“The Trump administration aspires to deport a million people in its first year of office. The president has also spoken of the more ambitious goal of deporting 15-20 million undocumented people overall, even if that category probably covers only 14 million folks. The discrepancy of a couple million people shouldn’t bother President Donald Trump. He’s happy to deport those with green cards, H-1B visas, and even American citizens. Deporting a million people in a year is a heavy lift. The previous record, 409,849 people, was during the Obama administration, as part of the 1.5 million deportations he conducted in his first term. Trump, no doubt, wants to best Barack Obama in this category, since he’s determined to outshine the former president in every respect, even the dubious ones.” (10/25/25)
“As Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries out raids across the country, the agency is working rapidly to expand an online surveillance system that could potentially track millions of users on the web. Federal records uncovered by The Lever reveal that ICE is paying $5.7 million to use an AI-powered social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs, something Will Owen, the communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), calls an ‘assault’ on democracy and free speech. The ‘real-time intelligence’ platform is capable of ingesting and analyzing vast amounts of publicly available data, like social media posts, according to its website. In a pamphlet shared by The Lever, Zignal Labs says it uses machine learning, computer vision, and optical character recognition to analyze more than 8 billion posts per day in over 100 languages.” (10/25/25)
“I’ve been watching how jurisdictional rules affect digital platforms for some time now, and it’s remarkable how much geography still determines access. What once depended purely on internet availability now hinges on where you live — and what laws apply there. From my perspective, regulation has become a defining factor in the online experience. Some users adapt comfortably within their country’s framework, while others seek flexibility by exploring international platforms. The balance between compliance and choice is more complicated than ever.” (10/25/25)
“I do wonder at what point churches will realize that there can’t possibly be room in their pews for both Jesus — that is, for the prisoner and the sick and the stranger and the outcast — and also room for people who belong to a militarized hate group like the Republican Party, who are actively engaged in excluding and terrorizing and killing all those other sorts of people, or (more likely) in hiring people to do it for them, so they can feel safe while they wait for heaven. Whenever I express this belief, I’m reminded by well-meaning Christians that the revolutionary and the tax-collecting Roman collaborator both ran with Jesus in unity and harmony, but I also recall the tax collector left his corrupt and collaborationist business behind.” (10/25/25)
“The daily headlines have this column almost writing itself. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, we have the recent revelations of Democratic candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, sending text messages to a colleague in 2022 wishing that someone would put ‘two bullets’ in the head of then-Republican Speaker of the House of Delegates, Todd Gilbert. … Then, in the state of New Jersey, we have Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Michelle ‘Mikie’ Sherrill facing questions over the circumstances of the discipline she received while a Naval Academy midshipman, which reportedly prevented her from walking with her class at graduation.” (10/25/25)
“Social Security (SS) was created in 1935 with noble intentions. The idea was that current working Americans would pay into a shared public fund, providing income for retirees who could no longer earn a paycheck, while collecting their own retirement in the future from the next generation. It was meant to be a safety net — a collective insurance policy that ensured no elderly person would be left destitute. Politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt sold it as a stabilizing force befitting of a moral society. … But the SS system has quietly made Americans poorer. By removing trillions of dollars from private investment and placing them in the hands of a slow, bureaucratic system that earns virtually no return, the program has robbed the average worker of what could have been generational wealth.” (10/24/25)
“It is not hard to see the appeal of Zohran Mamdani. He is, after all, not Andrew Cuomo — another corrupt, old, Democratic sexual harasser who’s already spent years in power and thinks he’s entitled to be mayor because of his last name. He doesn’t appear steeped in petty corruption like Mayor Adams. He’s not as obviously nutty as Sliwa seems to be. And he has done politics, pace Ezra, the right way: listening to the other side, earning people’s votes one by one, talking to people on the street, and, of course, mastering our new collective replacement for civil discourse: 30-second videos on TikTok. … His only problem is not being female — but since he denies that the category of female exists, no big deal I suppose. He will give the MSNBC/Bulwark crowd a new lease on self-righteousness.” (10/24/25)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Alexander Migursky
“In trying to understand the moral paralysis that undermines the revolutionary energy so essential to our collective survival — an energy that has no real place within the narrow ideological confines of democratic realism — we find ourselves returning, almost reflexively, to the Marxist concept of alienation. This idea addresses more than just economic conditions; it speaks to the very structure of modern subjectivity, encompassing both psychological and political-economic dimensions.” (10/24/25)
“It’s one of the most rousing calls to conscience to come out of the 20th century. I’m thinking of Martin Niemöller’s ‘First they came for the communists’. You know how it goes. It begins, ‘First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.’ And it ends, ‘Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.’ It’s a powerful statement, and you’ll see it on T-shirts and posters and placards at demonstrations. But when you actually look at our history, it’s not just that good people didn’t speak out. It’s that many Americans threw other Americans under the bus. The story of the Danish king who wore a yellow star in solidarity with Jewish Danes during World War II is apocryphal. It never happened.” (10/25/25)
“Angela Franks’s Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self illuminates how our culture came to be unrecognizable to so many. As she tells it, the changes came about gradually and then all at once. It is a careful and vast intellectual history, engaging notable thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also novelists like Jane Austen and C. S. Lewis, to explain the observable contemporary incoherence surrounding the self, the body, and identity. That incoherence, Franks demonstrates, is a primary cause of our current malaise. This deeply considered work is a welcome contribution to the present literature on the body, gender ideology, and the self.” (10/24/25)
