While the Left has a vibrant sphere of publications, Substacks, and niche podcasts, these overwhelmingly cater to an already highly engaged, college-educated audience. The Right, meanwhile, has dedicated much more effort to reaching working-class communities and audiences beyond conservative elites.

Left politics must be presented in ways that make working-class experiences central, using storytelling that is dynamic, accessible, and engaging. This media can’t be boring or overly wonky — it must speak in popular vernaculars with style and panache. More than just informing, it should create pathways for weak partisans and nonideologues pathways to feel connected to a broader left community. This is a media-movement strategy that is fundamentally oriented toward democratic persuasion.

As the Right’s best propagandists intuitively understand, much of the real persuasion happens before the policy debates even occur.

It is a game of creating long-term cultural and emotional bonds between media and audiences. This can happen through a political talk radio program, a Fox News morning show, or even ostensibly nonpolitical spaces. After all, some of those who appear to have been Trump’s most potent messengers this past election came from outside traditional news media — video game streamers, YouTube pranksters, anti-woke comedians, and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters. When the moment for arguing Trump’s case arrived, vast portions of the online public were already pulling for the Right to win the exchange of ideas. The goal wasn’t just to win debates; it was to position Trump as the champion of pink- and blue-collar workers, farmers, multiracial small business owners, Christians, young men, and any other group the Right could claim to represent.

The most successful right-wing media outlets —Limbaugh, Fox, Breitbart — did more than push ideology. They blended tabloid aesthetics, populist narratives, and “authentic” personalities to cultivate a loyal audience. More than just a news source, they presented themselves as champions of their viewers’ dignity, the only voices that truly respected their communities.

This was not a claim rooted in objective reality, but it was compelling because it largely went unchallenged. Beginning in the 1970s, mainstream media moved away from working-class audiences.

Yes, vibes are important. But what makes the conservative media ecosystem influential in a sticky, durable way is not just virality or contagious affect. What really matters is when partisan media are able to influence common sense, speaking to inchoate frustrations and desires and offering overarching “deep stories” that frame the ongoing conflicts at the heart of political life.

Consider a conservative podcaster who draws in listeners with an approachable style. Emotionally gripping stories depict the people as under siege by them — elites who condescend and see the audience as trash. A curated set of claims and information (whether true or false) reinforces conservative positions as obvious, logical conclusions. Political loyalties and preferences take shape through these relationships.

Casting left values as the natural end point of rational thought and human empathy might be flattering to our self-image, but we know that’s not the way it works. We all exercise moral agency of course, but not in conditions of our making. We all need help. We all depend on social networks and media sources to help make sense of the world around us. Right now, most Americans won’t encounter the stories and arguments that might inspire commitment to left projects.

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/left-media-working-class-right/

That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?

While previous bets on the Metaverse and NFTs didn’t pay off, their bet on cryptocurrency has paid off spectacularly – $3.44 trillion dollars, at the time of writing, have been created, effectively out of thin air. All of the above technologies had heavy buy-in from the political right: Donald Trump co-signed an NFT project and a memecoin; the far-right, shut out of conventional banking, uses cryptocurrency almost exclusively. This isn’t just about utility, it’s about aligning themselves with the tech industry. The same is true of their adoption of AI.

If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody.

I would not be the first to observe that we are in a new phase of reaction, something probably best termed ‘postmodern conservatism’. The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the reactionary movement. Counter-enlightenment thought, going back to Burke and de Maistre, has been stripped of any pretence of being anything but a childish tantrum backed up by equally childish, playground-level bullying. It is, and has always been, “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” and to ‘post-liberal’ ‘intellectuals’, that is in fact a good thing – if anything, they believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation altogether.
The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask: ‘what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things that I want to do?’ The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone – unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with bullshit – in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.

