Convict, Hotshot, or Municipal Firefighters: Which Side Are You On?
It is understandable and reasonable that many of you feel slighted by the overwhelming attention that convict crews are getting. As many of you have mentioned, it isn’t uncommon for news media to focus almost exclusively on these populations and it can feel like they are doing so intentionally despite the clear needs of non-convict crews – and I assure you, we hear you on the Left as much as we hear the convict crew even if you don’t have the informational streams to hear us talking back. But I implore you, please, look at this structure for what it is: worker manipulation and disempowerment.
The Looting of Los Angeles
There is a truth here that many are desperate to ignore: this is a class war. The rich who were able to mobilize private armies of fire fighters to protect their homes and businesses while everything their neighbors owned burned around them are turning around to point at Black and Brown young men minding their own business or seeking to save their own lives and loved ones. The politicians who were happy to allow private interests to subsume public resources as their own, who refused to stop the theft of our water, land, and opportunities in favor of those like the Wonderful Company (hope your pistachios taste like burning rubber) who have stolen some 90% of Californians’ water through underhanded manipulation of municipal levers and officials.
Mangione and Palestine: Two Faces of the Imperial Polyhedron
Luigi Mangione is an example of just what happens whenever the strictures of expansionism abroad translate to real deprivation at home, the continued over-investment of resources in external affairs allowing for a complete degradation of affairs here. The pressure has mounted across the country, building against the banking, housing, education, manufacturing, service, and healthcare industries with little to no release as US legislators focus almost exclusively on the maintenance of empire and the intentional distraction of their constituencies which this necessitates.
Anti-LGBTQ+ Arabs? Sounds Sus: Debunking Islamophobic Talking Points About LGBTQ+ Rights
Daniel Woods dismantles the Islamophobic talking point claiming Arab nations are inherently anti-LGBTQ+, exposing the hypocrisy behind Western supremacist arguments. Drawing from US history, Woods reveals how social justice movements require basic security and economic stability to flourish—conditions systematically destroyed by occupation and imperial violence.
The same politicians who fought against gay marriage until 2015 and preside over 3,000+ annual anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes now lecture others about tolerance while bombing their neighborhoods. Woods argues that material conditions, not culture, determine social progress. When communities face daily threats to survival, civil rights movements become secondary to basic security.
A powerful critique of how identity politics gets weaponized to justify imperialism while ignoring domestic failures and the devastating impact of Western intervention on vulnerable populations globally.