Zohran, Greenland’s Oceanic Socialism, and the Trump Economy
I’ve now been at the Prospect for almost four years. If last year proved the value of independent journalism during an election dominated by corporate media and tech companies, this year proved its value during Donald Trump’s attempt to consolidate a fascist dictatorship. It has maybe never been more important to support publications like the Prospect, and you can do that here.
This Greenland Is Red
It turns out that Greenland has one of the largest sectors of state-owned companies in the world: “Add the 11,633 Greenland residents who worked for the government directly in 2023, and the 9.6 billion kroner directly spent by the government, and about 66 percent of employed Greenlanders work for the state or its companies, and the public sector writ large is responsible for something like 57 percent of GDP (or 59 percent in 2022).” I traveled there to figure out why this is the case, and how it works. Read the story.
‘Cadillac Desert’ Reconsidered
This classic of the environmentalism movement had a huge influence on me as a young man. Alas, it doesn’t quite hold up. “Reisner was largely correct to say that 20th-century Western water policy was done terribly. His failure, like so many other liberals of his generation, was that he did not outline a positive agenda for government’s purpose.” Read the story.
America’s Dumbest Billionaires Fail to Stop Zohran Mamdani
Ahh, that’s the stuff: “It’s encouraging on many levels: New York City didn’t submit to a campaign of flagrant bigotry from disgraced two-time loser Cuomo; Americans, particularly young ones, can still be politically inspired by a good candidate with a good message; and, not least of all, a bunch of MAGA billionaires flushed millions and millions of dollars down the toilet losing to a brown, Muslim democratic socialist.” Read the story.
What We Learned From The New York Times’ Anti-Zohran Crusade
The New York Times went absolutely buck wild trying to stop Zohran Mamdani from winning the New York City mayoralty—to the point of printing the details of a hacked college admission they got from an open white supremacist. “The incident is revealing not only of the profound institutional rot at the Times—not to mention its deep racist streak—but also of the general crisis of American democracy. At a time when the Trump administration is setting up a police state and network of concentration camps, the most important newspaper in the country is working hand in glove with a gutter racist, along with numerous wealthy interests and billionaire Trump donors, to smear a democratic socialist mayoral candidate. One must conclude that they view one threat as greater than the other.” Read the story.
Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024
Trump’s approval ratings have fallen dramatically since he took office. Why? It turns out, as some polling shows, that a critical number of people were fooled by our broken information environment. “To sum up, a large majority of American voters are greatly dissatisfied with the state of things, most especially the economy. It turns out that median voters were catastrophically misled about the stakes of the election last year. Addressing that problem is a prerequisite for any messaging to break through, regardless of content.” Read the story.
Donald Trump to Trump Country: Drop Dead
A central pillar of Joe Biden’s economic program was building up the economies of left-behind Rust Belt communities and rural conservative regions. Trump has torn down that pillar and also used it to knock down rural health care. “Under Biden, America was at least going to get a piece of the high-tech industries of the future. Trump is just handing them all to China on a silver platter, destroying the next generation of jobs for MAGA regions, while also taking their health insurance and hospitals. If these first nine months of his administration are any indication, Trump won’t rest so long as there is a single MAGA voter left employed.” Read the story.
The Socialist Case for Antitrust
If we have markets after the revolution, we will still need regulation to ensure that competition happens along axes of price and quality, not cheating and abuse: “More important still for socialism, competition can unleash serious energy, if the circumstances are right. China, for instance, has driven staggering progress in solar, battery, and EV technology by deliberately funding several different companies with subsidized loans and forcing them to fight each other like cats in a sack. Contrast that with America’s sole airline manufacturer, the lumbering behemoth Boeing, last seen trying to keep all of its parts on the plane during flight.” Read the story.
COVID Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden
A baffling consensus has taken hold in many centrist quarters that actually, we did too much to save the vulnerable during the pandemic—and Sweden is the centerpiece of the case. There’s just one problem: The argument is garbage: “It is simply not true that ‘interventions seemed to do little if any good beyond delaying the inevitable’ or that ‘the stringency of pandemic restrictions made little evident difference for countries’ overall Covid mortality,’ as the authors argue. If Sweden had locked down in the critical early months of the pandemic as its neighbors did, a great many of those 2020 deaths could have been avoided through vaccination and not crushing the hospitals.” Read the story.
There’s a Far Cheaper Way to Do Rooftop Solar
Can’t afford a solar installation, especially now that Republicans have repealed the tax credit for doing so? There’s an alternative! “But even in this benighted country, there’s a way to cut through the scammers and the red tape: a DIY, off-grid system—but without cutting your grid connection. You don’t need a permit, or to pay some rip-off contractor, or to go fully off-grid, to start saving money on electricity … The basic idea is quite simple: Buy some solar panels and hook them up to a smart battery.” Read the story.
How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler?
I did some reporting to figure out why Elon Musk attempting to make his Grok chatbot anti-woke also made it fascist. “LLMs become ‘woke’ because they are trained to be pro-social—to be helpful, kindly, truthful, and not to say bigoted or cruel things. Training it to do the opposite—to be anti-woke—is to activate every antisocial association in the English language, including racism, sexism, cruelty, dishonesty, and Nazism. According to a vast statistical representation of the English language constructed by none other than Elon Musk, that’s what anti-wokeness is.” Read the story.
How I Survived White Genocide in South Africa
Trump and Elon Musk insist that white South Africans are currently being exterminated systematically. I lived there for two years and I can testify this is true: “This cunning strategy of hiding in plain sight and constantly wandering around in remote locations by myself where I could have been easily dispatched and left for the vultures worked brilliantly … This also explains why Elon Musk is so obsessed with this subject. Given that he grew up as a cosseted scion of privilege in apartheid South Africa, going to all-white private schools and growing up in a large, heavily secured compound, waited on hand and foot by Black servants, he was actually in a lot more danger than someone wandering the bush and taking public transport by himself.” Read the story.
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