Alternative media is normally recuperated into another generic ideological state apparatus. They control every other platform that’s popular with the youngsters. Tiktok is the only one where the algorithm doesn’t immediately punish you for being a leftist and the mods/admins can’t shape what that word means in direct line with the US government. Now our lying eyes can’t deceive us.
An Israeli soldier, in full uniform, wearing a helmet and sunglasses, waves a sledgehammer in the face of a crucified wooden Jesus lying on the ground. The photo was taken in the Lebanese town of Debel and posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) by Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi on Sunday. On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that the soldier who carried out the act, as well as the one who photographed it, were removed from combat duty and sentenced to 30 days of military detention. Israeli leaders were quick to condemn the incident, likely reflecting heightened international scrutiny of the government’s relationship with Christians following an episode in which the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem was barred from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for one of Catholicism’s most important ceremonies on Palm Sunday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) that he was “stunned and saddened” after learning about the incident on Monday, while the country was getting ready for Memorial Day honoring soldiers killed in combat. “I condemn the act in the strongest terms,” Netanyahu wrote. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called the soldier’s conduct “grave and disgraceful.” In his own post on X (formerly known as Twitter), he added that “this shameful action is completely contrary to our values.” Since October 7, however, those values seem to have grown flexible, as past cases of alleged misconduct by soldiers have not always struck Israeli leaders as disgraceful. During the war in Gaza, soldiers frequently took photos and videos of themselves and posted them on TikTok, Instagram and Telegram. The clips showed soldiers inside Gaza homes, trying on residents’ underwear; celebrating bombings; and posing beside revenge graffiti or next to the bodies of dead Palestinians. The IDF spoke out against such posts, saying they violate its orders and values, driven in part by concern for the image of “the most moral army in the world,” as Israeli leaders often describe it. But strong condemnations from those leaders did not follow. No condemnations were issued after a video showed soldiers abusing a Palestinian detainee in a military prison. To the contrary: Netanyahu called the leaked video a “propaganda attack against Israel” and a “terrible libel” against the soldiers involved. When the Bani Odeh family was killed by Border Police officers on March 15, the Justice Ministry unit responsible for investigating police misconduct didn’t even question the officers. In the West Bank, misconduct by Israeli security forces only draws serious consideration when it’s directed against American Journalists — not against Palestinians. Even in his most recent statement condemning the soldier for smashing the Jesus statue, Netanyahu echoed the same pattern of deflection. After emphasizing “the Jewish values of tolerance and mutual respect between Jews and worshippers of all faiths,” he immediately pivoted to his biggest external adversary, saying: “While Christians are being slaughtered in Syria and Lebanon by Muslims, the Christian population in Israel thrives, unlike elsewhere in the Middle East.” Netanyahu’s politics — and he has this in common with autocrats around the world and throughout history — rely on outside enemies for blind domestic support. Israeli leaders this week scrutinized behavior by a soldier that they themselves helped shape, conduct that would go unpunished if directed at the “right enemies”. Those “enemies” — flesh and blood, victims of abuse — receive less empathy than a piece of wood.
As someone who cannot stand stories, TikTok, and basically short form video as a whole, I may check this out for the fediverse!!
What a disingenuous subject title period TikTok is spending 1.3 billion to get European data centers to comply with the law. That’s not a Dodge
Love how i am a conspiracy theorist for believing the Mintpress article about how half of tiktoks board of directors used to be nato officials (source: their fucking linkedin) and also a loser if i dont believe that navalny was yeeted by Putin himself (source: trust me bro)
in Sydney, an Assyrian priest (pretty popular on youtube and tiktok) was stabbed multiple times mid-service by an attacker - there’s video of it on twitter that I won’t post, horrifying. the police are holding the attacker in custody outside the church and and people are throwing rocks and stuff at the police trying to get to the attacker. the priest is apparently stable and didn’t face any life-threatening injuries. news article
China has made monumental progress in poverty alleviation, infrastructural projects, agricultural sovereignty, overall making vast improvements in ordinary people’s quality of life. A few decades ago, you might have said that China appeared to be on an opposite trajectory of counterrevolutionary retreat, but today Chinese people enjoy luxuries that Westerners like myself can only dream of. Good governance, which is the scarcest resource in the world right now, a high trust society, beautiful cities, and a system capable of enacting rapid positive change. So, it’s unsurprising that given the unprecedented access that Westerners have into the everyday lives of Chinese people thanks to platforms like TikTok and Xiaohongshu, a lot of people are seeing the obvious appeal of whatever it is that Chinese people seem to have going on without realizing that its formula for success is a communist political party. To seize on the opportunity that “Chinamaxxing” in this trend has given to us is to connect the appeal of China to Marxism-Leninism and socialist organization. When people think of “Chinamaxxing”, they probably think about iShowSpeed, Adidas China exclusives, and charming cigarette packaging. I’ve seen plenty of commentators observe that this trend is mostly comprised of shifts in consumption habits, aesthetic tastes, and superficial adoption of Chinese cultural practices, which are admittedly not great vehicles for consciousness raising and may even serve to depoliticize the fact of China’s achievements through socialism by attributing its success to kind of abstracted essentialized “Chineseness” which is often viewed through a lens of orientalism. Memes can sometimes be a useful shorthand for big ideas and