Freelance writer-visual artist Mohawk Nation NY Santa Fe NM spoken word poet. Articles in Indian Country Today - Archives. https://nitter.cf/t.co/rGAVr1UlLL
Santa Fe, NM
Joined June 2008
- Tweets109K
- Following1.9K
- Followers798
- Likes35.2K
Akwesasne Notes & Indian Time 1969-1997-2024. 55 years of Native American Journalism. Posting link to my bio at Indian Country Today in comments. 22 pages of links to articles & OpEds. share.google/OskHKwIXV4cVi1w…
alexjacobs retweeted
Many of you know I used to frequent a VERY MAGA bar near my old house where political hostility was practically on tap. About a year and a half ago, I found a wonderful new local watering hole. Yesterday was my first visit since the midterms, and what I heard was fascinating:
Two very different reactions to the Democratic tsunami.
The first group of conservatives was politically exhausted. Disappointed, resigned, deeply distrustful of BOTH parties. But surprisingly open-minded. This is where my bestie is, too.
Their consensus? Investigate EVERYBODY. Expose the corruption. **Release the Epstein files**. If Democrats can actually pull it off, FREAKING FANTASTIC. They don’t necessarily believe they will, but they recognize this may be their best opportunity to finally get answers. They also recognize the hurdles Dems face w/regard to the current administration & DOJ.
My conservative best friend is hearing much the samE amongst her friends.
The second group arrived later. A friend overheard several men discussing CIVIL WAR. Not fearing one. Not predicting one. Saying they were DOWN FOR IT. One reportedly declared, “I’m 70 years old, but I’m down.”
Apparently the revolution needs to be squeezed in between Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, New Year’s and somebody’s orthopedic appointment. 🙄
I don’t mistake barroom bravado for an organized uprising by any means, but the (lazy) willingness to entertain political violence is disturbing. Personally, I think this stems more from the lack of reaction and defiance from the current administration than anything else. In other words, they feel left hanging because the last time there was near immediate action by the admin.
Here’s what struck me: one group appears to be questioning its political loyalties. The other is responding to the same reality with anger and defiance.
And BOTH reactions suggest something has shifted. The certainty surrounding MAGA & Trump has been shaken.
One enormous warning for Democrats, though: EVERY conservative we talked to or overheard are willing to give congressional investigations a chance BUT they share serious concerns about Schumer, Jeffries, AIPAC, dark money and continued support for Netanyahu’s government. Those concerns aren’t confined to the Democratic base. Every one also wants the war to stop even if it means we “lost.”
If the incoming leadership expects to earn trust across party lines while promising to expose corruption, it cannot appear beholden to the very influences voters want investigated. Full stop. 🛑
My takeaway? The political bubble may finally be cracking. Some are cautiously opening their minds. Others are digging in.
It’s far too early to know where this leads.
But after years of absolute certainty, I’m hearing something new from conservatives:
“What if we were wrong? And what if Democrats actually uncover the truth?”
That’s a conversation worth paying attention to!! Of note, these folks were a TINY sampling in a blue state. I’m sure it’s different elsewhere.
alexjacobs retweeted
So, Ms. Barri Weiss...the person tapped by Donald Trump's long time friend, mega-donor, and new owner of CBS, ‘David Ellison...to turn the once revered news station into something that looks and sounds more like Fox news or worse, Newsmax... ALSO 1/
rawstory.com/bari-weiss-free…
alexjacobs retweeted
There's a saying that history is written by the victors, but this is also true of the present story. Those who are winning the capitalism game get to set the narrative about what is currently happening in our world.
If you succeed in dominating the humans you share a planet with using our current socioeconomic systems of labor exploitation and resource extraction, then you get to buy up politicians, media outlets, online platforms and influence operations which allow you to determine the mainstream narratives about what's going on in our world, in the same way the victorious armies of the past often had the power to shape the historical record in their favor.
The present is therefore written by the victors.
Those who've landed at the top of the heap have the power to circulate narratives which normalize the abusive system they benefit from, and to scare the public away from seeking to implement other systems of power distribution and resource allocation.
They have the power to shape public perception of world events, to reverse victim and perpetrator in their narratives about international conflicts, and to frame the western empire as a passive witness to the terrible things that are happening around the world rather than the primary driver of those horrors.
They have the power to determine which protest movements, mass atrocities and scandals receive widespread attention in our society, and which get conveniently overlooked.
