Learning a new recording software with Studio One for my upcoming album with @anarchist_archivist , "Mother Anarchy".

In the meantime, to learn it, I'm recording protest songs written under occupation here in Minneapolis.

If you have a protest song about this, send it to edrootsmusic at gmail dot com if you want it in Folkroots. They're collecting songs and I'm one of their local contacts.

Wrote this after the feds murdered Renee. Tried to write a memorial song, but this is all that came out.

https://soundcloud.com/edrootsmusic/ropes-of-nuremberg-01-start-3

In periods of greater repression, it becomes even more important that movements have many, many poles of initiative, many layers of organization, a greater effort at coalition building, and a greater acceptance of autonomous action. State repression thrives off of finding and decapitating the leadership of resistance networks, and this is all the easier the more centralized that leadership is.

What we need is networks of resistance in which a broad base of participants act with their own knowledge of the social terrain where they are at, to strike blows and to build popular counter-power. We need movements where people are active shapers of tactics and targets rather than passive followers of march routes and slogans planned for them.

In centrally led resistance, the militancy of those resisting can be effectively deterred by threatening to punish the leadership or the organization. This in turn leads to self policing by those committed to protecting their institution and authority from the threat that autonomous action poses. That threat is not only the risk of “provoking” the repression the state already intends to do. It is also the threat of stale old institutions losing legitimacy if direct action “upstages” choreographed spectacles. The autonomous affinity group becomes an absolutely necessary tool of popular resistance, not in tension with mass formations of counter- power, but in complement to and defense of them.

While so much of the western left remains enamoured with the One Big Party, be it big tent or a select cadre, experience shows us that such organizations will become the top target of the forces of reaction. Worse, the politics of party chauvinism lead each party to spend a great deal of energy competing to become The Party of the revolution. In America today this gives us an absurd parade of aspiring vanguard parties. In place of the politics of party control over any project, or trying to turn joint projects into party front groups, we need to become practiced in the formation (and where they’ve served their purpose, comradely dissolution) of coalitional efforts. The road to greater practical unity among the many communities and movements resisting the reactionary turn, is found in relations built through shared struggle, political honesty, andreciprocal trust and solidarity.

When I was a boy, some degree of casual antisemitism was a commonly held attitude among many of my schoolmates, most of whom had never met an openly declared Jew in their life. Most of these boys would not have described their politics in terms of opposing Jewry, but would casually joke about Jewish control of media and banks or talk about someone Jewing them out of money. We were a very Catholic, very German town. I met one Jew my age growing up, and one older Jew, who went to the Unitarian Fellowship and had been part of the American garrison occupying Germany following the Second World War. It seemed bizarre to me for so many people I knew to have such casual hate towards people who they had never met, and it confused me where they even got these attitudes, as my own parents and family had never spoken ill of the Jewish people at all. It did not come up much, except for when a new episode of South Park focused on it and brought choruses of laughter from the boys. It was not, however, a feature of political discourse outside of the fringe far right. Just an attitude that so many held, but no one had a serious argument to justify- and which, if challenged, was explained away as a joke. Why can't you take a joke?

Now, I am a man some years on, and it is clearly not a Joke. Now, "the noticing" is a big in-joke among a huge section of the right, for whom this Jew-hatred is a sick substitute for class consciousness- a scapegoat for every problem of the day. People have marched in the streets shouting "Jews will not replace us" and beating those who oppose them. Of the several times I've been doxxed for opposing fascism, at least twice my stalkers accused me of being a Jew, despite my having a violently Irish Catholic name. I have seen my name and face posted on hate forums with the words "SUSPECTED K**E" written across them. My friends in the eruv ask me, sometimes, if I can rally the force to defend them if the time comes for that. My friends in the eruv are planning to move to Montreal.

On the left, meanwhile, I see many people making a principled stance of criticizing the institutions and colonial mission of the state of Israel, while rejecting antisemitism. But, I also- and it brings me no joy to say this- see too many people accepting within their midst those who make no such distinction, and who conflate Israel with the Jewish people and faith, or who respond to attacks on Jews and Jewish events and Jewish spaces with equivocation and whataboutism, or whose analysis of American foreign policy goes beyond recognizing the immense power of the pro-Israel lobby (driven largely by evangelical Christians) and into the conspiratorial realms of imagining Jewish control over the whole American military establishment. That is the socialism of fools. That is Jew-hatred.

The hatred of Jews is not a forgotten prejudice, buried in shame and regret where it belongs alongside the graves of millions burned in the ovens of Europe. It lives still, and it kills still. It is one of the spearheads of the modern far right, alongside hatred of feminism, hatred of queer people, hatred of immigrants and black folk, and hatred of the left. The modern far right in its most explicit camp sees all the things they hate as flowing from the Jews, as part of a great conspiracy to erase white men and western culture. That camp is growing within the right, and on the left too may of us remain complacent to the normalization of antisemitism even among nominal allies and comrades of ours.

Be alert for Jew-baiting and the old tropes of this ancient and murderous hatred. Do not suffer it to take root among your friends, your neighbors, your family, or fellow workers. Do not equivocate or hesitate. The hatred of Jews is a spearhead of fascism, the oldest banner of reaction, and the favorite rallying point of the scum of the earth.

Dreams of Nuremberg haunt the wicked and provide some cold comfort for the just. Comfort because judgement was rendered, cold because it was too late for the dead, and because its shadow has faded on the conscience of wicked men.

The horrors our grandparents knew could be answered with the rope, but not undone by them. What cannot be undone must be prevented from arising at all. Having arisen, it must be crushed forthwith. Only then can the shadow of Nuremberg be made solid again, and weigh on the moral scale of men who aspire to mastery over their fellow man.

In the silovik regimes of Russia and Belarus, collective punishment of families of dissidents continues to be a method of political repression.

https://abc-belarus.org/en/2025/12/12/repression-methods-in-belarus-persecution-of-anarchist-prisoners-parents/

Rural America is in collapse and the most powerful move the left could make would be for folks with roots there to organize there.

https://newrepublic.com/article/204051/firewood-ba