Write an SEO-optimized excerpt for the given content Last Friday, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, posted a link on X/Twitter to promote $Libra, a new cryptocurrency that, in his words, would “promote economic growth in Argentina and fund small business and entrepreneurship in Argentina.” The currency quickly rose in value, receiving support from the international cryptosphere and his base of hardcore supporters in Argentina. Within a few hours of Milei’s tweet, however, the coin became virtually worthless. The creators of the currency pulled their investments — around $100 million was withdrawn in total — resulting in multimillion-dollar profits for insiders and the sudden evaporation of the savings of some of Milei’s most ardent supporters. The fate of $Libra’s investors mirrored that of those who a few weeks earlier invested in $Hawk, the cryptocurrency launched by the “Hawk Tuah girl.” But the big difference was that $Libra was not the product of an internet personality but the president of the country with the world’s twenty-fourth highest GDP. Due to Milei’s saintlike status within the right-wing online community, the currency seemed a safe bet for those who ideologically identified with his political project. Some of his most loyal supporters reportedly lost their savings after investing in the currency. While the full effects of the apparent scam might not be known until much later, it is clear that Milei has seen a significant drop in support since the scandal, and lawsuits are currently being filed in Argentina and the United States. Political personalities across the Argentine ideological spectrum took to X to condemn Milei’s actions. Former right-wing president Mauricio Macri publicly distanced himself from Milei. The Trotskyist and Peronist opposition called for an impeachment trial, while centrist sectors called for a parliamentary investigation into the incident, which could constitute the first real threat to Milei’s presidency since he was inaugurated with popular support in December 2023. Milei, a serial tweeter, remained mostly silent on X for several days. Finally, on Monday night, he had the opportunity to make his case before the nation in a recorded interview with Todo Noticias, a station sympathetic to his agenda. But instead of apologizing, he doubled down, saying that he didn’t have to apologize because he didn’t promote $Libra; he just shared it, effectively comparing it to when a president visits a business. He then went on to state that he shared it from his personal account. Therefore, he did nothing wrong. There was no state involvement; it was an issue between private entities. He added that those who suffered losses should have known better, stating, “If you go to the casino, you lose money. What’s the complaint?” Shortly after the interview, a clip surfaced of one of Milei’s advisers interrupting the interview when the interviewer, Jonatan Viale, pressed Milei on the difference between his personal and presidential account. In a lapse of journalistic integrity, the interviewer apologized, noting that the question could get Milei into legal trouble. Another scandal quickly followed when Hayden Davis, one of the cryptocurrency’s developers, boasted about paying bribes to Karina Milei, the president’s sister and chief of staff, to have Milei support the coin. Davis stated in texts riddled with racist slurs that he controls Milei, and that his sister can get him to sign whatever he says and do whatever he wants. It remains to be seen whether the opposition can effectively use the scandal to damage Milei politically. Milei is currently hiding from the media spotlight in the United States, while his party managed to get the Senate to dismiss an initial investigation into the scandal. Meanwhile, outside Argentina, the scandal seems to have sent the Latin American right soul-searching. The endless barrage of social media posts and op-eds since December 2023 arguing that Milei is a model for the Right have suddenly come to a halt. In Chile, the Right has conveniently decided to remain silent, while in Brazil, the Right seems too preoccupied with the coup charges against former president Jair Bolsonaro (not to mention its own cryptocoin scandal) to be worried about the noise next door. Meanwhile, in Colombia, the Right’s 2026 presidential front-runner, Vicky Dávila, initially tried to distance herself from Milei, stating that she has always been critical of the crypto world, but since the scandal has blown over she’s doubled down on her praise of Milei’s model. It’s important to note that Dávila also hired campaign advisers who are connected to Millei through a network of right-wing and libertarian think tanks in the region. The scandal raises the prospect that Milei’s model could be a liability to the Latin American right in various elections that will take place this year and next. The US right has not shown the same hesitation in regard to Milei. On Thursday, Elon Musk appeared together with Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) wielding a chain saw, a gift from the Argentine president that symbolizes his slashing of state programs like pensions for the elderly and public education. This closeness between the two crypto bros should comes as no surprise. Musk has praised Milei since 2023 and helped promote him to star status in the US media landscape. Furthermore, he has cited Milei’s austerity agenda as the direct inspiration for the Department of Government Efficiency. The fact that Musk is not distancing himself from Milei when he is under fire for accepting bribes and scamming his base goes to show that the US right doesn’t care about combating corruption or cutting government waste. Rather, it reveals an unwavering commitment to austerity above all else — in Donald Trump and Musk’s case, ripping off normal people under the bizarre pretext of fighting “wokeness” and “DEI.” The far-right political project begins to look like a meme coin swindle. As Milei’s credibility declines both inside and outside Argentina, the austerity politics of the anarcho-capitalist president and his imitators comes into focus as the biggest scam of all. . The excerpt should be compelling and should succinctly summarize the content, incorporate relevant keywords naturally, and be between 150–160 characters (including spaces and punctuation. Also add relevant hashtags to encourage online engagement. The excerpt should encourage click-through.