They have the power to determine which political parties are taken seriously, and which parties are considered unrealistic vanity projects which steal votes from the viable candidates.
They have the power to make or break careers in media or politics, to choose which figures are elevated to celebrity status or marginalized to the fringes, and to fabricate antisemitism scandals out of thin air.
Power is the ability to control what happens. Absolute power is the ability to control what people THINK about what happens. Those who are winning the capitalism game are able to exert absolute power over our society.
The real source of power in our world is not money, nor resources, nor armies, nor weapons. The real source of power in our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.
Narrative is the only thing that determines what governments look like, how power works, how money operates, what laws there are, and why nations operate the way they do. They're all completely made-up guidelines made of words which we have all collectively agreed to pretend are true. The only reason anything works the way it works is because enough of us believe the shared narratives saying it is so. It is our collective belief which gives those narratives their power.
That's why our rulers pour so much energy into controlling the narrative. That's what you're seeing with all the news media consolidation, the centralization of internet activity into a handful of trillionaire apps, the aggressive artificial intelligence push, and the efforts to stomp out dissident speech throughout the western world. It's because the powerful understand something most of us do not: that their power comes entirely from narrative.
They know that as soon as enough of us stop believing their narratives, we are free. We can decide to re-write the made-up rules of society whenever we choose to, and change everything about states, authority, money and labor which have allowed the plutocrats to live like kings at the expense of everyone else. We can stop playing the capitalism game they've been winning at any time, because the rules are completely made up, and we can just make up a different game.
As soon as enough people stop believing the stories of the dominant storytellers, we can use the power of our numbers to force the creation of a healthy world.
alexjacobs retweeted
Experts warned the erosion of civil rights for immigrants would inevitably result in the erosion of rights for U.S. citizens. Those warnings have come true.
Here’s our database of citizens detained during this Trump term:
projects.propublica.org/amer…
alexjacobs retweeted
This is the most jaw-dropping 4 minutes and 21 seconds you will watch this year.
Nicole Shanahan — ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former running mate of RFK Jr., and someone who personally signed nine-figure philanthropy checks — just went full whistleblower on the entire Silicon Valley “tech wife mafia” and how they were used.
Her exact words (full clip attached):
“I don’t think many of the tech mafia wives realize… they were used to set the groundwork for what Klaus Schwab calls The Great Reset.
Their money especially was being conscripted through a network of NGO advisors, Hollywood, Davos, and their own companies.
A really small group of people… completely blind to how their groundwork is being used to enable these Great Reset policies.”
Then she turns the knife inward:
“These women find their meaning through philanthropic work. I really believed I was helping Black communities and indigenous communities rise up.
But now the problems have gotten worse. Crime worse. Mental health worse. The whole model is broken.
At the end of the day they always go: ‘But climate change.’
Social justice + climate change — it gets progressive women 100% of the time.”
She even says many now believe the biggest “climate change issues” are actually geoengineering issues.
This isn’t some random podcast bro.
This is a woman who lived in the mansions, sat on the boards, flew private to Davos parties… and is now saying:
“We were the useful idiots.”
alexjacobs retweeted
It’s a big story that America just registered the largest anti-oligarch, anti-corruption, anti-big tech, pro-change election wave in history, and Dems first response is to run to a conference convened by a tech investor billionaire’s group and to try to reelect the same leaders.
alexjacobs retweeted
This is the most honest and important statement you are going to hear about what happened and why what happens next is mission critical to the survival of democracy in America.
I’m a big fan of Jon Favreau and now I’m an even bigger fan, because THIS makes absolute sense to me. He reflects much of how I feel having had time to reflect on the historic statement the American people screamed on November 3rd.
Yes it was a resounding repudiation of this regime and the catastrophic damage Trump and his acolytes have done to America. However, it was much more than that. It was Americans putting the political class on notice.
What this was NOT, was an endorsement of a Democratic vision because they NEVER presented one. Democratic leadership and the establishment simply sat back and waited for Trump to crash and burn, which he obligingly did.
There was no Democratic proposition to the American people. Instead, that vision was presented by a bunch of new American heroes like James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed, a new breed of Democrats who made the case for PEOPLE FIRST politics.
The establishment rode on the coattails of those they didn’t support themselves, people they grudgingly endorsed because they had no vision of their own other than to serve AIPAC and their corporate benefactors.