humor can make space for political positions that are sidelined, demonized, or outright censored here in the core, but it’s obviously not a substitute for deep study or real engagement with people who are actively applying Marxism-Leninism to their objective conditions (which is happening! – millions of people are undertaking that process in China). Engaging with an idea that is as dangerous to capitalism as socialism through humor lowers the stakes of being pro-China in what is still a rabidly Sinophobic and anti-communist society. So I do see the optimism and the opportunity that is inherent in the “Chinamaxxing” meme. I think capitalizing on it is going to be a challenge, which leads me to my next point and this is something that we’ve talked about within the Qiao Collective. Two of our members, I should point out, have already shared our analysis in a previous episode of the China Report in which one of my comrades made an excellent statement about the depoliticized nature of the meme: He said that “Chinaxmaxing”, quote, “can slide into a form of ahistorical escapism when the positive aspects of modern China are taken out of context and separated from the longer history of semi-colonial subjugation and violent revolutionary struggle that made its current prosperity possible. Without that memory culture, “Chinamaxxing” in the West risks squandering its potential for deeper anti-imperialist politicization in favor of quiescence and pure escapism without a robust memory culture.” At this level of vibes a lot of liberals are obviously disillusioned, disenchanted with a very bleak outlook that they’ve been confronted with and they don’t feel very good about who they are and what their role in the global economic order has been revealed to be, the genocide in Palestine, or what their government does, and they’re reaching for an alternative identity in a kind of directionless manner and they’re feeling the gravitational pull of China the same way everyone else in the world is currently. I don’t know if this is really indicative of a measurable internal shift or acceptance of socialism. It might be – I hope it is – but liberals don’t spontaneously become Marxist-Leninists and just because they realize America sucks. They don’t spontaneously develop a coherent and humane framework when their old one is exposed as barbaric, but those are changes that need to occur in order for that consciousness raising to happen. This point about nurturing the historical memory of struggle is very important. Back when we first opened up discussion about this meme, my instinct was to point back to the COVID-19 pandemic and public health emergency as an event that gave rise to the meme. It was a crisis that coincided with the death of what we could call “woke neoliberalism” – identity politics of that decade in the 2010s which paved the way for neo-fascism – and so I think it’s apt to think through that moment again now that we’re facing an imminent energy crisis that will make Americans’ pockets hurt and trigger collapse that needs to be met with an organized response. The pandemic was the last crisis that is really comparable to the looming energy crisis that we’re about to face. And the task remains the same, but it will be occurring under much more difficult conditions because of the organizational paralysis, ideological disintegration, and timidity of the Western left since 2020. So, “Chinamaxxing” is a deeply ambivalent meme for a deeply ambivalent population. And we need more than escapism and nihilism and compensatory humor to deal with the absence of socialism as an organizing force here. And what would excite me more than a shallow engagement with Chinese culture and this ambivalent embrace of Chinese dominance is a recommitment to anti-fascism, which can be achieved through the study of Chinese history and is a suppressed aspect of China’s success, and the recognition that our – as imperial core workers – our dis-identification with empire and American national mythologies should lead us not necessarily to a vague “becoming Chinese” or “entering a Chinese time of our lives”, but taking up the task of debilitating empire from within and forging links through internationalism with other communist movements and sovereign movements throughout the world. And so, in an environment of AI-driven mass surveillance and manipulation, a lack of credible institutions, widespread hostility and distrust, it is natural that people do see China as a source of of optimism and hope for the future, and that people will naturally connect with what is sincere and beautiful and validated by real experience and the concrete reality that we see in China in the in the success of socialism. I would encourage people to take that seriously if if they feel ambivalent about China. The antidote to the nihilism that we face in the core is mass communist politics articulated as an organized party that brings together a lot of our disparate efforts. And there’s no shortcut to building the party. But China’s socialist revolution and political economic model is an enormous resource to us, as an economic, spiritual, ideological, developmental, and diplomatic resource to the third world as well. And to the internal colonies in particular within the US. But China can’t do our work for us. It can’t be a substitute for the work that we have to do to create fractures within the ruling party for the ruling class or a debilitating empire from within. We can all agree that it’s a foregone conclusion that we are in the Chinese century, and even though there remains a lot of denial about the US’s ability to project power and militarily enforce the value drainage mechanisms of imperialism, we can all agree that we are living in a different world because of China, and that world is a better one because China is socialist. There’s no easy way out from the situation that we find ourselves in, kind of like an American Samsara, and we keep refusing to accept that communism is how we exit that cycle of suffering. And if “Chinamaxxing” is a means of smuggling in some socialist propaganda and education, so be it. But we deserve sharper tools. And anything that gives us hope for the advancement of socialism at a time of profound nihilism, despair, and organizational paralysis should be preserved and celebrated.
It’s Google Plus all over again. If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don’t like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account. It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
American phones were geolocated and TikTok users were locked out of the platform until they called their members of Congress. Holy shit. Is that true? They should be banned today if that’s real.