Write an SEO-optimized excerpt for the given content Bill Kristol & Robert Kagan talk about Trump, his thirst for power, companies bending the knee, the situation in Ukraine, and the administration sliding towards dictatorship.Leave a commentAs always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. . The excerpt should be compelling and should succinctly summarize the content, incorporate relevant keywords naturally, and be between 150–160 characters (including spaces and punctuation. Also add relevant hashtags to encourage online engagement. The excerpt should encourage click-through.

Write an SEO-optimized excerpt for the given content In its three short years of existence, Anvil magazine published several writers who would go on to achieve immense fame, including Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren. The small, ragtag magazine, founded in 1933, was unique among leftist literary journals of the time in its racial diversity and its proud adoption of rural radicalism. It sought to offer an alternative to New York periodicals such as New Masses and Partisan Review and make Marxism accessible to workers in the cultural outskirts of the Midwest. Despite publishing the early works of some of the most renowned US socialist writers of the twentieth century, Anvil remains unknown to all but a few specialists in leftist literary history. That’s a shame, because it offers a blueprint for communicating a popular socialist vision to a working class outside the United States’ major urban centers — a task that could hardly be more urgent today. A historic meeting of radical authors convened at Manhattan’s New School on April 26–27, 1935. The League of American Writers, the meeting’s Communist Party–affiliated organizing body, was one recent manifestation of the red decade’s robust anti-fascist cultural front. The congress invited men and women of letters from across the country to collaboratively chart the course for a new revolutionary American literature. One of these writers was Jack Conroy, a working-class novelist who had authored two lauded works of proletarian fiction, The Disinherited and A World to Win. The son of a coal miner, Conroy was raised near the small farming town of Moberly, Missouri. He spent most of his young adulthood hopping between jobs in the industrial Midwest, from working railroads in Missouri to automotive factories in Toledo, which provided the settings for his two novels. In prose and in person, Conroy flaunted his heartland roots with his folksy, idiomatic speech and his disdain for social status. He reportedly delivered his talk at the American Writers Congress with uncombed hair and disheveled clothes, looking “like an unmade bed,” in the words of journalist Heywood Broun. The talk, with its animosity to what Conroy considered elitist literary modernism, out-of-touch Marxist theoreticians, and urbane decadence, was denigrated by several members of the congress and the mainstream New York press. Conroy’s biographer, Douglas Wixson, relates that James T. Farrell, author of the popular Studs Lonigan trilogy and a fellow speaker at the congress, allegedly referred to Conroy as “Jack Cornrow” and even called him a “walking cornfield.” Farrell’s identification of Conroy with the Midwestern landscape might have been just the reaction that Conroy hoped to elicit. He implored Marxist authors to write for the masses in accessible, demotic language: “The worker-writer must learn to express himself as clearly and as simply as he can. . . . In order to do this, he will not find it necessary to concoct weird hybrids of words or to coin new words. . . . One may combine simple, and what some ultra-aesthetic critics might call banal and commonplace, words into an exciting and colorful pattern.” Conroy’s commitment to writing that realistically and organically reflected working-class experience made him a hayseed to some, a populist yokel who lacked the proper training to produce rigorous revolutionary literature. Yet at the time of the American Writers Congress, the provincial Conroy was the editor of one of the most cosmopolitan magazines of the period’s anti-capitalist literary movement: Anvil. Founded by Conroy two years earlier, the magazine featured an impressively diverse masthead. It published the early works of some of the twentieth century’s most influential women and African American authors. Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Frank Yerby, Meridel Le Sueur, and Sanora Babb all placed writing in Anvil or its 1939 successor, New Anvil, when their names were virtually unknown. In addition to these upstarts, some already prominent figures in 1930s letters placed work in Conroy’s publication, including Langston Hughes and Erskine Caldwell. For a small rag produced on cheap newsprint with an ancient printing press in a cattle barn, this litany of names was no small feat. Nor was it coincidence. Through its curation of working-class fiction and poetry, signature linoleum print illustrations, and Conroy’s rustic editorial commentary, Anvil fashioned an aesthetic that was at once provincial and international. Conroy’s sense of the importance of regional identity and his belief in authentic folk expression attracted several black and women writers who felt alienated from the Communist Party establishment. In the 1930s, Anvil contended with the elitist belief that cutting-edge literature could scarcely emerge from the allegedly conservative cultural backwaters of Missouri, Kansas, or Ohio. The Left cannot assemble a majoritarian, working-class coalition without winning over the nation’s rural and deindustrialized midlands. Today US politics continues to turn on regional conflicts and inequalities, both real and perceived, and the Left cannot assemble a majoritarian, working-class coalition without winning over the nation’s rural and deindustrialized midlands. Especially for leftists campaigning in the field of culture, Jack Conroy and Anvil magazine provide lessons in representing and nourishing interracial radicalism in the heart of the United States. Conroy was a day laborer in his early thirties when he first entered the literary stage at the start of the Great Depression. Baptized in sudsy bar ballads, folk tales, and factory banter, the burly Conroy was driven by a desire to seize a place in the national literature for the workingmen and women surrounding him. Recognizing a lack of vehicles for what he called “non-urban” leftist fiction, he enlisted a journeyman printer named B. C. Hagglund and launched Anvil in 1933. The magazine’s subtitle, “Stories for Workers,” signaled its intended proletarian audience, while its slogan declared an aesthetic philosophy: “We prefer crude vigor to polished banality.” From the start, Conroy made good on this slogan by publishing writing from workers who harbored literary ambitions but lacked the formal training and institutional access to make a career from their words. Some contributors, like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, would not wait long for renown. For others, success came much later, if it arrived at all. The lead piece in the July-August 1934 issue, “Postoffice Nights” by Harry Bernstein, gives an account of an ambitious, college-bound teenager confronting his own economic precarity. Bernstein would toil at writing for the next seven decades before his memoir, The Invisible Wall, finally won him acclaim in 2007. The impressionistic recollections that brought him celebrity at age ninety-six were already apparent in the 1934 Anvil story. Anvil’s support of writing by workers, for workers, was a populist revolt from the village against the East Coast communist literary establishment. Although a committed revolutionary, Conroy clashed with influential New York radicals such as Philip Rahv and their leading magazines, among them the famous New Masses and Partisan Review. Conroy and his coterie of Midwestern proletarian writers critiqued these metropolitan journals for prioritizing Marxist theory over stories that realistically reflected working-class life and for their insensitivity to the disparity in both cultural and financial resources separating New York from environs like Conroy’s native Missouri. As Conroy put it in a reflective essay written in the 1960s, “out in the Midwest of penny auctions and burning corn … we were far from the ideological tempests raging in New York City coffee pots. How many Marxian angels could dance on the point of a hammer and sickle?” Anvil therefore served as a pragmatist counterbalance to the headier discourses circulating in radical periodicals like Partisan Review, which would absorb and dissolve the first Anvil in 1935 in what Conroy interpreted as a hostile coup by the New York crowd against his vehicle of homegrown regional writing. Anvil was premised on the existence of an already deep tradition of cultural radicalism in the heartland. However, this radicalism had rarely enjoyed a nationally prominent outlet to disseminate its principles and productions, at least not since the turn-of-the-century halcyon days of the major socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. One of Anvil’s major tasks, then, was to represent this radical Midwest in print. As the poo-bah of New York communism, Daily Worker columnist and novelist Mike Gold advised Conroy: “Make it a regional paper, for the peasant poets and Midwest literary proletarians … proletarian in content, regional in form.” In addition to reserving space for unknown writers, Conroy invoked regional radicalism through messages on the front and back covers requesting donations to Anvil and other revolutionary books produced by the magazine’s printer, B. C. Hagglund. Instead of promising glossy paper and high-end printing in exchange for contributions, Conroy’s solicitations emphasize the austere conditions in which the leftist texts were produced: “B. C. Hagglund, the