#MotherJones

[azspot]

Once upon a time there was a person with the unnoticeable name of Mary Harris, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1837, who lived a private life of suffering and failure. Her parents, fleeing Ireland’s Great Hunger, brought her as a teenager to Canada, where she briefly attended a Toronto teachers’ school, before she went to Monroe, Michigan, where she briefly taught school in a convent. A skilled seamstress from a girl, she left Monroe for Chicago, where she opened a dress shop. But she moved on yet again, to Memphis, where in 1861 she married George Jones, an organizer of his fellow iron foundry workers, to whom she quickly bore four children. Then her worst tragedy hit, the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1867, which wiped out all five members of her family. Back in Chicago, she reopened her dress shop, to have it destroyed by the Chicago Fire of 1871. Disaster had crowded on disaster throughout her entire blighted life, leaving no record of having done a single thing memorable.

America’s Best Made-Up Person

[stroebe2]

Earlier this summer, I showed up uninvited at a midtown Manhattan music venue, where a startup named the Praxis Society was holding an event as part of a weeklong series to promote its flagship product: a free-market Mediterranean city-state the company hopes to build under the leadership of a CEO who, former employees said, is interested in fascist authors and occultism and has touted a book that argues Black people are intellectually inferior to whites. 

Praxis, a for-profit corporation, was founded as Bluebook Cities in 2019 by Californian Dryden Brown and former Boston College wide receiver Charlie Callinan. They envisioned an autonomous enclave where the free-market dreams of Chicago and Austrian school economists would become reality, a place libertarians could settle without the tyranny of regulation. While the project draws inspiration from ancient Greece and Rome, Brown, the company’s CEO, said in a 2021 interview that its style would be “hero futurism” with a “neo-Gilded Age kind of aesthetic.” 

If this sounds like fantasy, it probably is. But it’s one that’s captured the minds of real—and really rich—people. In 2021, the company’s seed round raised roughly $4 million, including from Pronomos Capital, a libertarian city-building fund started in 2019 with significant financial backing from Thiel. Other participants included Thiel’s close friend Balaji Srinivasan; Joe Lonsdale, who cofounded the analytics and intelligence company Palantir Technologies with Thiel; and Bedrock Capital, a fund launched by a former partner in Thiel’s Founders Fund. Praxis followed up several months later with a Series A round that brought in $15 million, much of it from cryptocurrency investors, including Three Arrows Capital and Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research, which both later spectacularly imploded. Emergent Ventures, another Thiel-backed fund led by economist Tyler Cowen and housed in George Mason University’s Koch-supported Mercatus Center, has also invested. 

Brown and at least one other senior Praxis employee were interested in “this strange Nazi occultism,” one of those three ex-staff members said, citing the pair’s appreciation of Evola, who co-authored another book offering “instructions for developing psychic and magical powers,” according to its contemporary publisher. (Scholars have written about Nazi links to Ariosophy—an esoteric ideology blending mysticism, racism, nationalism, and antisemitism—and documented the SS’s fascination with Norse mythology and Eastern spiritual traditions. If you’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know the Hollywood version.) Another of those former employees, also citing Evola, confirmed Brown’s interest in the occultist bent of the SS. An internal slideshow briefing staff on the company’s brand and philosophy presented Evola’s thinking on the four “functional classes” or castes, and suggested the categories should guide the company’s recruitment of new members and prospective residents, according to that former worker.

“When you’re hired,” one former employee said, “you get a welcome packet with 11 book recommendations. One of them is Bronze Age Mindset,” an openly racist and fascist book by the anonymous far-right influencer Bronze Age Pervert that warns of a coming struggle against the “enemies of Western man and the enemies of beauty.”