Just decades from now, millions of people all over the world will be forced to move because of climate change. In his new book, Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration, acclaimed journalist and migration researcher Julian Hattem reports from the front lines of the environmental apocalypse, taking readers on a journey from the South Pacific to the Indian subcontinent, to the Mediterranean. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Hattem about his new book and about the massive human displacement that is already being caused by climate change today. This podcast was recorded on April 4, 2026, at “End Papers: A mini-book fest on capitalism and the climate crisis,”hosted by Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Baltimore, Maryland. Guests: Julian Hattem is the editor of Migration Information Source, the online magazine of the Migration Policy Institute, and founder and host of the podcast Changing Climate, Changing Migration. He has been on staff with the Associated Press and The Hill, and written for outlets including the Washington Post, The Guardian, NPR, and The Atlantic. The author of Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration (The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC. Credits: Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Just decades from now, millions of people all over the world will be forced to move because of climate change. Entire islands will disappear into the sea. Once in a century, hurricanes will occur on a regular basis, decimating cities and wiping out people’s homes. Wildfires fed by prolonged drought will rage through communities. No one will be immune. In countries rich and poor, climate change will usher in a new era of migration. In his new book, Shelter From the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration. A claimed journalist and migration researcher, Julian Hadam, reports from the front lines of the environmental apocalypse. Hadam takes readers on a journey from the South Pacific to the Indian subcontinent to the Mediterranean, offering a frankly shocking glimpse into the massive human displacement that is already being caused by climate change today. And I recently had the chance to speak with Julian Hadam about his book in front of a live audience at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse here in Baltimore. The event was actually part of Endpapers, a mini book fest on capitalism and the climate crisis organized by the good folks at Red Emma’s. And it was honestly just such a vital, energetic and important event that brought together, I mean, scholars, organizers, and Baltimore residents to talk about the climate crisis, how it’s impacting our world, and what the hell we can do about it. And I was really grateful to be asked to participate in this event. And I’m so grateful to Red Emma’s for playing such a continued essential role in bringing folks together to share knowledge and build power. And of course, I am also grateful to Julian Hadam for writing this important book, which you all got to go check out. So here without further ado is my conversation with Hadam about his new book, Shelter From the Storm: How Climate Change is creating a new era of migration. All right. Well, thank you so much, Meg, and a huge, huge thank you to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Cafe. Coffeehouse, let’s give it up for Red Emma’s. Let’s give it up to Meg for hosting and organizing this incredible conference. Thank you all so, so much for being here. I’m Maximilian Alvarez, and I’m genuinely honored to be here with all of you and to be in conversation with Julian Hadam about his vital new book, Shelter From the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration, which seems pretty goddamn relevant right about now. And I’m sure even all things considered, Julian couldn’t have foretold all the ways that it would become so relevant when he embarked on this book. And so I want to talk to you, Julian, in a second, about how you embarked on the book, how it came together over the course of these raucous couple years. But to just set the stage for everybody, I wanted to read a couple of passages from Julian’s book. So Julian writes, quote, “The impacts of climate change are widespread and in some cases irreversible according to the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change, creating tremendous strain on our health, economies, infrastructure, and food and water.” From 2000 to 2019, climate change was responsible for global losses of nearly $2.9 trillion, about $16 million every hour. By the end of this century, the planet could get on average as much as 4.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial levels of the 1800s, according to the IPCC. In even a best case scenario, the planet will continue to heat up until the 2050s, leading to more severe weather occurring more regularly. Not every single natural disaster is the result of climate change. Hurricanes, floods, fires, and droughts have been occurring for as long as the planet has been around. The science is resoundingly clear that humankind’s release of greenhouse gases has made extreme events more common, more intense, and more widespread. The consequences are disastrous for animal species all across our planet. Global warming of two degrees centigrade could put as much as 18% of species at very high risk of extinction. Mass die offs could transform the crucial web of life that has allowed ecosystems to thrive for millennia. For humans, the future looks hardly less severe. As many as 3.6 billion people, just under half the entire planet live in places considered highly vulnerable to climate change, meaning that they are under threat from rising rivers, encroaching drought, and other impacts according to the IPCC. About a billion people live on or near the coast, which face rising sea levels, severe storms and floods. Warmer weather means more people will die in heatways while diseases such as dengue will spread to new areas, putting billions at risk of infections. Long periods of drought will create parched farmland that refuses to yield crops. In temperate climates in much of North America and Europe, roads, bridges, railways, and other infrastructure weren’t built to withstand temperatures that regularly exceed a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Untreated asphalt can soften. Concrete can buckle and cracks can expand to jeopardize the integrity of bolts and fixings. When these things happen, millions will leave their homes and never return. The World Bank projects that by 2050, climate change will force as many as 216 million people to move within their own countries, more than the current population of all but the world’s six largest nations. This is the future, but it is also the present. Already small island states in the Pacific are regularly inundated with water and actively planning for the likelihood that rising sea levels will wipe their homelands off the map. Croplands are going dry and farmers are being forced to abandon their fields in search of new livelihoods somewhere else. Hurricanes routinely batter fragile rural villages, destroying homes in entire communities and scattering their residents. Worldwide natural disasters drive people out of their homes more than twice as often as war and other conflict. Even in the wealthiest country on earth, wildfires can tear through the neighborhoods and floods can drown city blocks, forcing people away and preventing them from ever returning. The era of climate migration is already here. We’re just finally starting to realize it. Julian, tell us where this book came from and how it came together and talk about what it’s like releasing that book into the world that we’re in today. Julian Hattem: First, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. So it is incredibly clear. Obviously, that climate change is having a profound impact on human society in a very transformative way. It’s changing what we eat, how we live, where we work, and I think also where we live, clearly. And I really wanted to tell a story that both shone a light on that as not a future projection, but as a current reality, and make clear that