proletarian publisher, proletarian printer, and proletarian writer, has returned to his cowbarn sanctum in the muskegs of Northern Minnesota. . . . Hagglund sadly needs a few extra dollars with which to buy paper and ink. . . . The actual printing is done on a press thrown away as unusable by a self-respecting printer . . . in the Boer War.” Conroy punctuates his request with a note that money can be sent to the farmer-poet H. H. Lewis at Rural Route 4 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The message’s tongue-in-cheek humor rests on quintessential Midwestern self-deprecation, yet he brandishes the magazine’s material deficiencies as a point of pride. Indeed, compared to the Partisan Review, which ran over one hundred pages an issue, and the New Masses, renowned for its avant-garde illustrations, Anvil was a ramshackle affair. Initially only eight pages (it eventually expanded to between twenty-four and thirty-two pages per issue), printed on inexpensive news stock, and featuring the occasional blatant printing error, Anvil embodied an unpolished, honest working-class ethos. Further, the places mentioned in Conroy’s request outline the topography of the radical Midwest. Revolutionary workers’ writing was being brought forth through a network running from northern Minnesota, to Conroy’s residence in St Louis, to southern Missouri and beyond. Certainly, anti-capitalism had long been active in these middle states, but Anvil’s explicit appeal to the Midwest and aestheticization of working-class grit helped to fashion a distinct identity for leftists living outside of major urban centers. It’s true that Cape Girardeau, Missouri, gave the world Rush Limbaugh, but it was also an important station of revolutionary workers’ writing. Why should the Left cede this territory, both physical and symbolic, to reactionaries who pretend that their ideology is representative of this mythical “true America”? Anvil’s support of writing by workers, for workers, was a populist revolt from the village against the East Coast literary establishment. The magazine’s distinctive illustrations, when Conroy and Hagglund could afford to print them, were key to both its regional aesthetics and democratic socialist philosophy. Nearly all illustrations are linoleum block prints and depict workers in an asymmetrical, primitivist style. One image from the May-June 1940 issue of New Anvil, John C. Rogers’s Working Class Mother, portrays a simply clothed woman standing arms akimbo on a country hill, her back turned to the viewer as she looks proudly at a sun either rising or setting. As in Conroy’s vivid description of his printer’s “cowbarn sanctum,” Rogers depicts the rural environment of the magazine’s imagined reader with respect but little romanticism. Ideologically, it signals a departure from the conventions dominant in Marxist aesthetics during the early 1930s. Instead of replicating socialist realism and representing the world revolution with depictions of workers united in victory or heading into battle, Working Class Mother equivocates on the state of socialism in the rural United States. It is unclear whether the sun in the illustration is rising, suggesting the coming revolution, or setting on a passing opportunity, perhaps registering that the anti-capitalist potential of the Depression decade was on the wane. John C. Rogers, Working Class Mother, New Anvil (May-June 1940). (Courtesy of Newberry Library) This ambivalence is characteristic of Anvil’s heartland radicalism, as is suspicion of formal party politics. While Conroy was affiliated with the Communist Party, he was a consistent voice for internal critique. For his biographer, Wixson, Anvil was unique among other literary organs of the 1930s in its spirit of “independence, its promise to be of sectarian attitudes and ideologies.” Wixson echoes a long-held belief that communism failed to gain traction in the United States partly due to Americans’ reluctance to submit to centralized authority, especially an authority that they perceived as foreign, such as the Moscow-tied Communist Party. A popular, naturalized Marxism was supposedly yet to arise in the United States. Anvil refutes this myth. However, the magazine suggests that American socialism would diverge greatly from the Soviet model. The preferred organizational strategy — and ultimate political goal — of the Anvil crowd was horizontal worker association that incorporated elements of Industrial Workers of the World–inspired syndicalism, prairie populism, and what would become known as autonomous Marxism or workerism. For Conroy, a properly American form of Marxism would honor the country’s mythos of freedom and independence while producing agitprop in forms that would be familiar to a Midwestern farmer. While an effective approach by several measures, Conroy’s writings can walk a thin beam between egalitarian regionalism and anti-intellectual nativism, and at moments they lose their balance. The discourses of “rootedness” and folk simplicity that abound in Conroy’s work can, as leftist literary historian Michael C. Steiner suggests, feed “a reactionary urge that encourages differences between regions and nations at the same time as it smothers differences within them.” However, the Missouri of Conroy’s writings is never a homogenous landscape of so-called pure Americanism, and neither are the pages of Anvil. Flipping through a typical issue, readers could move from imagery depicting the rural Midwest to another Rogers linoleum block portrait, this time of Vladimir Lenin. John C. Rogers, Nicolai Lenin, Great Leader of the World Proletariat, Anvil (May-June 1934). (Courtesy of Newberry Library) Depicted in the same folk style as the working-class mother, Lenin’s face fits naturally next to Rogers’s other prints and the magazine’s rural dialect stories. As editor, Conroy depicted a vision of the American heartland in which Lenin is an organic feature of the cultural landscape alongside Walt Whitman and Mother Jones. Radical regionalism is therefore not an isolationist ideology but a dialectic approach to revolutionary culture. Anvil’s aesthetic is as internationalist as it is regional; Rogers’s woodcuts, for instance, take influence from the murals and woodcuts of Mexican revolutionary artists who were also invested in ideas of the geographic periphery and the provincial. This regionalist internationalism, as I call it, provided fertile ground for anti-colonialist black writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker, who incisively described the conflicts of being black, Midwestern, and Marxist. Lenin’s likeness in the May 1934 issue was foreshadowed by a poem in the debut issue a year earlier: Langston Hughes’s “Ballads of Lenin.” Although an ode to the revolutionary titan, Hughes’s poem elevates the workers of the world to equal footing with the individual leader while forcefully expressing the proletarian internationalism that defines much of Hughes’s 1930s verse: Comrade Lenin of Russia, High in a marble tomb, Move over, Comrade Lenin, And give me room. I am Ivan, the peasant … I am Chico, the Negro… I am Chang from the foundries / On strike in the streets of Shanghai. For the sake of the Revolution I fight, I starve, I die. Hughes’s poem is a fitting cry for the inaugural issue of a magazine whose contributors exemplified working-class writing from a breadth of demographics. Already established as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes looms large over a masthead of otherwise “unknown writers of the revolutionary school,” as Conroy described the contributors in a prospectus for the magazine. From the NAACP’s Crisis to the Marxist New Masses, Hughes had access to publications with much larger reaches than Anvil, whose circulation peaked at four thousand. Why did he contribute what would become one of his most beloved poems to the first issue of a small literary journal in the hinterlands? Hughes and Conroy had been professionally acquainted since the late 1920s, the pair likely bonding over their mutual upbringings in the robust socialist print culture of early twentieth-century Missouri and Kansas. According to his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes delivered copies of the Appeal to Reason to his black neighbors in Lawrence, Kansas, at age twelve. Two hundred miles away in Moberly, the just slightly older Conroy was reading copies of the same newspaper and the legendary Little Blue Books workingperson’s library, produced by the same Kansas publishing house responsible for the Appeal. Besides his affection for the vivacious Conroy, Hughes probably identified with Anvil’s attempt to forge a revolutionary literature with the Midwestern dialects, folklore, and landscapes that provided the material for his own work. Literary critic Anthony Dawahare points out that Hughes’s proletarian writing utilizes “working-class vernacular [that Hughes] believed could have multiracial mass appeal . . . to the worker unschooled in Marxist theory.” Hughes and Conroy were thus united in their desire to democratize socialist and communist literary arts. This democratization was a vital element in increasing black participation in the radical labor movement’s cultural front. Communist rhetoric was failing to speak to the people who stood to benefit most from a workers’ revolution. “The Sailor and the Steward,” Hughes’s short story that appears in the May-June 1935 issue, alludes to American labor’s troubled history of anti-blackness and supplies a parable of interracial organizing. Drawing from Hughes’s own experience as a ship hand in the early 1920s, the story takes place on a cargo ship called the Loganderry as it transports commodities from the United States to Africa. The protagonist and titular sailor is Manuel Rojas, an Afro-Cuban ship hand. When Manuel catches the ship’s captain and officers feasting on steak while the crew is fed a rotten