Part of the company’s strategy involves drawing participants in New York’s downtown scene to its events in the hope of bringing some on board. Succession actress Dasha Nekrasova, a leading light of the so–called Dimes Square set and a co-host of Red Scare—a once-socialist podcast that has taken a turn to the right—attended a June black-tie banquet at the Yale Club for current and prospective members. Thiel money has also directly funded downtown events attended by the arty set Praxis is trying to lure; in 2022, BuzzFeed News revealed the billionaire’s financial backing of the New People’s Cinema Club, which boasted of screening transgressive films without mind to political correctness. Jokes about sloshing “Thielbucks” among the anti-woke downtown set have become a meme.

In Brown’s vision, Thiel’s or his associates’ money wouldn’t just be going to film impresarios or their parties; it would go toward a city where both young neo-reactionaries and their post-left associates might have a hand in forging something tangible, something beyond a podcast or a Substack. Of course, Praxis hasn’t done anything tangible. But even if construction never starts, the company’s inroads with the scene are another vector for reactionary Silicon Valley perspectives to acquire cultural purchase.

The company has scoped a rotating set of possible sites for its city along the Mediterranean shore. Kunapuli told me they were trying to decide between Italy and Morocco. (I later heard Montenegro is in the mix.) “There’s tradeoffs,” Kunapuli acknowledged, as we looked at the renderings. Italy is more trusted by Westerners, a place where Praxis company leaders believe government and industry are more likely to come through on legal contracts, he explained, before conceding the same conditions would make it “harder to influence and change regulations and policies” than in Morocco.

A record-breaking heat wave and forest fires would end up hitting the Mediterranean a month later. As best as I could tell, Praxis didn’t have a plan to shield its new-Gilded Age city from such catastrophes. As it turns out, you can’t exit everything.

[kheelcenter]

Mother Jones

This quote perfectly exemplifies Mother Jones, a fierce and forceful labor activist who was dubbed "the most dangerous woman in America" by a US district attorney.

A photo of Mother Jones with a quote of hers reading, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

[usnewsper-politics]

New Leader at Mother Jones: Clara Jeffery Takes Charge to Hold Power Accountable and Inform the Public #budgetcuts #ClaraJeffery #climatechange #decreasedresources #editorinchief #ExecutiveDirector #factbasedreporting #groundbreakingreporting. #holdingthoseinpoweraccountable #indepthanalysis #industry #inequality #investigations #investigativereporting #journalism #localnewspapers #longformreporting #mediaoutlets #MotherJones #multimediastorytelling #nonprofitinvestigativereporting #partnerships #socialjustice #Universities #wellinformedpublic

[destiel-news-channel]

Source 1 - P2025 website

Source 2 - Report from MotherJones

thank you very much for the news.

[Image ID: Depicted is the Destiel meme where Castiel tells Dean that he loves him. Dean's answer was edited to read '50 conservative think tanks in the US using dark money are pushing to completely control the government, turn the whole country into an even worse Christian theocracy, and completely erase all LGBTQ+ people from existence. It's called Project 2025' /.End ID]

Also a further note: This groups plan seems to rely heavily on a Republican win in the presidential election 2024 after which the whole U. S. federal government is supposed to be placed under direct presidential (Trump in this case) control. I don't know how feasible such a plan is even if the Republicans won, but let this serve as a reminder to

FUCKING VOTE!

[PT: fucking vote! /end PT]

Republicans rely on people who would rather vote Democrat than Republican not voting 'cause they don't see any sense in it anymore/also don't want to support Democrats 'cause "even though they are the lesser evil they're not good"! By not voting you just play into their hands. This Project 2025 is nothing than a direct attack on democracy and if you still want to have a vote that counts in the future please vote. An example of what they want to do is to bring the FEC (Federal Election Commission) which enforces the campaign finance law under their control by only instating Republican commissioners (right now there are just as much Republicans as Democrats).

Please, please get as many people to vote as possible. Tell your family and friends about this. Reblog posts about how voting helps and what Republicans have planned even if you may not be able to vote in America yourself share those things for your American followers.

