Source: The Weekly Dish
by Andrew Sullivan

“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)

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/magic-mamdani-theory-108

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)

https://c4ss.org/content/60836

Source: Common Dreams
by Laura Flanders

“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)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/liberal-appeasement-fascism

Source: Law & Liberty
by Brena M Hafera

“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)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/a-deep-dive-into-liquid-modernity/

Source: CounterPunch
by Jeffrey St. Clair

“So, here we are on the precipice. Not just CounterPunch, but the country, even the 30% who refuse to believe it. Indeed, we may well be off the precipice, suspended in air above the chasm, like Wile E. Coyote, as the icy grip of gravity takes hold, pulling us down into political darkness. Is that dark pit we’re being dragged into ‘fascism?’ I’m reluctant to use that word to describe the retrograde policies and savage tactics of the Trump regime. There’s no reason to import a European ideology from the last century to explain a domestic political pathology that can be traced back to the origins of the Republic. In fact, what if we’re entering a dispensation that’s even worse than ‘fascism?’ Worse, you say? What could be worse than fascism?” (10/24/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/10/24/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-an-appeal-in-a-time-of-darkness/