seafood stew, he flies into a rage and attacks the ship’s West Indian steward, Manuel’s immediate superior in rank. The captain disciplines Manuel by locking him in the ship’s brig without food or water for at least a day. An unnamed Filipino waiter who also works on the ship finally brings Manuel a meal, but this is not all that he serves to the sailor. The waiter, who already belongs to a union, provides Manuel with class consciousness and a map for organizing the crew, showing him that lashing out in angry isolation is futile. “The only way to stop the steward,” he advises, “and the company, too, from feeding you slop is for you boys back aft to get together and make one big kick in a bunch. If you don’t belong to a union like we officers do, then form one.” Manuel evolves from a disgruntled, isolated employee to a converted trade unionist who recognizes that his personal struggle is tied to that of his fellow crewmen. The expansion of Manuel’s consciousness is symbolized by a physical change in his perspective. The story begins with Manuel peeking through the brig’s lone porthole: “All that Manuel had seen since the sun came up was that miniature circle of sea water and sky.” His view is limited, his vision blank and dull. At the conclusion, after talking with the unionized Filipino waiter, Manuel has sprouted “beaming eyes” that are full of a horizon of hope and opportunity. He sees the world more vividly and accurately. John C. Rogers, Mill Town, New Anvil (May-June 1940). (Courtesy of Newberry Library) Alongside its commentary on the futility of unorganized, atomized strikes against oppression, the story narrates a resolution of ethnic conflict through trade unionism. Manuel begins the story by thinking of himself first as a “Cubano,” separate from other workers because of his nationality. By the end of the story, however, Manuel overcomes his sense of isolation from the other workers and identifies primarily as a “seaman” like the rest. The initial distrust that Manuel feels toward his Filipino and West Indian crewmates evokes historical labor disputes that spiraled into ethnic violence. These instances would have been tragically familiar to Anvil readers; in 1917, white workers terrorized the Black neighborhoods of East St Louis, killing hundreds and destroying the property of scores more. The massacre began as a factory labor strike whose energy was brutally unleashed onto the Black workers whom the whites’ opportunistic bosses had employed as scabs. In the preceding issue, Conroy published his own tale, “Down in Happy Hollow.” The story’s grotesque main character, coal miner Monty Cass, informs two young boys who stumble upon his shack that he once killed a man for crossing the picket line. The racialization of scabbing is evident in Monty’s account of his final appeal to the murdered traitor, Jess Gotts. “‘Jess, don’t go! Jess, be a white man!’. I coaxed ’im as nice as I knew how,” says Monty. While Monty voices what was a painfully common belief — that solidarity was inherent to whiteness while scabbing was a mark of racial inferiority — Hughes’s story depicts unionization entirely driven by and consisting of non-white workers from US colonial territories. By joining a Cuban and Filipino worker in solidarity, Hughes stages an anti-colonial insurrection in miniature. Though Black radicals such as Cedric J. Robinson would later fairly criticize twentieth-century Marxism for its apathy and ignorance toward cultures outside of Europe, Anvil had managed to publish early decolonial Marxist writings like this, and from an unlikely locale. Moreover, the labor union in Hughes’s story promises to be more successful than the one to which Conroy’s Monty Cass belonged, as the Loganderry crew is able to set aside ethnic differences for a common cause. Instead of persuading Jess Gotts to join the union like Hughes’s Filipino officer is able to do for Manuel, Monty buries an ice pick in Jess’s head. In Conroy’s story, Monty’s race-inflected appeal to Jess ultimately fails, the union is broken by the factory, and one white man has murdered another. Monty’s arc is the inverse of Manuel’s: he begins a union man on strike with his comrades, but his violence and prejudice doom him to a tragic end, alone and unloved on the outskirts of town. These stories, published in sequential issues, facilitated a dialog on union racism. While other radical periodicals such as New Masses and the earlier Liberator also featured diverse editors and contributors, Anvil uniquely localized leftist politics without demarcating who did and didn’t belong in the Midwest. It’s no coincidence that Richard Wright, who maintained a lifelong correspondence with Conroy, published two of his earliest poems in Anvil when he was still working at a Chicago post office. In his essay “I Tried to Be a Communist,” a dyspeptic but potent critique of the Communist Party’s attempts to connect with black Americans, Wright recounts reading an issue of Masses featuring a violent cover illustration and revolutionary catchwords: “I looked again at the cover . . . and I knew that the wild cartoon did not reflect the passions of the common people. . . . They had a program, an ideal, but they had not yet found a language.” This same conviction, that communist rhetoric was failing to speak to the people who stood to benefit most from a workers’ revolution, motivated the founding of Anvil. Even as the magazine folded after three years, and its 1939 revival lasted only one, its success at fashioning an organic socialist language that could appeal to workers close to home can be measured by the litany of writers and artists, both acclaimed and anonymous, who placed their work in the cowbarn rag. Nearly forty years after the New Anvil went under, Conroy began to reflect on his work in the 1930s. The anti-communist paranoia and suppression of the 1950s had decimated his circle of radicals. Richard Wright was surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI; Langston Hughes was hounded by G-men and called to testify before Joe McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations to answer for the proletarianism of his 1930s writing. Others, like Conroy’s old friend H. H. Lewis who lived at Rural Route 4, suffered psychological collapse under federal harassment and spiraled into mental illness and delusion. Some trusted comrades turned traitor, such as Whittaker Chambers, an editor of the New Masses and former Soviet spy who accused several leftist literati of espionage. The rest, including Conroy, were forced underground, blacklisted from publishing in most commercially viable outlets. The tide began to turn in the 1960s as the New Left recovered and rehabilitated the works of the Depression generation. Conroy embarked on campus speaking tours and benefitted from new anthologies of his writings, but in letters he and his confidants mourned the disappearance of the revolutionary energy and focus that distinguished the 1930s. Without a radical, internationalist, and uncompromising labor movement, there was little hope to stop nascent neoliberalism in its tracks. “We are living in vacuous times — themeless, visionless,” journalist and labor leader Edward J. Falkowski wrote to Conroy in 1976. “There are no longer any great visible leaders in this country in literature or politics or penetrative thinking.” Falkowski’s yearning for a theme and vision to galvanize the masses remains a familiar emotion for leftists today. Then as now, the Left was scattered across disparate and sometimes oppositional interest groups, while the apolitical settled into life oriented around consumerism. Falkowski commented on the youth of the 1970s, They’re being robbed of all their faith in social change. . . . And the Labor Movement (so-called) has joined with the fascists in return for a piece of the pie. So the young people say — to hell with it all — and go on to do their own thing . . . in the [Women’s] Lib movement, the Gay movements, Rock and Roll, etc. These movements are really gestures of despair. While Falkowski failed to recognize the political necessity and triumphs of women’s liberation and gay rights, his larger point is that without a genuinely mass movement organized around a common language, without a radical, internationalist, and uncompromising labor movement, there was little hope to stop nascent neoliberalism in its tracks. The November 2024 election results made obvious what had already been clear to many leftists. The hollowest form of identity politics, with no capacity to envision an alternative to decaying capitalism — what Falkowski might have called politics of “despair” — has no mass appeal. One of the most pressing tasks for the Left, then, is to communicate with workers in more compelling and less alienating language than both the Democrats and the Republicans. Despite the manifold crises of the present, US socialists now have the opportunity to progress from our overspecialized predecessors and appeal to the multiracial masses desperate for radical change. Anvil reminds us that the most effective appeals result from a fluid dialogue between workers and intellectuals and the foregrounding of worker-intellectuals, not from closed communication by a distant governing body. Without access to focus groups or statistics, the data on which Anvil operated was the experience that its editor and contributors gained as laborers working in specific places among their inhabitants. In Anvil, the universal resides in the particular. The material for a rejuvenated, contemporary leftist culture surrounds us, in close proximity and crude vigor. . The excerpt should be compelling and should succinctly summarize the content, incorporate relevant keywords naturally, and be between 150–160 characters (including spaces and punctuation. Also add relevant hashtags to encourage online engagement. The excerpt should encourage click-through.