[nando161mando]

Today in Labor History November 30, 1930: Mother Jones died, age 100, in Silver Spring, Maryland. She was an organizer or "walking delegate" for the United Mine Workers (UMW), famous for her bravado. When she and 3,000 women were released by a militia after being held all night in McAdoo, Pennsylvania, they marched straight to the hotel housing the soldiers and ate their breakfast. Even well into her 90s, she still roamed through the hills of West Virginia, encouraging miners to organize.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #MotherJones #union #strike #solidarity #FreeSpeech #prison #coal #mining #WestVirginia

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

🎙 NEW PODCAST ~ In our latest episode, Matt Agorist, Jason Bassler and guest Austin Petersen dissect a recent hit piece from MotherJones about the Libertarian Party and discuss the best direction for the future of the party.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3851eCOAq8xuLl5p6KHSQx

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/guest-austin-petersen-the-future-of-the/id1439014279?i=1000653223124

Podbean: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/podcast/podcast-austin-petersen-the-future-of-the-libertarian-party-direct-action-culture-jamming

[umbralwaves]

NEW: With little fanfare, Trump said over the weekend he would implement "remigration"—a policy proposal popular with the far right in Europe to return immigrants to their native lands that the AP described as "a soft-style ethnic cleansing."

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 17, 2024

“AP described as "a soft-style ethnic cleansing."”

Western press has abandoned all pretense of journalism

— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) September 18, 2024

[stuartbramhall]

New York Supreme Court Schedules Criminal Trial Against Trump

Former President Donald Trump, 2024. | Photo: X/ @MotherJones Newsletter Donald Trump is charged with 34 offenses related to the US$130,000 he paid to porn actress Stormy Daniel. On Thursday, Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan announced that former President Donald Trump will stand trial for alleged irregular payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels starting on March 25. The…

[myweddingsandevents]

NPR reported that Mike Johnson has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, an extreme far-right Christian movement seeking to dissolve the US’s separation between church and state by “any means necessary.” @motherjones

[stephen-barry]

Ilhan Omar

The Real Reason House Republicans Kicked Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee;

It’s not about anything she said. 

It’s about racism and Islamophobia.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/ilhan-omar-foreign-affairs-racism/ via @MotherJones

[kheelcenter]

"Women at Work"

Another UAW painting, this one details through intricate artistry a portion of women's history and involvement in labor and the labor movement. Mother Jones, just one of many female labor organizers, was singled out in the painting and portrayed here for her strike efforts in Ludlow, Colorado, the aftermath of which ended in massacre by anti-strike militia.

[journalappalachia]

August 1, 2021. “Mother Jones says goodbye to Sid Hatfield” (Terror of the Tug, July 31, 2021) On this day, August 1, 1921, Sid Hatfield and his deputy, Ed Chambers, were gunned down on the McDowell County, WV, courthouse steps. #motherjones #sidhatfield #minewars #appalachianwarstory #appalachia #appalachianstory #coalminers #coal #coaltowns #welch #mcdowellcountywv (at Mcarts Amiptheater) https://www.instagram.com/p/CSDPVrys48r/?utm_medium=tumblr

[brandonthibodeaux]

MOTHER JONES

The family of Isac Garcia-Wislar, who died in 2017 while in custody of the US Marshals Service, kindly opened their door to me for a feature with Mother Jones. The Garcia family's story is part of a massive investigation by reporter Seth Freed Wessler, looking into the far-flung detention system run by the Marshals. They are tasked with safeguarding pretrial detainees, however Seth's reporting finds that America’s oldest law enforcement agency suffers from a massive dereliction of duty. Seth had to sue the Marshals in federal court for documents that revealed, for the first time, a secretive empire with a death rate that far outstrips that of the parallel federal system run by ICE. Read the full piece here for the full investigation and podcast collaboration with radio producers from NPR's Latino USA.

[superknovamusic]

So honored to be featured on this Mother Jones Friday Music Playlist! 🙏💖

“A little bit of Bowie, a little bit of Prince, SuperKnova’s—real name Ellie Kim—newest track is a must listen for anyone who enjoys an alternative-pop-rock cross genre tune. With her second EP due out this summer, this track only tantalizes us with the proudly trans pop-rock star’s potential.”