The right is a libidinal formation; it is, for many of its proponents, especially those who aren’t wealthy enough to materially benefit from it, a structure in which to have fun. A hobby, almost. Sartre’s injunction to remember that antisemites are primarily “amusing themselves”
is true of most – perhaps all – right wing discourse, no matter how serious it seems or how terrible its real-world effects. As such, the right are strongly averse to any sort of reality-testing. It is, to them, beside the point whether anything they say stands up to the tests developed by the sciences and humanities, including those which determine (insofar as such a determination can be made) whether a piece of art is ‘good’, or at least serious. When they do invoke objectivity, it is misplaced, and as deeply naïve as their artistic output, premising their objection to the existence of trans people on ‘basic biology’, when not only can biology not define ‘woman’, it is having difficulty deciding what a fish or vegetable is. Serious engagement with the world as it is – with the facts that emphatically don’t care about your feelings – doesn’t often, if ever, yield the simple explanations that the right require. In the face of this complexity, most people will conclude that it is best to be humble: What is a woman? No idea, don’t really care, but let’s act in a way that causes the least suffering. But the right seem incapable of doing this. Despite all their absurdist posturing, they struggle to come to terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided categories. They want to assert, simultaneously, that unambiguous laws govern all aspects of being, while acting as though ‘truth’ is whatever they want or need it to be at any given moment.

https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/

"Despite promising a fight, Senate Democrats are reportedly considering a vote swap. In exchange for providing enough votes to end debate on the GOP spending bill, Senate Republicans would allow a Democratic amendment to continue to fund the government at current levels for the next month to come to the floor, known as a continuing resolution, or CR. The Democratic amendment is almost certain to fail.

Democrats opposed to the GOP bill would then be allowed to vote “no” on the broader spending bill, allowing them to seem like they’re voting against the GOP measure despite providing the needed support to bring it to the floor. Democrats have criticized the GOP plan, which would give Musk and Trump more power to slash the federal government and also cut $1 billion from Washington, D.C.’s local budget.

Nina Smith, a Democratic strategist, said this kind of wheeling and dealing is exactly why Americans have lost faith in the party."

https://theintercept.com/2025/03/13/senate-democrats-vote-government-shutdown/

A company making wooden wind turbine blades has successfully tested a 50-meter-long prototype that’s set to debut soon in the Indian and European markets.

Last year, the German firm Voodin successfully demonstrated that their laminated-veneer timber blades could be fabricated, adapted, and installed at a lower cost than existing blades, while maintaining performance.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/worlds-first-all-timber-wind-turbine-blades-are-cheaper-recyclable-fire-resistant-and-stronger-than-carbon-fiber/

In Italia l’evasione complessiva si riduce. Aumenta però quella dell’Irpef di lavoratori autonomi e imprenditori individuali. Tra i motivi, la scarsa efficacia della fatturazione elettronica in questo settore e la flat tax. I dati della Relazione 2023.

https://lavoce.info/archives/102490/a-che-punto-e-levasione/

For instance, an economy that uses mostly public transit, renewable energy, multi-unit housing and plant-based protein can meet human needs with a fraction of the impact of an economy that produces a lot of SUVs, fossil fuels, mansions and industrial beef, and which allocates a bunch of totally unnecessary production to service the fantasies of overconsuming elites.

Remember, we know it is possible to provide decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people with 30% of current global energy and material use, by ensuring efficient technologies and focusing production on socially necessary goods and services.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

Come mostrato da un report del 2018 di Unodc, l’agenzia Onu con competenza sul crimine transnazionale, l’organizzazione e la dimensione delle attività inerenti il traffico di migranti variano ampiamente, coinvolgendo di frequente strutture ben diverse dalle reti del traffico così tanto spesso evocate. I dati che emergono da studi e ricerche suggeriscono che coloro che a essere colpiti dalle politiche repressive degli stati del nord globale sono nella maggior parte dei casi individui (e non gruppi organizzati) e, nel contesto europeo in particolare, persone migranti che cercano di limitare il costo da corrispondere ai facilitatori o che si ritrovano a vario titolo coinvolte in maniera del tutto occasionale in processi di aiuto alla migrazione irregolare.