Write an SEO-optimized excerpt for the given content Sarah Longwell & Tim Miller sound the alarm on America’s political future. Are we ready for what’s coming? Watch now.Leave a commentWatch, listen, and leave a comment. Use the controls on the the left side of the player to toggle to the free audio-only edition or find the show wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.This ad-free video edition of The Next Level is exclusively for Bulwark+ members.You can add The Next Level to your podcast player of choice, here.. The excerpt should be compelling and should succinctly summarize the content, incorporate relevant keywords naturally, and be between 150–160 characters (including spaces and punctuation. Also add relevant hashtags to encourage online engagement. The excerpt should encourage click-through.

Write an SEO-optimized excerpt for the given content Paul Rogers The three main countries in this regard are Germany, France, and Britain, with the last of those three states no longer in the European Union (EU), of course. Germany has been traditionally sympathetic to Israel because of the history going back to the Holocaust, France rather less so, and Britain is also pretty supportive of Israel. That is certainly true for the current Labour government of Keir Starmer, partly because of all the controversy over antisemitism during the period that Jeremy Corbyn was the party leader — although I think most people now accept that much of that was put up in a political push to damage Corbyn’s reputation with the electorate in Britain. Be that as it may, I think you should expect that out of those three key countries, it will be France that is more likely to be independent-minded and less supportive of Israel. You can see very strong support for the Palestinians in Britain, by no means restricted to the substantial Muslim minority. We have had a series of massive demonstrations in London — approximately twenty demonstrations over the last sixteen months, all of which were peaceful. There have been some attempts at disruption by right-wingers, but by and large the marches have been fairly peaceful. Those demonstrations have really concerned the British government — both the previous Conservative government and the Labour government in office since July of last year — because this is something that they are finding very difficult to control. What is happening nationally is happening locally as well. I live near an industrial town in the North of England, and there have been frequent demonstrations there too. There’s a chasm between what the states are saying and what ordinary people are thinking, particularly in Britain. Bit by bit, Israel is coming to be regarded as a pariah state in many parts of Europe, and of course much more so across the Global South. There is a lot of concern in Europe about this at leadership level. At the same time, however, you have a number of states, notably Hungary and Italy, that have moved pretty far to the right. By and large, support for the Palestinians is much lower in those political quarters. The Israelis obviously recognize these divisions, and they are putting a huge amount of work into maintaining support in Western Europe, but it’s proving difficult for them. What that means for the EU is that it does not have the unity or strength at the moment to come up with a common view that will hold. That may change, and it certainly could change if Trump comes anywhere near to going ahead with his scheme to clear Gaza. But again, these are very unusual times, and it is difficult to make predictions with the kind of certainty that you would hope for. The problem with the British is they always think they’re much more powerful and significant than they actually are. The problem for Europeans — and here I can speak mainly about what’s happening on the British scene — is that they’re not really sure how far Trump is going to go on so many of these different schemes. They’re almost taking refuge in the idea that Trump is not going to get away with some of the things that he is doing — there’s quite a lot of wishful thinking going on at the moment. The problem with the British is they always think they’re much more powerful and significant than they actually are. The “special relationship” between Britain and the United States is incredibly one-sided, and Britain has had great difficulty in coming to terms with that. . The excerpt should be compelling and should succinctly summarize the content, incorporate relevant keywords naturally, and be between 150–160 characters (including spaces and punctuation. Also add relevant hashtags to encourage online engagement. The excerpt should encourage click-through.