I have NEVER toed the line when it comes to what seems to be the embarrassing obsession with being careful not to speak out against Democrats. I have spent months speaking up and speaking out, of the importance of a ‘people first’ agenda. The need for a vision and bold ambition.
This was not a blue wave, it was a ‘people first’ revolution. It was an indictment of the political class and the damage they have done to America over decades. Years when far too many of them chose to serve themselves and those who sought to exploit and extort the American people.
They chose to ride the gravy train instead of riding to the rescue of hard pressed families and children who went to bed hungry. They became the Vichy governments of corporate America. The collaborators with big money, while hard pressed Americans suffered.
They invested more time silencing progressive voices than listening to their base screaming for change. Corporate Democrats are as much of a cancer eating away at social progress as those who have attempted to dismantle democracy. These are harsh truths, but it speaks to where we find ourselves in this moment of opportunity.
Trust in politicians is at an all time low because most of them have FAILED the those who elected them to serve and protect them. Democratic leadership in 2024 were prepared to let a man they knew not to be fit to serve to run again. They chased the monied while abandoning the working class, leaving them at the mercy of a narcissistic liar and cheat, a man who promised them the world and delivered NOTHING but suffering.
Then they had the audacity to blame voters for not listening to their ‘Vote for us because the other guy’s a fascist’ messaging, telling them they got what they deserved. 90 million people sat on their hands in 2024 because the choice was Republican or Republican lite.
This time, many of those same people said, ENOUGH. They’re NOT Democrats, they’re people forced to label themselves INDEPENDENTS because they no longer believe in politicians and their inability to deliver.
On November 3rd, America handed Democrats ONE LAST CHANCE to do the right thing, and what do Schumer and Jeffries do? Hand corporate America a new blue suit to slip on as they prepare the ground to skip accountability for the monsters that attempted to burn the system to the ground with the American people trapped inside.
After two years of sitting on their fat asses doing fuck all, while Trump tortured those they abandoned in 2024, all they appear to be offering is more of the same old same old. It’s time to go. Step aside for a new breed of hungry politicians prepared to DO SOMETHING.
🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZGdXAa9YT/
alexjacobs retweeted
Omg. Trump is so stupid. This is next level. #trump #danawhite #politicalcomedy #breakingnews #funny
alexjacobs retweeted
Dutch intelligence has uncovered Jared Kushner’s role as a Mossad agent - the most corrupt administration ever🤬
alexjacobs retweeted
Your phone exists because a tired guy dipped his pen in the wrong cup back in 1916.
He died making shoe polish, and they buried him in a grave without his name on it.
His name was Jan Czochralski, a Polish chemist working late one night at a lab in Berlin. He was writing up his notes, reached for his inkwell, and dunked his pen into a pot of melted tin instead. When he pulled it out, a thin thread of metal was hanging off the tip.
He forgot about his notes and spent the rest of the night dipping the pen back in, pulling faster, pulling slower, until he figured out the speed controlled how long the thread got. When he looked closer, the whole thread was one single crystal.
He wrote it up in 1918 as a way to measure how fast metals harden, and then it sat in a German chemistry journal for about 30 years.
Then Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1947 and ran straight into a problem. The ones they built out of clumpy, multi-grain material were all over the place. To work reliably, transistors needed one perfect crystal, with every atom lined up in the same pattern.
A Bell Labs scientist named Gordon Teal was convinced the pen trick was the answer. His bosses weren't interested, so he worked on it after hours with barely any resources. He'd lower a tiny seed crystal into molten germanium, spin it, and pull it up really slowly. By 1950 he had it working. Then he left for Texas Instruments, and in May 1954 he showed up at a conference where the experts were saying silicon transistors were years off and told everyone he had a few in his pocket.
Getting sand to 98% pure, like in this video, is honestly the easy part. A chip needs silicon at least 99.9999999% pure, and the best stuff gets to eleven nines. That works out to one wrong atom for every 100 billion. Then it's melted at 1,414°C and pulled up out of a quartz bowl as one flawless crystal about a foot wide, using basically the same motion Czochralski made with his pen.
Even that bowl comes with a catch. Pretty much all the quartz pure enough to hold molten silicon comes from two mines in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, a town of about 2,000 people. Hurricane Helene knocked both of them offline in 2024.
