Must-Reads and Some Thoughts About This Terrible Interregnum

Your weekly, curated list of must-reads has arrived. But first, there’s a new episode of Movement Memos that I want to share with you. I talked with labor journalist and author Sarah Jaffe about her latest book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. In the episode, Sarah and I discuss how we navigate, survive, and reconcile loss and how grief is impacting our movements. 

“The capitalist system also doesn’t care if we die,” Sarah told me. “So insisting on the value of human life, insisting on grieving, particularly grieving publicly and collectively, is a real statement against this entire death-making system.” You can subscribe to Movement Memos wherever you get your podcasts, and if you need a transcript, you can find that (along with audio and show notes) here.

Must-Reads

From surveillance to fascism, hurricane recovery, attacks on labor, and how immigration organizers are preparing for 2025, here are some of the most important articles I’ve read this week.

• The Incomprehensible Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans by Mellissa Gira Grant. “Stephen Miller also chatted with Kirk about how a Trump administration would fill these camps. ‘You go to the red state governors and you say, “Give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers,”’ Miller said. They would ‘go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.’”
• Preparing for the Worst by Silky Shah. ”I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue. Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is.”
• Republican Attorneys General to Court: We Demand More Pregnant Teens by Madiba K. Dennie. “Bailey, Kobach, and Labrador’s argument treats teenagers as breeding stock. The complaint is shocking in its brazenness. But it is a natural outgrowth of the conservative legal movement’s efforts to subordinate women: Girls choosing not to give birth is wrong, and men can go to court to set it right.”
• Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics by Joseph Cox. “404 Media is highlighting the use case of tracking vulnerable people traveling to abortion clinics because it is a form of travel that some states have specifically proposed criminalizing. But Locate X can analyze a dizzying array of other locations that have alarming implications.”
• Israel’s Siege Forces First Responders to Totally Halt Operations in North Gaza by Sharon Zhang. “The Gaza Civil Defense agency, the government’s first responders, said that recent Israeli attacks on its workers have forced it to suspend its operations in the north. In a statement, the agency said that three of its members were wounded by Israeli forces who fired on them in Beit Lahiya, while another five were detained by Israeli forces at Indonesian Hospital.”
• Mother says AI chatbot led her son to kill himself in lawsuit against its maker by Blake Montgomery. “‘Daenerys’ at one point asked Setzer if he had devised a plan for killing himself, according to the lawsuit. Setzer admitted that he had but that he did not know if it would succeed or cause him great pain, the complaint alleges. The chatbot allegedly told him: ‘That’s not a reason not to go through with it.’”
• Pro-Palestine Activists Target Invisible Genocide Profiteer in Arms Supply Chain by Rimsha Syed. “Activists call on labor unions, student movements, community-based organizations, legal organizations, and other progressive movements to join the call to halt the flow of capital and logistics.”
• Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind by Elisabeth Zerofsky. “‘I think it’s going to be very dicey,’ [Paxton] said. ‘If Trump wins, it’s going to be awful. If he loses, it’s going to be awful too.” He scoured his brain for an apt historical analogy but struggled to find one.’”
• The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Overturn Labor Law by Shaun Richman. “Judicial hostility to unions extends to even Democratic appointees, potentially making nullification of the right to organize an easier lift than overturning the right to abortion.”
• Immigrants in western NC face a long road to recovery after Hurricane Helene by Julio Tordoya and Tina Vásquez. “In the weeks since Helene touched down in western North Carolina on Sept. 27, Colaborativa La Milpa has worked tirelessly with volunteers and other local organizations to reach the immigrant communities too often left behind in the wake of climate disasters while simultaneously tasked with their cleanup.”

ICYMI

This week, I interviewed Che Johnson-Long, the Community Safety Education Coordinator with Vision Change Win about electoral safety planning, and how activists should prepare for right-wing threats in the run-up to the presidential election. If you’re concerned about right-wing, election-related violence, this piece provides practical tools and advice.

Something Heartening

If you need a boost in morale (and who doesn’t, these days?), be sure to check out the latest edition of Mariame Kaba’s newsletter. Mariame’s lovely reflection on the progress that people fighting for youth decarceration have made in Illinois is an important reminder that, as Mariame puts it, “It’s important to take time to notice the things you’ve been part of changing.” Those of us involved in justice work are often discouraged by the evils of this world, but our long haul struggles have had major impacts, and it’s important to remember those wins.

Tomorrow’s Zoom Conversation

Tomorrow, I will be hosting a Zoom conversation with my paid subscribers. I enjoy these opportunities to connect with readers whose contributions make this newsletter possible. I will never add paywalls to this site. I write to fuel change, and limiting the reach of my words would undermine that objective. Access to ideas that strengthen our movements should never depend on our ability to pay. That’s why I’m deeply grateful to everyone who can afford to support this newsletter and chooses to do so.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you should have already received an email titled, “Join Me for a Zoom Chat.” If you become a paid subscriber today, you’ll receive your invite tomorrow morning for the Zoom, which takes place at noon Central Time.