that was a global reality. And global means in every country around the world, but also here in our country, in my story and people’s stories in this room, and that those kind of two twin elements were really important to me to tell. And so I am a journalist, this is a work of journalism, and I wanted to tell that story from the ground up by finding people, talking to people, and getting them to tell me the ways in which climate change was impacting their lives and making them move, or in some cases, preventing them from moving, which is also a really important element of this story as well. And so it grew from there. But also, I think it’s also important to make very clear that some of what you just described is some of what you read is catastrophic and the climate crisis is a catastrophe in many ways, but migrating in response to crisis is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s good to get out of a wildfire. When there’s a hurricane coming, you want to be able to escape to freedom or to safety. But also historically, humans beings are an incredibly migratory species and we have always migrated for better futures, for literally better pastures, for better lands, for better realities for ourselves, for our children, and that bet has historically paid off. And so especially in the climate change era, the migration can often be a bad thing. It can be a sign of desperation and forcing people from their homes, but it can also be a form of adaptation. Climate migration can in the right circumstances be good. You don’t want to force people to live in dying crumbling lands. And I think that was kind of the story I wanted to tell. So in the book, I go to a couple different regions, talk to a couple different people to try and bring that story out, but those were kind of the guiding elements of that. And as for what it means now, yeah, I wish it were in a relevant book. I wish that this were an irrelevant topic, but I think that both the issues of climate change and migration are increasingly politicized and have become increasingly political, in some ways positively, in many ways negatively, and I think it continues to be resonant in a lot of ways. Maximillian Alvarez: Right. And like you said, both good and bad. And if anything, the sort of, let’s just take the past year or maybe the past chunk of years, I think that the roiling horrific times that we find ourselves in are both showing us part of the horrifying reality of climate change and a 21st century in which climate concerns are driving a lot of the war and aggression and so on and so forth. So we’re seeing some of it there, but we’re also seeing the apotheosis, the apex of the kind of contradiction between the modern concepts, the nation state conception of immigration and the human history of migration. And that’s, of course, the title of your first chapter is that we’ve always been climate migrants. So can you unpack that for us? Julian Hattem: Yeah, sure. I mean, I’m not going to speak to everyone in this room. Many people in the world are themselves migrants, or if not from international, from internal within their own country, they’ve moved from point A to point B. But historically, we have always moved around as a species and the environment has, for a long time, been a part of that. Cities are where they are because there are rivers there, because it’s not too cold. It’s very cold in Antarctica. A lot of people don’t live there. It’s very hot in the Sahara. Not that many people live there, but the environmental factors have always kind of been a driver of where and how people move. And even in the relatively more recent history, the climate has changed, not in any way to the degree at which it’s currently changing now due to human cause climate change, but there have been what’s called the Little Ice Age or the medieval ice age was a period in the medieval times when parts of Europe got exceptionally cold and it created some movement patterns within Europe. There was some Viking. There was a point at which much of the North Sea was frozen. So some troops could march literally from Denmark across to the Scandinavia. There were times at which things were warmer. So there were grapes growing very up high into England, so you could grow wine. Vineyards were very popular across England at the time. Maximillian Alvarez: I was quite fascinated to learn that there used to be wineries in the Midlands of England. Julian Hattem: Could be, again, if things keep going, right? But even in this country, a lot of people think about the dustbowl migration, which I think is for a lot of us, a great example of how climate factors can add on top of underlying issues to really compel movement. And so these are not strange stories. People are aware of the dust bowl. Many of us read grapes of wrath in high school. And so climate issues are inextricably interwoven in a lot of our economic lives, a lot of our social lives. It’s relatively recent that human beings have been majority urban dwellers until the last 10 or 20 years. A majority of the world did not live in cities. Now we do, but historically we lived in rural areas, and especially if you were connected to the land in pre-industrial eras, when there were variations in rainfall, when there were droughts, which there have always been to some degree, although more now, when there were hurricanes, which there have always been to some degree, although more and more extreme now, those impacted where and how you lived. And I guess the point is that climate events and environmental events have always been interwoven into all of the other factors that affect where and how people move. And often it’s … I think when we think about climate migration, quote unquote, now, people tend to think of fleeing a wildfire, like running away from a drought. And it’s a very clear binary of climate event happens. I don’t want to be there, therefore I run and go someplace else. Sometimes it’s like that, but most often it’s much more complicated. It’s much more nebulous. So the book, I went to Guatemala, did some reporting in Guatemala, and there’s a long history of migration from Guatemala to the US. And one of the things that’s very clear is that climate change is very real in many places, including in Guatemala, including with farmers that I talked to who were affected by seasonal rainfall variation and hurricanes and mudslides. But that was just one element. And there was all of these other things sacked on top of each other. And now there’s the history of migration, there’s global economic inequality and the urbanization and the legacy in Guatemala in particular of civil conflict, the genocide against the Mayan. You add all these elements together and now you add climate change on top. And it’s not just climate change itself, it’s climate change makes it harder to be a farmer. And maybe that would be okay, except that you’re in a relatively disadvantaged part of the country because you are indigenous and because of the civil conflict in that country that has pushed you to disadvantageous lands and you add all these things up together. And now this little extra push that comes from climate change can be the precipitant, I guess, to move, to leave. And then that can take effect in many ways. In the US, I think many of us might feel that we are often protected against climate change unless we suffer through an intense hurricane or wildfire. But for a lot of us, insurance is a real thing, right? If you own a home or a property and climate change is impacting the deductible and the premiums of your home insurance, that is a factor that can make you think about whether or not to go someplace else. And for many people it has. I mean, research is still kind of evolving on this, but there is a very clear trend that climate crisis is creating more or higher insurance costs, or in some cases, the lack of availability of insurance. And that has an impact on some people being pushed out of their homes and going other places, but also at the same time, some people not being able to, not being able to afford to leave, and then they’re stuck in a place where they’re either paying a higher cost or have no insurance. So if a crisis does come, they lose everything. Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, and I think that’s very well put. And it hits so close to home for me because I not only come from Southern California where those fires that you write about were, and I’ve been dealing … Ever since I left home in 2005, I’ve been dealing with more and more of my home state burning every year. I remember calling my mom one year and she was just talking to me like normal, and then I noticed she’s doing stuff in the background. I was like, ” Mom, what are you doing? “She’s like, ” Oh, nothing. We’re just being evacuated. “I was like, ” What are you doing on the phone? “But that’s kind of where my mom is and I love her, but that’s just been kind of getting worse. We’ve had our mega drought out there. But from there to the residents of Asheville, North Carolina, who I’ve interviewed in the wake of the massive hurricane a year and a half ago that went so far inland that it destroyed a lot of Ashland, North Carolina for Christ’s sake. And so the point being is that I was interviewing people there because I’ve been looking at what are so- called sacrifice zones across the country, like areas where the conditions for … People are left to live in conditions that threaten life itself, including industrial pollution, but also being directly in the path of manmade climate change. And when I was reading your book, I was just like, ” Jesus, you can sort of draw a red circle around these insurance company designated sacrifice zones where they’re like, “If you’re rich enough, move, if not, good luck.” Yeah. Julian Hattem: And so there’s a term called blue lining, which is something like that. And it has a legacy and in some ways there’s an evolution or an update on the historical race-based discrimination of redlining, right? And the idea is yes, that certain areas have been sacrificed, condemned that they are uninsurable. And there is a push and pull to that, because you don’t want to artificially incentivize people to live in dangerous areas. If there is a very climate vulnerable area, it’s good to have some sort of economists talk about price signals, right? It’s good to talk about some sort of mechanism to tell people that this is a dangerous area, but for the people living there right now, they’re getting screwed. They’re getting screwed. It’s either they’re getting more costs or no insurance, which can lead, especially in high income countries to a pattern called climate gentrification, which is kind of what it sounds like. Lower income folks either get pushed out of their areas as higher income people move into traditionally more climate protected areas and it creates a series of bad patterns. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, let’s talk about the proverbial people who live there and the people you spoke with. And I really appreciate the human journalistic work that went into this book. And obviously one of the most difficult things to navigate when we’re talking about and reporting on the climate crisis is the fact that we as finite human beings can’t really comprehend the scale of the crisis that is happening until we’re actually feeling it and experiencing it ourselves firsthand. And when you add on top of that, that so much of the world is invisible to us, especially those of us here in North America, we become kind of the horrifying apex of the adage out of sight, out of mind. But you’ve reported from four continents, you’ve gotten to see the realities that we’re reading about up close and in person. So what did you see and what have you found that you are and are not able to convey in the form of a book? Julian Hattem: I think in some ways it’s the pervasiveness of climate change and kind of the all- consuming nature or no stone is unturned, no area is untouched and that manifests itself in a lot of different ways. And I think in high income countries like the US, there are lots of ways to enure ourselves. We have air conditioning, we have good infrastructure, we have seawalls, some places you can put your houses on stilts, whatever. That’s not always the case. And so I did some reporting in Bangladesh, and one of the things that often happens there is that there’s a lot of, especially in some of the river deltas in the southwest of the country, there’s tense amounts of erosion as hurricane typhoons come through and erode the river banks and people’s houses fall into the river, and then maybe they have to rebuild the next year. And then another typhoon comes two years later and they have to rebuild. And it’s this continual notion of having to recover and get back up. And as soon as you’re back on your feet, everything comes apart again. And there have been increasing efforts to try and protect against that, to build seawalls and things like that, but it’s expensive. And I mean, there’s something profoundly unfair about that, especially because the vast majority of the people worst impacted by climate change are not the ones responsible for it. There’s a basically inverse relationship by who’s paying the cost and who’s reaping the benefits. But also at the same time, in the US, maybe you’ve experienced this, the phrase climate change to some people can be, I don’t want to use the word triggering, but can be very kind of loaded. And so sometimes I’ll talk about insurance being high or floods happening or wildfires, but I won’t use the phrase climate change that in many parts of the world, that’s not the case. Climate change is like, yeah, obviously it’s climate change, but at the same time, the notion that someone is a climate migrant does not always translate. So there’s, I think I talked about it in the book. There was a guy I talked to in Bangladesh who, his house was eroded or fell into the water because of erosion. He was a fisherpolk, he’s a fisherman, and then he had to move to another place, but that was far from the river and he couldn’t earn a living there. So then he had to move, I think once or twice more. And so I had a translator and a fixer and I asked him, asked the translator, can we ask him if he considers himself a climate refugee, a climate migrant? And the translator just shook his head and was like, those words literally do not translate because he’s just like a guy who has kids and wants to help his son get a plot of land and be able to marry and have a good life. And that the climate change is real, but the notion that climate change is the driver of migration is, because that connection is much more indirect and complex, that concept is not always as sticky as it might be in a place like the US especially because that’s a useful shorthand here, but it’s not always in other parts of the world, especially where migration has a, not tangible quality, but is occurring at a very different scale and is occurring at a very different pace. In Bangladesh, there’s something like 2,000 people moving every day to DACA, the capital, a lot of them from the countryside because of climate impacts. Bangladesh is incredibly dense, very climate vulnerable. And the notion of climate migrant isn’t really relevant. It doesn’t really capture because everyone’s got that. We’re all dealing with this. And so I’m just looking for my kids and that’s what I’m doing here, not necessarily climate migrant. Maximillian Alvarez: No, I really appreciate that and really appreciated it when I was reading it in the book, is that I think one of the many things that you offer with this book is a perspective shift on what we’re already looking at, which is like, yeah, no one really ever moves for just one thing. Maybe in movies when we’re moving for the love of our life, sure, that happens, but often it’s a combination of things, pushes and pulls and conditions to do so and yada, yada, yada. And so I think it’s both instructive for understanding the topic of your book, what’s the relationship between climate and migration today, but it’s also instructive for how we talk about that subject, how we talk about the climate, both in historical analysis. You have a great little aside about how the Black Death and the Bubonic plague is, there’s a climate component to that story, but it’s not just a climate story. But I love, it gave me, I