Dispatches From the Culture Wars — February 24, 2025
- The Day Before Stonewall
- Solidarity Melts ICE
- The Hidden Architecture of Gangster Capitalism
- Project 2026. And 2027, and 2028....
- Small Town Talk
- Conservative Support for Israel on the Wane
- The Food Wars
- Protest Songs Never Quit
- How to Block Data Centers
- Debraining and Rebraining
By Lucian K. Truscott IV, Lucian Truscott Newsletter
The Trump administration took down the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument across Christopher Street from where it all began. What they really want to do is turn back the clock to the day before Stonewall. I was there and witnessed the first arrests at the Stonewall Inn that precipitated the uprising by a crowd gathered across the street.
Solidarity Melts ICE
• Resistant Minneapolis By Joann Wypijewski, New Left Review
• Counter-Institutions Based on Care By Rashida James-Saadiya, Truthout
• A High School Movement By Lex McMenamin, The Guardian
• ICE Agents are Chumps By Rhian Lubin, The Independent
• Pushing Airlines to Drop Deportation Flights By Umme Hoque and Daniel Hunter, Truthout
The Hidden Architecture of Gangster Capitalism
By Henry Giroux, CounterPunch
A quieter, long-standing mode of disappearance is practiced by elites and insulated from democratic scrutiny. The case of Jeffrey Epstein exposes this hidden register with disturbing clarity. Atrocity is converted into content, stripped of historical depth and severed from the economic system that produces it.
Project 2026. And 2027, and 2028....
By Kylie Cheung, Abortion, Every Day
In January, the Heritage Foundation published “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years”—yet another chilling roadmap, this one to erase LGBTQ families, decimate the social safety net, and push women out of public life altogether.
By Ed Rampell, The Progressive
In An American Pastoral, film director Auberi Edler follows the 2023 school board race in Elizabethtown, population 12,000, as far-right candidates run against moderate Republicans and Democrats. The moderates fear that if ultra-conservatives win five seats currently held by middle-of-the-road Republicans, educational policies will become dominated by extremists.
Conservative Support for Israel on the Wane
It’s not just about politics. It’s also about theology. And it’s going to have a massive impact on Zionism, U.S. foreign policy — and even the place of Jews in America.
By Annie Levin, The Nation
We’ve struggled as a country to address the structural problem of access to that healthy food. What we’ve tackled instead are problems of consumer choice. Rather than addressing the working and living conditions of Americans that are at the root of the issue, one presidential administration after another has punted the problem to the free market.
By Ted Olson, The Conversation
People protesting ICE and Customs and Border Protection actions in Minnesota and elsewhere have been singing “Which Side Are You On?” and other well-known protest songs, but musicians have also been writing new protest songs about the crisis.
By Derek Seidman, Truthout
Private equity — that powerful and opaque slice of Wall Street, run by mega-billionaire founders, focused on private investment and outsized profits — is an especially outsized force driving the data center boom. AI profiteers, however, have come up against a major obstacle: a growing, vibrant, locally rooted resistance movement, stretching across the U.S., against the data center boom.
By Omar Hernandez, The Brooklyn Rail
As the higher brain functions of society fade, what remains gradually starts to look like an economic creature moving on instinct—a zombie, mostly brain-dead, reacting only to immediate stimuli and driven by an insatiable hunger. That hunger, a craving for productivity and profit that never actually materializes, pushes society to devour its own organs of intelligence for short-term gain.