Zachary Gallant The AfD has been trying to polarize Jews against migration, mostly of Muslims, [for a long time]. This has long been a strategy. The AfD talks about “imported antisemitism.” In my first years in Germany, my closest friends were from countries that Germany accuses of being the sources of imported antisemitism. I have noticed German antisemitism being a significantly more dangerous entity than imported antisemitism. What I think is vital, when Germans talk about imported antisemitism, is to talk about the year 1941 and the decision by Adolf Hitler to support Iraqi independence against British colonialism, in a German colonial move to gain Iraqi resources and undermine British and French wartime maneuvers. Hitler’s decision to support Iraq led to Nazi propaganda being translated into Arabic and widely dispersed through mass amounts of money and printing presses into organizations throughout the Middle East, through Iraq, through the Muslim Brotherhood. This was the first time in Arabic history that exterminationist antisemitism entered the Arabic language. There had been antisemitism. I’m not going to deny that, but the idea of the Jews as a race that needed to be exterminated was something the Germans translated into Arabic and spread widely. When we talk about imported antisemitism from that space, it’s only because of what Germany brought there in the 1940s. It created a whole new kind of antisemitism. When Julius Streicher was in the dock in the Nuremberg trials, he declared that the model for antisemitism was Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies.” The antisemitism in that is just astounding. Antisemitism has been sitting deep in German culture for over five hundred years; it didn’t need to be imported. . The excerpt should be compelling and should succinctly summarize the content, incorporate relevant keywords naturally, and be between 150–160 characters (including spaces and punctuation. Also add relevant hashtags to encourage online engagement. The excerpt should encourage click-through.