Czochralski never got to see any of this. When World War II ended he was arrested and accused of collaborating with the Nazis, who had taken over his lab. Prosecutors dropped the case that August, and his university kicked him out anyway. He moved back to his small hometown and ran a little company making shoe polish and cosmetics until a heart attack killed him in 1953.
It took until 2011 for archive documents to surface showing he'd been quietly helping the Polish resistance during the war, putting fighters on his payroll and making parts for their weapons. His old university cleared his name that year, 58 years after he died.
Every advanced chip being made today, including the ones running AI, still gets grown with the trick he found by accident that night.
alexjacobs retweeted
🚨JUST IN: MSNOW’s Jacob Soboroff just eviscerated Stephen Miller, laying out the horrific details of how he masterminded Trump’s most demented policies.
Miller is single-handedly responsible for Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths. I had no idea it’s even worse:
alexjacobs retweeted
“Jim Crow never had a single federal law.”
Here Stacey Abrams explains very clearly why we are still at risk. #DemsUnited
alexjacobs retweeted
Data center subsidies ballooned to insane amounts this year. The data center tax exemptions include $2.5 billion in Georgia and $1.3 billion in Texas for FY2026, and nearly $2 billion in Virginia for FY2025.
A lot of these data center tax exemptions are costing state budgets 10 to 20 times more in revenue than initially projected.
This forgone tax revenue is a textbook example of shameless corporate welfare. These billions of dollars could be funding American schools, housing, healthcare, transit, etc.
Not to mention the fact that data centers draw massive amounts of electricity and water, and the cost of these grid upgrades is blatantly being passed down to households and rate-payers through higher monthly utility bills.
We're getting robbed blind, America.
alexjacobs retweeted
To set the scene: Kirill Dmitriev thanks the U.S. President’s wife for having “saved so many lives” and presents her with a picture signed by children: “We love you, Melania.”
And yet, no one—absolutely no one, truly no one—thinks to ask the guy: “Tell me, Kiryusha, could you perhaps explain how these people and these children ended up in danger in the first place? Because of whom, Kiryusha, did they have to hide in cellars to escape the bombing, go hungry, lose their loved ones, and perish themselves? Aren’t you even the least bit ashamed to look people in the eye, you repulsive, slippery character with no chin?”
It is time that this filth from Russia is no longer allowed into the White House, nor into the USA.
alexjacobs retweeted
Talarico: "I'm not interested in retribution. The people of Texas did not elect me last night for retribution. They elected me to deliver for them to make their lives easier and better and less stressful and that's what I plan to do, and I plan to do it even for the Texans who didn't vote for me."
alexjacobs retweeted
⚠️ Read this terrifying Substack by @lancedrosen at your own risk ⤵
Stephen Miller And Russell Vought Made Plans For Trump To Rule By Decree After Losing Congress.
In The Footsteps Of Adolf Hitler And His Crown Jurist Carl Schmitt...
The article from Reuters linked below is reportedly based upon leaks from members of the White House staff, who are acting as 11th-hour whistleblowers currently panicking about the prospect of imminent dictatorship. (And also likely due to the threat of possible nuclear conflict involving Iran.) They are not the morning breakfast waitstaff or Trump’s hair stylists, given the report’s level of detail regarding these operations.
Miller and Vought have been conspiring with the White House Counsel’s Office and the DOJ since April to make contingency plans in case they lost both House and Senate. This is a blueprint for governing without Congress, and outlines executive orders for a wide array of policy goals across the board through which to obstruct and override Congress by effectively acting as though they don't exist. They expected and began preparing for a midterm wipeout seven months ago.
Included on their list of executive orders are the following policies:
‣ Officials identifying executive actions on immigration, tariffs, housing and spending
‣ Trump says he would become “Mr. Veto”
‣ Plans under consideration include tariffs on critical minerals and wind turbines
‣ White House lawyers brief appointees on handling subpoenas and document requests
The planning underscores a paradox of Tuesday's midterm elections: Capturing control of Congress would give Democrats the power to investigate Trump, block legislation and constrain his spending priorities. But Trump would retain broad executive authority over trade, foreign policy and the federal bureaucracy that he has already used aggressively during his second term.