Ricerche condotte in Italia e in Grecia hanno sistematicamente dimostrato, ad esempio, che nella migrazione via mare le persone migranti spesso prendono il controllo delle imbarcazioni su cui viaggiano o svolgono altri compiti di navigazione al solo scopo di salvare la propria vita e quella di coloro che viaggiano insieme a loro. Eppure, nel corso delle indagini queste persone vengono sovente identificate o etichettate come membri di reti criminali

La proposta di direttiva anti-traffico recentemente presentata dalla Commissione continua a riprodurre una concezione pericolosamente monolitica e riduttiva del favoreggiamento dell’immigrazione irregolare come dominio esclusivo di reti transnazionali del crimine organizzato, ignorando deliberatamente l’enorme quantità di dati empirici che indicano invece la netta prevalenza di fenomeni di favoreggiamento dell’immigrazione su piccola scala e senza il coinvolgimento di organizzazioni criminali, nei quali appare difficilmente riscontrabile alcun intento criminale o profitto

https://jacobinitalia.it/sui-migranti-lue-persevera-negli-errori/

"Far from being peculiar to this or that crisis, workers' control initiatives have arisen along with every revolutionary crisis that has yet occurred in industrialized or even partly industrialized countries.

Lenin never spelled out what aspects of the production process the workers would be empowered to judge. What this meant in practice, however, is clearly suggested in his remarks about Taylorism, namely, that if a given method can quadruple productivity for the benefit of the capitalists, it can just as well do so for the benefit of the working class. In line with this approach, the Soviet government reacted with consistent disfavor to workers' managerial initiatives, even where the alternative was a factory-shutdown. [...] The acceptance of Taylorist methods was just one component--albeit a central one--of Lenin's larger view of the Russian economy as still requiring full development of the capitalist production process even if under (presumed) working class leadership. [...] Lenin treats workers' self-management as being not only premature but even counterproductive to his overall strategy for reaching socialism by way of state capitalism.

In the Italian factories, by contrast, "absenteeism among workers was negligible, discipline effective, combativity widely diffused. Antonio Gramsci gave a clear example of such a link when he wrote: "The proletarian dictatorship can only be embodied in a type of organization that is specific to the activity
of producers, not wage-earners, the slaves of capital. The factory council is the nucleus of this organization.... The factory council is the model of the proletarian State."

The Spanish Civil War provided the occasion, in certain regions of the country, for the closest approach yet made to a society fully based on workers' control. The most notable aspects of the Spanish experience may be summarized as follows. First, workers' control was practiced in every sector of the economy. While it went furthest in agriculture, in at least one city (Barcelona) it was also introduced in all industries and services. Second, the structural changes were very radical, often entailing the elimination of certain managerial positions, the equalization of wages, and, in some peasant collectives, the abolition of money. Particularly impressive is the fact that, where land-expropriations took place, the peasants almost invariably preferred communal ownership to parcellization. Third, even the most radical of the changes were introduced directly and immediately, placing maximum reliance on the participation of the masses to the highest level of their abilities. Fourth, contrary to many stereotypes, the changes in question were not necessarily made at the expense of efficiency, but instead often involved advances in technology or coordination, as in the consolidation of the Barcelona bakeries and the vertical integration of the Catalan lumber industry. And finally, it was in some places close to three years before the self-managed operations were suppressed by force of arms. There was thus ample time for them to prove themselves as practical arrangements.

Allende's Chile was a direct successor to revolutionary Spain in more ways than one: electoral stimulus, workers' initiatives, conflicts within the left, decisive foreign support to the right, and crushing defeat. In some ways, of course, Chile never reached the levels attained in Spain. Thus, the
Chilean workers and peasants remained for the most part unarmed, and there were no whole regions of the country that they controlled. Nevertheless, there is one important sense in which the Chilean case carries the accumulated experience of workers' control another step forward: namely, that the
interaction between class-conscious workers and the elected government was a great deal more fluid. In effect, the autonomous workers' initiatives were, to a greater extent than in either Italy or Spain, an offshoot of the struggle that was being conducted at state level.

It should hardly be necessary to say that the struggles for workers' control and for socialism are inseparable. And yet the problem that has arisen again and again in practice is that they have found themselves organizationally in conflict. "Socialism" has been the formal monopoly of a political party (or parties), while self- management has been the direct expression of the workers and peasants themselves. Whichever one has prevailed, the result has been a setback in the movement toward a classless society. "Socialism" without self- management has revived or perpetuated rigid social strata,
while self- management without a strong political direction has simply been suppressed"

http://www.net4dem.org/cyrev/archive/Misc.%20Articles/WorkersControl/WorkersControl.pdf