeller Center).