Notes on March
Fascism, unions, vegetables, anarcho-tradwives, bar news
Since I wrote to you on March 24th, the federal government has continued to target and abduct non-U.S.-citizen graduate students in response to their participation in pro-Palestine activism. Rumeysa Oturk, a PhD student at Tufts, was kidnapped on her way to iftar in Somerville, MA and disappeared to Louisiana. They are seeking to deport Momodou Taal, a Cornell PhD student who is fighting back in the courts. Badar Khan Suri, a not a grad student but a postdoc at Georgetown, was abducted and placed in immigration jail, seemingly for reasons related to his wife, a Palestinian American U.S. citizen.
Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has re-escalated, as has Jewish settler violence in the West Bank (I’m sure you’ve heard about the violent settler attacks on and police kidnapping of Palestinian Oscar-winning documentarian Hamdan Ballal, who thankfully has been released). These are dark, dark times. Those of us in America with the privilege of U.S. citizenship must continue to speak, and seek new ways to combat the violence. What else is there?
With that, here are my notes on March for paid subscribers (a little shorter than usual, due to the length and detail of my very recent post on Clover’s and my trip to Mexico City - still long tho).
-I was stirred by Hamilton Nolan’s recent essay There’s No Justice Without Power. He starts by gossiping about Nick Denton, the super-rich founder of Gawker Media, who represents an era of online media I’m really fascinated by (I didn’t read the original Gawker at the time, but I was a big Jezebel reader in high school/college, which was bought by Gawker Media, and I was obsessed with Gawker 2.0 when they rebooted it a few years ago and was sooo sad when it folded). Anyway, you may or may not be interested in Nick Denton, but Nolan then (very skillfully, I might add) pivots to talking about organized labor. Organized labor, he argues convincingly, is the only real source of power we have on the left that is actually able to place demands (and not just requests) on the powers that be.
A long quote for you: “Organized labor, which creates the ability of workers to collectively strike to withhold their labor, is a form of direct power. It does not rely on persuasion. It does not ask those who already hold power to do something on our behalf. It is power. It shuts things down directly, because all enterprises—warmongering and oppression included—require labor….The power of the strike is not useful only in service of “better labor rights.” It is a power that can be applied to any cause. If you can strike, you can stop the enterprises that do anything.”
-I loved
’s podcast about “anarcho-tradwives,” featuring a conversation with Hazel Acacia and Margaret Killjoy (listened in February but forgot to mention it at the time!). If you’ve been mucking around at all in feminist online discourse lately, you have probably seen lots of chatter about tradwifery and what it means - this was a totally fresh take that I completely related to as a dyke who loves to cook, sew, and garden.Speaking of which…