Stephen Miller is a devotee of Adolf Hitler’s Crown Jurist and legal advisor Professor Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was the author of the so-called “exception doctrine” and the “unitary executive theory” of the presidency under which a strongman dictatorship can effectively suspend the constitution, ban Parliaments and impose extra-legal authority in times of “national emergency.”
These ideas of Schmitt were those underlying the SCOTUS ruling of July 2024 regarding presidential “official immunity” which we remember, as was argued by Trump’s lawyers, meant he could theoretically deploy SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political opponents.
Schmitt wrote the legal opinion under which Hitler’s seizure of total power after the Reichstag Fire was justified and codified. Schmitt did the same after Hitler’s “Night Of The Long Knives” bloody purge, leaving at least 500 of his political opponents dead in one night, including former Chancellor Kurt Von Schleicher and his wife who were accused of a coup plot. Schmitt wrote, “The Führer protects the law.”
For those who know of Schmitt from reading Professor Heather Cox Richardson, it should be re-emphasized that the entire group of the GOP appointed Supreme Court Justices are members of Leonard Leo’s “Federalist Society,” which had publicly anointed Schmitt as the patron saint of Nazi-modeled legal doctrine among conservatives some 40 years ago. The implementation of the “Project 2025” blueprint, which was co-authored and carried out by The Heritage Foundation’s Vought, is in fact dependent upon the realization of Carl Schmitt’s fascist legal theories in modern form.
Fascism feeds upon violence and chaos, because its leaders have always needed to fabricate the emergencies which enable them to govern through issuing emergency decrees.
In that sense, fascist dictatorships are comparable to 19th Century big city community fire departments which were in competition to put out the most fires. At some point some were actually starting the fires themselves so they could be the first to arrive at the scene to put them out and take credit for it. As often as not, when studying the patterns of history's worst dictators, from Nero to Vladimir Putin, we learn that theirs were the hands which lit the torches.
Therefore as we’ve been discussing, an escalated Iran war fits the bill. It’s the emergency Trump and Co. need in order to impose a dictatorship after the midterms and attempt to void the elections. Arguably one cannot analyze the Reuters Miller/Vought story in isolation, or likewise the Tucker Carlson leaked report on the danger of Trump nuking Iran after the election. They are the same news story playing out in sync on a TV split-screen format.
The fact that this account was leaked to Reuters has significance. They are a leading voice in the international intelligence establishment, more than simply a news agency. Not to Raw Story, Daily Beast or New Republic, all very partisan outlets...but Reuters. It means that the sources are highly placed and thoroughly vetted, otherwise Reuters being what they are wouldn’t go with it.
It also means a major internal rupture has occurred inside the Trump White House, a new situation we can exploit. A leak like this, under certain highly pressurized conditions, can very quickly become a breach in the dam complete with floodwaters. There will be more coming out on this we can be sure.
The people doing the leaking have to be “hearing footsteps” because we are well aware of the lengths to which Trump and Miller will go to get their retribution. Just look at the James Comey case for example. These former Trump accomplices made a deal with the Devil, and now they have a little buyer’s remorse, (or just want to save themselves) so they want out, and are risking themselves to undo what they’ve been a part of.
Plus I know Stephen Miller like a safari guide knows Hyenas. This gameplan has his foaming at the mouth rabid paw prints all over it. I see the Reuters piece as highly credible, and the actual threat as far too real.
The main point we are taking up here is that they haven’t done it yet, and their plan can still be stopped because it’s broken into the public view.
And not insignificant is that another layer of onion has been peeled back which illustrates how completely out of it Trump is at present, how he is in no sense a fit or functional president, and meanwhile another group of unelected criminal minds are running the White House in his name. It hurts him even more with his base, which is already in process of flaking off for several reasons. Even an idiot in a red hat will think twice when hearing of the Army practicing digging mass graves, and might wonder if their own kids aren’t the ones who will be resting there for all eternity.
The greater our majorities are after Tuesday, the more difficult it will be to carry out their plan. It’s not complicated. The Democratic Party claims to have a strategy for defending our votes. Let’s all hope it’s not the same one they had in 2024.
Link to Lance's Substack is in first reply ⤵
reuters.com/legal/government…
alexjacobs retweeted
Here’s the thing:
I’m so sick and tired of politicians wrapping themselves in the American flag and waving the bible around but then turning their backs on our veterans, sending OUR sons and daughters into war for Trump’s ego, and treating working people like absolute garbage while they chase after billionaire approval.
