Dispatches From the Culture Wars — November 4, 2025
- Zohran’s Big Score
- New Strategies Needed
- No Visa for Wole Soyinko
- Young Republicans Let Their Hair Down
- Billie Ellish: Get Woke, Billionaires
- Concentration Camps USA
- “A House of Dynamite”: Comment from Hiroshima
- Community Food Sharing Networks
- Fashion and Repression
- The Statue at the Heart of Culture Wars
By William Shoki
San Francisco Bay View
This is how the Left wins: by organizing at scale, speaking with clarity, building power that lasts and doing it in a way that feels alive. That is what Mamdani has begun to show. And that is what the system is trying, with increasing desperation, to stop.
New Strategies Needed
• Unions By Kate Bronfenbrenner, Jacobin
• No Kings By Hardy Merriman and Scott Harris, Between the Lines
• Defend Public Health By Lucy Rabinowitz Bailey, SaportaReport
The Wire
Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s venerated Nobel Literature laureate, has seen his US visa revoked. According to Soyinka and news reports on the sudden development, it is part of the United States’s turn towards what is broadly called political and cultural “intolerance”. Though it is a charge the Donald Trump administration repels, Soyinka made no bones about it.
Young Republicans Let Their Hair Down
By Ben Burgis
Jacobin
Rising-star Republican operatives seem to be in the business of reassuring themselves that they aren’t attached to silly ideas about human rights and equality, and reassuring each other that they’re on board with whatever comes next. That should set off some very loud alarm bells.
Billie Eilish: Get Woke, Billionaires
By Stephanie Soteriou
BuzzFeed
Billie Eilish has won widespread praise after she used her platform at the WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards in New York City to call out billionaires directly to their faces. A whole host of other rich and famous names were in attendance — including Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.
Concentration Camps USA
• Federal Building ICE Lockups By José Olivares and Will Craft, The Guardian
• Forced Labor for Homeless By Stephen Prager, Common Dreams
“A House of Dynamite”: It Can Happen Here
By Sara Goldstein
Motherly
Moms have been doing mutual aid forever. We’re already experts at the logistical gymnastics of keeping everyone fed, the emotional labor of checking in on people, and the multitasking magic of coordinating community care while managing our own chaos. The difference now is that we’re formalizing it.
By Kelsey Stiegman
Teen Vogue
MAGA, like authoritarian regimes around the world, uses fear as its primary tool for compliance. Fun and free styles of dress will be disincentivized when the ruling ideology is focused on lawlessness and implementing strict gender norms.
[Portside note: Teen Vogue has produced some of the strongest and most important political journalism of the past few years. On November 3, the magazine was shut down by Vogue’s new management. And so it ends.]
The Statue at the Heart of Culture Wars
By Kelly Grovier
BBC
So fixed is our focus on the radiant points of her spiky crown and the upward thrust of her flickering lamp, it is easy to miss altogether the shackles of human enslavement that Lady Liberty – who is at the centre of a fresh skirmish in the US’s accelerating culture wars – is busy trampling underfoot. Her meaning contains multitudes. It pulls her in many directions.