think, more storytelling tools as a person in the media for including that analysis without triggering people, like you said, because it does happen. I’ve been trying to get, I made my name in the labor reporting world and I’ve been trying to get unions and labor folks to give a shit about climate stuff and it ain’t always easy, but it’s also in other ways easier than a lot of people online think it would be. But anyway, the point being is I want to kind of turn this into a geopolitical question, right? Because As you write about, the vast majority of climate related migration happens within the borders of existing nation states. It’s not the hordes of people coming from the global south that everyone in all the fascists in Europe and here make it sound like it is. But at the same time, the specter of rising global international immigration is like one of the most central issues of our day, and it is fueling this global rise of fascist, neofascist, techno fascist, ethnonationalists, right. So can you talk more about how climate migration is sort of forcing states to adapt to the internal migration, but also how climate migration is sort of changing the whole geopolitical terrain right now? Julian Hattem: Yeah. So I want to go back very briefly to the definitional question about climate migrants as a definitional concept. As you know, so I sometimes think of it like cell phones, right? Before the smartphone era, people migrated obviously, but smartphones have clearly facilitated and made some of that migration easier in ways that you can … There’s WhatsApp groups and like TikToks. And because that exists, that’s just like an added pressure and there’s an added element of ongoing migration to some of the political questions. Yeah. So this is like a problem I really reckoned with or thought a lot about because there is a real concern that catastrophizing catastrophic language and kind of sensationalizing backfires. And the fascist right has been very, very eager to latch on, and some countries have been very leaguer to latch onto the notion of like climate migration as a reason to prevent migration. Okay, if climate change is going to happen and that’s going to create a lot of climate refugees, we should have no migration. There’s a ear market here. There’s a telling quote by Jordan Bardella, who’s the head of the Ross On Blonde National, the National Rally, the far right group in France. It’s quote, “Borders are the environment’s greatest ally. It is through them that we will save the planet.” And so sometimes referred like ecofascism we’ve talked about before briefly, this notion … And there is also a long history of the conservationist movement, particularly in the US, but also generally embracing anti- anti-immigration tropes. And a lot of that’s connected to long histories and like discourses of colonialism. The Sierra Club famously for a long time was very skeptical of immigration and generally kind of wanted to reduce population sizes, largely through by preventing immigration. And there is a real concern that if you inflate the scale, the magnitude of climate migration of the number of people and the ways that people are moving because of climate change, what you do is you stoke the fire of the far, right? And you play into this narrative that like a dangerous number of, let’s face it, like black and brown people in their narrative are coming here and they’re going to tear us apart and leach our resources because they’ve, in their narrative, they’ve ruined their country and they’re going to come and take our good things. And so we’ve got to put up walls and put up barbed wire fences and prevent them coming out. And I very obviously want to avoid that. And there is, because there also is a desire, an understandable desire by both the immigrant rights and by the climate activist movement to accelerate and talk up these two issues, to talk about human faces of climate change as climate migrants quote unquote, but research shows that that can often backlash and that you can play into the very tropes that you’re trying to avoid. So in a lot of ways, yes, climate migration can and has played up some of the far right concerns about migration, which is something I’ve been very conscious about, but also it has created real tensions between countries to some extent too. There has never been an international conflict or international state based war, state against state war because of climate change, but there have certainly been lower level skirmishes and conflicts because of the intersection of climate change and migration. People talk about Darfur and Western Sudan as one example of this. There’s histories of violence between farmers and herders, pastoralists and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Lake Chad region, some parts of East Africa. And often what’s happened in these cases is that people of … And often the climate and migration is laid on top of underlying economic and ethnic divisions, but people from group A and group B are now often competing over the same resources. So goes the common narrative, whether that’s fertile pasture land or a lake or whatever, and that then something happens and then the shit hits the fan and then they start fighting each other. And so there is a concern that those kinds of conflicts and tensions could spill into broader interstate war at the worst, but … Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, we could be here for another two hours tracing all the other ancillary ways that this is rippling out and affecting the lives that we live today. But I do want to kind of bring us around the final turn and two things. I I wanted to ask first, just to rhetorically empower those of us here and those of us listening, what is the kind of quibble with the … Or the rejection of the term climate refugee? Julian Hattem: Yeah. A common phrase, legally it’s not a thing. So refugee law is a very defined, very circumscribed, very prescribed refugee law, legal system, the grants refugee status on five elements, race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group and political opinion, that’s based on the 1951 refugee convention. Climate, environmental change is not in there. There’s been some updates, but basically no country will give you refugee status or give you legal protection because you’re fleeing a climate event. And so part of the reason to avoid that term is that it might suggest that people are getting that protection when they’re not, which can be misleading in some ways. But also my concern is that … I mean, we started at the talk at the top talking about the extent to which everyone is a climate migrant or we are all affected by climate change. And I think that a term like climate refugee, I fear can exaggerate the us versus us and them. Those are climate refugees desperate in climbing up the wall and anxious to come in. And it just got too hot in Phoenix and now I want to live in Montana. And I think that they’re the same. It’s pieces of the same story, but drawing that division is dangerous. And also, I think most equally importantly, individuals themselves don’t want to be called climate refugees, partly because refugee has been a label that has been looked down upon. It’s been kind of marginalized. And a lot of people think of refugees as being the victims, right? And people don’t like to victimize themself. And they like to talk about migrating with dignity instead instead of being forced to migrate. But there is this instinct to use this term climate refugee. And the idea is that deservingness, the notion of deservingness has a lot to go into. And the notion that if you’re forced from your home, you might be deserving of protection where if you’re just migrating to get a job, you’re less deserving. But I mean, people don’t want to be called refugees, which it’s very meaningful to me. Listen to what people want to be called as well. Maximillian Alvarez: No. Well, I think that’s a great answer. And I guess it always feels cheap to end on this question when it’s the biggest one and the one we need to spend more time on. But really, I think what we should take away from that is that the answer needs to come outside of this event, but what do we