Write an SEO-optimized excerpt for the given content Climate activists have long advocated for consuming less energy and shrinking our carbon footprint. But a growing ecomodernist movement argues that we need more energy for prosperity, security—and to help combat climate change as well. Philanthropist Rachel Pritzker joins John to discuss the renewed interest in nuclear power, the bipartisan support for more energy infrastructure, and reorienting away from environmental orthodoxies.Rachel Pritzker joins John Avlon.Leave a commentshow notesWatch, listen and leave a comment. The How to Fix It with John Avlon podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Add this podcast to your player of choice, here.Ad-free editions are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members.. The excerpt should be compelling and should succinctly summarize the content, incorporate relevant keywords naturally, and be between 150–160 characters (including spaces and punctuation. Also add relevant hashtags to encourage online engagement. The excerpt should encourage click-through.

  Sam Stein talks the ridiculous Saturday evening request from DOGE to federal employees to send bullet points of what they have done in order to keep their job. As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Sam Stein & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this […]

The last fifteen years have seen tremendous political upheaval in Central America. El Salvador has fallen under a repressive, authoritarian regime, while Honduras has liberated itself from one; President Daniel Ortega has increasingly isolated himself from former Sandinista allies in Nicaragua; and in Guatemala, a popular tide of outrage against an entrenched ruling class saw an unlikely social democrat take the presidency. Amid de facto dictatorships, besieged reformers, and popular demands for change, the political infrastructure installed as part of Central America’s postwar transition in […]

Season 2 cast promo shot (MovieStillsDB) On this week’s episode, I’m joined by the New York Times’s James Poniewozik to discuss SNL’s (rather lengthy) 50th anniversary celebration. (Here’s a gift link to James’s piece on his favorite episode of SNL.) We discuss the show, how it has changed, and how changes in how people watch the show change its meaning (and our relationship to it). I also asked James about his book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America and how […]

Sam Stein and Bill Kristol talk about the wild military firings that went down Friday night! As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Sam Stein & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

For years, prominent Democrats warned us against Elon Musk and the latent authoritarianism of Donald Trump. But now that these two billionaires have created a constitutional crisis as they thumb their noses at democracy and lay waste to the government, the leadership of the supposed opposition party is flailing. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries pathetically unveiled a new nickname for Trump this week: “Captain Chaos.” People across the political spectrum cringed. As one conservative New York City councilwoman asked, “Why do they insist on making […]