This Morbid In-Between

The word “interregnum” echoes in my mind lately. I think about Gramsci’s words, which will be familiar to many: 

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Many of us feel stuck in this horrid moment between moments. It is not a pause, as everything that’s evil about this system continues to churn. The genocide in Palestine rages on. Environmental catastrophes are fueled by ecocidal industries, as billionaires trade away our futures in the hopes of becoming trillionaires. Imprisoned people live in tortured states. Famine and counter-revolutionary warfare devastate Sudan. Trans people are vilified and targeted by fascists. Displaced people beg for mercy at the border, and receive none. Disabled people are abandoned by the march of normalcy. Poverty and loneliness kill. It’s a sea of too much and not enough.

The in-betweenness of this moment is the product of our collective uncertainty. What chaos will the coming weeks bring? What forces will we be called to confront next year? How will we find the shared will to do so, as the left thrashes and collapses upon itself? Some people refer to left movements and thinkers in plural form, as the lefts, given our lack of coherent alignment. What we did have, in some recent years, was some amount of solidarity, power and momentum. In the last year, confronted with our inability to enforce our will, the weakness of our formations and practices has been front and center–and we have not handled ourselves well. 

Many people who knowingly declare that “organizing is about relationships” rarely behave as though this is the case. Sanctimony and a politics of exclusion are often practiced in public, in lieu of actual organizing. Curation, condemnation, and sanctimony are enough to craft a persona, and the maintenance of a persona, or a brand, is safer than the work of building power. If we never have to forgive anyone, or engage with people who disappoint us, or who don’t already agree with us, we can simply perform our politics and be approved of. Is this selfish, self-aggrandizing behavior? Is it the product of ego and clout chasing? Sometimes. Sometimes, these tendencies are simply the expression of political energies that have no productive outlet. When people cannot envision a path to victory, aspirations, frustrations, and resentments can blur into one. Politics as mere performance, or self expression, can be the product of despair.

People who cannot stomach feelings of powerlessness, or the reality that what they are doing is not working, or worse, that they have no idea what to do, will often take satisfaction where they can find it, tearing people down for sport and pronouncing others politically dead.

Of course, there is always meaningful work happening. Tenants are organizing for their homes, trans people, Palestinian people, Black people, and imprisoned people are organizing for their lives. Organized communities are defending the land and the water. People are caring for one another and helping each other survive unsurvivable conditions. This is always true. These efforts, however, have not defined the spirit of this moment. Most politicized people in the U.S. are consumed by the spectacle of the electoral circus, even if they hate it. The presidential race is devouring our attention, our indignation, and hundreds of millions of dollars–which makes this a terrible time for people attempting to raise money for any other cause. Plenty of people deserve to be celebrated for their efforts right now, and supported in their work, but there is a lack of political will, a lack of energy, a lack of resources, and a lack of hope among us.

We are stuck in the in-between of it all, and mired in the horrors of the moment, as our political ambitions struggle for air.

What does it look like to emerge from this moment? What is the path out of this horrid interregnum? The answer is not as sexy or immediately redemptive as anyone would like. A left in disarray, that is completely disconnected from the fundamentals of building power, a left that is steeped in alienation, is a left that has to get back to basics. While we must never abandon our transformative demands, we must recognize that there are no shortcuts in our immediate path. Our enemies are not on the brink of failure. This empire is not coming undone. There is a revolution slouching towards Bethlehem, but it is not ours.

Strutting in circles on digital runways can transform our politics into mere sideshows–signifying everything, yet producing nothing.

To build a different world, we will have to begin at the beginning. We will have to rebuild our skills, and in some cases, this will feel like relearning a forgotten language. However, that language still exists. The power of fellowship still exists. The ability to work across difference can be cultivated. Strategies can be devised and sharpened. The work of base building can be relearned and reenlivened. There will be openings and ruptures that bring new opportunities, but to meet those moments, we must develop skills, infrastructure and relationships that can propel transformative change.

We must recognize that our radicalism and our indignation will not carry the day. We must do messy, uncomfortable work. That is the path toward transformation. It is an uncertain path, but the path exists. We will need patience and humility to traverse it.

We have so much work to do while the world burns and heaves. The only promise I can make is that I will be here, doing that work alongside you. I am steeled by the firm belief that, come what may, possibility is worth fighting for. We, as human beings, and the creatures that surround us, are worth fighting for. You and yours are worth fighting for, and so is the world. Remember that during this terrible interregnum.

Much love,

Kelly

Organizing My Thoughts is a reader-supported newsletter. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today. There are no paywalls for the essays, reports, interviews, and excerpts published here. However, I could not do this work without the support of readers like you, so if you are able to contribute financially, I would greatly appreciate your help.