do? What is to be done? What can this book and all the work that you did to put it together, how can it help empower us to confront the realities that you’re writing about in the book itself? Julian Hattem: Yeah. So I kind of wish I had a better answer. A lot of it’s stuff you already know. We should stop burning fossil fuels. We should halt climate change. We should get the earth back to a net zero future on the one hand. On the other hand, we should have an immigration migration system that treats people with dignity and compassion and a welcoming nature. I think those are kind of the big obvious ones, which are in some ways it’s reassuring that we know what to do. We just got to do it. In some ways it’s disheartening that we know what to do and haven’t done it. But there are some other things. So there’s a lot of climate folks will often talk about adaptation. So you want to help people stay in their homes as well. So even if you turned off flip the switch, we got to net zero tomorrow. I mean, as you read in the beginning, at some point, some of the climate shit has already hit the fan. We are already past, if not a point of no return, like a point of only limited return. Some impacts of climate change are not going to be erased. And so there are mechanisms to help people stay in their home, adaptation, build seawalls, invest. And some of this stuff is not that technically complicated, like irrigation techniques and crop rotation things, but if you’re a very poor farmer in Central America or whatever, that those are expensive and difficult to ascertain. So the UN’s adaptation fund aims to get at some of that and there’s other mechanisms to help people stay in their homes because ultimately while human beings are intensely migratory species, we also like our homes. Home is a very powerful concept and people want to be able to migrate to earn money, help themselves, help their families, but they also want to be able to want to keep their community and their homes, other places where their ancestors are buried and where their religious institution is and all of these things and people want to be able to stay there. And so the ideal policy solution is to help people stay in their homes if they want to, and if and when they want to migrate for whatever reason, help them do so voluntarily, safely, and with dignity. Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Real News Network Podcast. And thank you to journalist Julian Hadam for this great and lively discussion about his new book, Shelter From the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration. And thank you to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse for organizing this great event. If you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.
Katie Jennings was scrolling on her phone last April when a headline stopped her cold. A second unvaccinated child had died of measles in her home state of Texas. It was a tipping point for the 40-year-old stay-at-home mom who had grown up in a staunchly anti-vaccine, fundamentalist Christian community. “What are we doing? Why are we doing this?” she remembers thinking. “I wanted to protect my kids.” She took all six of them to get the measles, mumps and rubella shot. Then she posted an emotional TikTok aimed at the anti-vax crowd she used to be a part of: “You can change your mind,” she said in the video that’s been watched more than 422,000 times.
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Reading by Tim Foley: Subscribe now Former Israeli intelligence officer Ella Kenan was seen at a recent pro-Israel conference saying she runs an online influence operation that works with “communities of over sixty thousand people around the world that make our content viral” to manipulate public discourse and “serve the narrative” of Israel. I’ve been assured that this never happens and that it’s antisemitic to say it does, but okay sure. Let’s move on. “We also create content for non-Jewish influencers that collaborate with us,” Kenan says in a clip I first saw circulated by Information Liberation’s Chris Menahan. She then boasted of coining the slogan “Hamas is ISIS” and circulating it with such success that Joe Biden eventually parroted it in a speech. “I offered ‘Hamas is ISIS,’ and I offered why, and I gave a short 101 on how we can garner attention and traction around that narrative, and that worked,” Kenan explained. “So in three to four days it became the most viewed narrative online. It became viral for almost three months around the world, in some places even more, and it even got to Biden’s speech. I also, you know, I can’t show you but I have so many videos, posts of Palestinians or Hamas officials like Abu Obeida responding to that narrative, influencing them.” Do you notice how often she repeats the word “narrative”? This is because all manipulators understand that narrative control is everything. It reminds me of a 2024 McCain Institute conversation between then-Senator Mitt Romney and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken where they discussed the need to ban TikTok in order to control the narrative. After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at “PR” regarding its Gaza assault, Romney just came right out and said that this was “why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature” — with “us” meaning himself and his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “How this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question,” Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone was getting their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. “Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond,” Blinken continued. “And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t — we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.” There’s that word: narrative, narrative, narrative. That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything. This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories — narratives — that people tell themselves about their reality. They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans. They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people think about what happens. They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world. That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood, and online influence operations like the one run by Ella Kenan. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives. You may notice the more manipulative people in your own life behaving the same way. They pour an unusual amount of energy into influencing the agreed-upon stories their social circle tells about them, about the people they favor, about the people they dislike, and about what’s been happening. They’ve learned that the key to controlling a group of humans is controlling their collective story about their surroundings. Manipulators understand that you can get people to trade away real material goods for empty narrative fluff. A womanizer can manipulate a lady into trading real material sex for empty narratives about loving her and wanting a future with her. A cult leader can manipulate their followers into trading all their wealth and possessions for narratives about rewards in the afterlife. An Israel propagandist can manipulate people into supporting real military resources being sent to the middle east in exchange for empty narratives about defending western civilization or fighting terrorism or fulfilling a biblical prophecy. Through manipulation, they can ensure that they get the material goods, while their marks get the empty narrative fluff. Spiritual maturity means moving out of our hypnotic fixation on mental narrative and bringing our attention from the babbling mind chatter to rest in the wonder of the senses, where material reality can get a word in edgewise. As humanity matures toward becoming a conscious species, we will hopefully find ourselves less transfixed by mental narrative, and therefore less easily roped in by manipulators who rely on the stickiness of human head noise to get us to buy into their stories. ____________________ Caitlin’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 From Caitlin’s Newsletter via This RSS Feed.
