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When an Old Friend Is Ripping Down Posters of Kidnapped Children Oliver Wiseman

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(Source: kidnappedfromisrael.com / The Free Press)

A disturbing and particular act of vandalism has gone viral in recent days. You’ve probably seen the videos online: people in cities across the West ripping down posters with the photographs and names of the hostages being held in Gaza. My colleague Candace Mittel Kahn was scrolling Instagram this week when she saw one such clip. 

“I almost skipped past it when I noticed something,” she writes in a piece for The Free Press. “After the woman finishes scraping the remainders of the poster from the street post, while muttering the word calba, the Arabic word for dog, she turns to the camera—presumably to the person filming her vandalism—and says, ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. And burn in hell.’ And that’s when my heart dropped: I know her.” 

In her brilliant piece, Candace tries to make sense of how a college friend ended up “standing on a street corner, tearing apart pictures of kidnapped Israelis and flinging them to the ground like a dirty tissue.” 

A lot of very smart people have been fired from teaching jobs at U.S. colleges for a lot of very dumb reasons in recent years. In many cases, professors have lost their jobs for wrongthink, an ill-considered tweet, or something else that has nothing to do with their jobs. 

In the case of Kendrick Morales, he was let go by Spelman College for doing the very thing I was naive enough to think professors were supposed to do: uphold academic standards. 

He tells this maddening tale in The Free Press today: 

Also in The Free Press today: 

Max Raskin interviews Sofie Berzon MacKie, a survivor of the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, who hid in a safe room with her family for twenty hours. 

Here’s an excerpt from their conversation: 

MR: As a woman, were you afraid?

SBM: I wasn’t thinking like they’re going to rape me or anything. I was just, as a mother, I think. . . seeing the terror on my children’s faces once they’re in the safe room—that was a thought that absolutely broke my heart. So when they were really on our house trying to get in, I just sat. I held them and covered their eyes, because I just didn’t want to see the look on their faces when they see the people that are going to murder them. I prayed. I don’t believe in God. Not that I don’t believe that the world is a spiritual place, but I don’t believe in Him in the way any religion explains this force that moves through the universe that creates all things. But I was, in my heart, just begging for some force to let me out of that room. We sat there for so many hours, my heart was pounding in my chest the whole time. At some point, I started really shaking uncontrollably because of the adrenaline rush. Complete terror.

MR: Physically—other than your heart beating—what does that physically feel like to be in that kind of situation?

SBM: I can’t even describe it.

MR: Do you want to throw up? Do you want to go to the bathroom?

SBM: You want to throw up. You want to run away. You have this urge, crazy urge, that you have to oppress, to open the door and run, just run. And you have to really stop yourself from leaving your home because you just want to run. To have to sit there and wait, all your muscles become stiff. Your body becomes stiff. Your heart is beating. I got extremely thirsty at some point. My mouth was so, so dry. My daughter had terrible cramps in her stomach. She had an awful tummy ache, and her head was throbbing. Your body is screaming that this situation is unbearable. But here we are.

MR: I don’t know if this is a silly question, but are there any moments of levity in that whole thing?

SBM: No. At one point, when I understood that I am going to die, I couldn’t stand the fear that took hold of me. It was beyond anything I ever felt in my whole life, the most extreme feeling of panic, and terror, utter terror. So, I kind of took a look at my life, and I became very grateful for what I have, what I had—for my life’s trajectory and the people I met and the people I loved and who loved me back. And that was a really deep moment for me. It was, I don’t know, spiritual in a way, that I understood my life is going to end. It’s a fact.

Read the whole thing here

And we reprint a prescient 2014 speech by Alan Johnson in which he busts six myths about Hamas.

On Monday, we wrote that we sensed a lot of people have been changing their minds on big political questions since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. And judging by the huge response to Konstantin Kisin’s superb piece on “The Day the Delusions Died,” we were onto something. 

One commenter on Konstantin’s piece wrote: “I am exactly where your friend is. Went to bed a liberal on October 7, woke up a conservative on October 8. And if all the Republicans can muster as a candidate is Trump, and Biden for the Democrats, I am—gulp—voting for Trump.”

Another said: “Brilliant article! I am also one of those people who has become politically conservative overnight after this issue. Never thought I would vote conservative until now. Even when I saw illogical and harmful demands made about inclusion of trans women in sports, prisons, too much focus on skin color, I still thought at its core these people mean well and want to create a more equal society. They are misguided, brainwashed, and maybe misinformed due to hyperpolarization driven by social media. But there is no way anyone can brainwash a moral person to think that killing babies is a form of ‘resistance.’ ”

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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors

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The Trump Bible, Kamala’s coconut tree, and J.D. Vance’s couch. The Free Press nominates symbols that sum up this insane race.

(All images via Getty, illustration by The Free Press)

The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.

(Evan Vucci via AP)

The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.

But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —Kat Rosenfield


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The Politics of Cultural Despair Chris Hedges

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The Morning After – by Mr. Fish

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In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power. 

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next. 

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base –  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.

All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.

Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.

The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.

We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.

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This is America Judd Legum

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Former President Trump has recaptured the presidency. He is poised to win all seven swing states and, for the first time in three tries, a narrow victory in the popular vote. 

For tens of millions of Americans, the result is distressing and confounding. How did a man who incited a violent insurrection, was convicted with dozens of felonies, and based his campaign around a collection of lies win a majority of votes?

There will be plenty of debate about this question. But there is one thing we already know for sure: This is America. 

Right now. 

What will America look like in the future? What kind of country will it be in 2029 or 2039? That will depend on how we react to this moment.

This was a long campaign; many people will need time to process what happened on Tuesday. That is more than reasonable. 

But, whenever you are ready, Popular Information will be right here — digging up the facts, rooting out corruption, and holding the powerful accountable. We do not do this work because progress is linear, reliable, and guaranteed. We do this work because it is not.

Today, I’d like to hear from you. How are you feeling? What are your hopes and fears for the future? I’ll be reading your responses in the comment section below.

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