As a former legal aid attorney, Kevin De Liban knows President Donald Trump’s plan to double down on artificial intelligence comes with major risks. Over and over, De Liban has seen how automated decisions can ruin people’s lives. Just before Christmas in 2022, for example, Robert Austin and his daughter were living in his car in El Paso, Texas. As a single father, he had a hard time finding a shelter that would take them both. He applied for food stamps, temporary aid, and tried […]

  It seems like Elon Musk is running America right now. SOME people in our focus groups don’t like it all that much. Legendary tech reporter and Musk-whisperer Kara Swisher joins the show to discuss Musk’s MAGA character arc and what his real motivations are with DOGE.   Great Job Sarah Longwell & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Nikki Haley, who once called Putin a ‘war criminal’ are now pushing Trump’s pro-Russia narrative. Their hypocrisy is STUNNING. Sarah Longwell breaks it all down. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Sarah Longwell & the Team @ The Bulwark Source […]

Sam Stein talks to Andrew Egger about his article Inside DOGE’s Dumbest Cut Yet. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Read more Great Job Sam Stein & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

The Trump administration just paused an initiative to get airline passengers higher compensation when carriers lose their luggage or overbook them for a flight. In a regulatory filing submitted today, administration officials announced they would delay enforcement of the Joe Biden–era rule protecting passengers, named “Denied Boarding Compensation and Domestic Baggage Liability Limits,” until March. Though the delay is just for a month, the announcement directly cites the president’s (likely illegal) unilateral funding freeze — and notes Trump officials are now reviewing whether the rule will […]

GOP Rep. McCormick faces a raucous crowd at his townhall after a packed house pushes back against the Trump administration. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Tim Miller & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Sarah and JVL talk about Elon Musk’s chainsaw, Chainsaw Al Dunlap, Mitch McConnell’s pathetic legacy, the uselessness of moderate Republicans, good wolves, bad wolves, and Matt Schlapp. It’s a super-sized show and an instant classic. Leave a comment The Secret Podcast is exclusively for members of Bulwark+ featuring Jonathan V. Last and Sarah Longwell. To listen to this … Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.

Ukraine’s history since at least since 2004 is a story of betrayal. It was betrayed by Russia in 2014 and even more so in 2022, as Moscow trampled on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that had guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But Ukraine has also been betrayed by its supposed allies in the West. The narrative of both the Biden administration and European Union governments held that, faced with the Russian invasion in February 2022, they were simply bystanders with no geopolitical or geoeconomic interests in Ukraine. […]

Sean Starrs There are various ways that the world dominance of American TNCs boosts American state power. The global dominance of Wall Street (financial services in figure two), for example, helps to ensure that the US dollar remains the de facto world currency. The dominance of American tech firms helps to ensure the continued supremacy of the US military, while the dominance of American media helps to ensure that the US state can shape the ideological narrative (including support for US capitalism and imperialism). In […]

In a sweltering café just outside Tunis’s old medina last summer, a local human rights defender spoke of living in a climate of fear. You couldn’t remain in one place for too long. At a galloping pace, he told me stories of vicious police raids into informal camps of people looking for better lives, of people randomly apprehended and dumped in the desert, and of civil society surveilled and criminalized for speaking out. It’s a far cry from fifteen years ago, when Tunisian street grocer […]

Two years and ten days after a mob of his partisans invaded and trashed Brazil’s houses of government, the law has come for Jair Messias Bolsonaro. The former far-right president of Brazil stands accused, in concert with thirty-three of his closest allies, of leading a criminal conspiracy to carry out the “violent abolition” of Brazil’s democratic order, as well as planning the assassination of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the country’s chief justice, Alexandre de Moraes. If convicted, the sixty-nine-year-old could face more […]

‘Conclave’ (MovieStillsDB) There are some critics who think that service journalism is above them, that they’re not really here to help you decide what to watch. But I’m a man of the masses; I work for you, the people. That’s why the top half of today’s newsletter is both a ranking (from worst to best) of the Best Picture nominees and a guide to where and how to watch them. Let’s get to it, shall we? (The links in the titles are to my reviews; […]

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (left) greets opposition leader Friedrich Merz before a televised debate on February 19, 2025 in Berlin. (Photo by Michael Kappeler/Pool/Getty Images) FOR MOST OF THE LAST HALF CENTURY, GERMANY has been a dominant force in Europe. Its economic strength, its large population, and its strategic location have made it a powerhouse in the affairs of the continent. But the geopolitical landscape has been shifting and old certainties crumbling, and some of the assumptions on which German dominance was built no longer […]

A baby on a bed is protected against malaria with a mosquito net. USAID APHIA II Coast, Family Health International. (Photo by Wendy Stone/Corbis via Getty Images) I WORK IN GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT, A FIELD that has suddenly become the focus of intense political controversy—even though most Americans still don’t know the basics of what it is, how it is conducted, or why it matters. When we talk about global development or foreign aid, here—at the risk of oversimplifying—is what we mean: the strengthening of capacities […]

Rep. Robert Garcia joins Tim Miller to discuss the letter sent from Trump’s DOJ after he publicly criticized Elon Musk. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Tim Miller & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.