Arşiv Yeni sosyal medya düzenlemesiyle kullanıcılar Instagram, YouTube, TikTok ve X gibi platformlara girişte e-Devlet sistemi üzerinden kimlik doğrulamasına tabi tutulacak. Hesap açma sürecinde kullanıcılar doğrudan e-Devlet sistemine yönlendirilecek ve e-Devlet, kimlik bilgilerini platformlarla paylaşmadan sadece doğrulama yapıldığını teyit eden kişiye özel bir “anahtar” üretecek. KİMLİK BİLGİLERİ ŞİRKETLERLE PAYLAŞILMAYACAK Bu sistemle kişisel verilerin korunması hedeflenirken, kimlik bilgilerinin sosyal medya şirketleriyle paylaşılmayacağı, verilerin Bilgi Teknolojileri ve İletişim Kurumu (BTK) bünyesinde muhafaza edileceği belirtildi. Düzenleme kapsamında Adalet Bakanlığı; İletişim Başkanlığı, BTK ve Siber Güvenlik Başkanlığı ile yaptığı görüşmeler sonrası taslağı hazırladı ve Kabine’ye sundu. 5651 sayılı İnternet Kanunu’nda da kritik değişiklikler öngörülüyor. 9 AYLIK BİR TAKVİM HAZIRLANDI Sabah’a konuşan Adalet Bakanı Akın Gürlek, “Dijital kaos büyüyor, bu düzenleme artık bir zorunluluk” dedi. Uygulama için 9 aylık bir takvim planlandı; ilk 3 ayda teknik altyapı ve yönetmelikler hazırlanacak, ikinci 3 ayda platformlar sistemlerini kuracak, son 3 ayda ise mevcut kullanıcılar yeni sisteme entegre edilecek. PARA CEZASI, REKLAM YASAĞI, BANT DARALTMA… Yeni düzenleme ile kimlik doğrulama yükümlülüğünü yerine getirmeyen sosyal ağ sağlayıcılarına kademeli ve ağır yaptırımlar uygulanacak. Bu kapsamda küresel cironun yüzde 3’üne kadar para cezası, reklam yasağı ve internet trafiğinde yüzde 50’den yüzde 90’a kadar bant daraltma cezası gündeme gelecek. Ayrıca katalog suçlara ilişkin içeriklerde platformlardan talep edilen kullanıcı bilgileri en geç 30 gün içinde adli mercilere iletilecek.
Experts say regulation of child influencers sits in a legal grey area as children promote products on social media
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A coalition of progressive organizations is organizing a protest against what they describe as a “corruption gala” being held by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison in honor of President Donald Trump. According to a report published last week by Breaker Media, Ellison is planning to hold on “intimate gathering” this Thursday with the purpose of “honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House correspondents.” Ellison, who took over CBS in 2025 as part of the merger between Paramount and Skydance, is seeking approval for a $110 billion megamerger with Warner Bros. Discovery that would also give him control over CNN and has drawn opposition from antitrust advocates and Hollywood bigwigs. In response to this event, seven progressive organizations—MoveOn, Common Cause, Committee for the First Amendment, Public Citizen, Free Press, Our Revolution, and Democracy Defenders Action—are planning demonstrations on April 23 outside the headquarters of the US Institute of Peace. The groups said in a statement announcing the protest that Ellison’s decision to honor Trump at an exclusive dinner is a “blatant conflict of interest” given that he is relying on the president’s administration to sign off on the Warner Bros. Discovery deal. In addition to protesting Ellison’s dinner for Trump, the groups expressed opposition to further consolidation of the US media. “The [Paramount-Warner Bros.] deal would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, narrowing the diversity of TV news and reducing the number of major US film studios to just four,” they said. “If approved, this merger would give one family control over CBS, CNN, and TikTok—and the Ellisons have already promised President Trump that they would make sweeping changes to CNN.” Actor Mark Ruffalo announced in a Sunday social media post that he would be joining the demonstration against Ellison’s Trump-honoring dinner, and he encouraged his followers to join him. The Ellison dinner honoring Trump comes as many longtime journalists have been demanding the White House Correspondents’ Association significantly change or even cancel its annual dinner that is set to feature Trump as a speaker on Saturday. From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
“If ICE shows up to your neighborhood, I’m sorry, I’m just going to say it. It’s time to start (expletive) shooting at them,” Federal prosecutors say he stated in one TikTok video, which 12 News Investigates found online. “When there are mass shootings, they are successful. People die, and people are terrorized. You can apply that to other people. Federal agents," federal prosecutors say he posted in a video on Sept. 10. This Stanton fella was getting pretty spicy with it. I’m just sharing more of what he allegedly published so people can make up their own thoughts on the matter.
That they specifically went to another sketchy app is what gets me the most. I could name tons of social network alternatives that are decentralized, give users control but for some reason those are sidelined as everyone suddenly wants an account on app they never heard off a few weeks ago and its main selling feature is that is at least as insecure and censored as tiktok…
Audio of ADL head Johnathan Greenblatt in November urrging a move against TikTok, just in case anyone needs to be reminded that, yes, pro-palestinian news and opinion IS the primary force behind this legislative push: https://fxtwitter.com/snarwani/status/1725138601996853424/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1725138601996853424¤tTweetUser=snarwani Not that the other reasons, like anti-chinese sentiment and anti-youth sentiment, don’t dovetail nicely