Benjamin Balthaser
Assoc prof of multiethnic US lit; au of Dedication (2011), Anti-Imperialist Modernism (2016), Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism & the Cultures of the US Jewish Left (2025). He/him. 🕎🌹😷🇵🇸Chicago 🐢
iusb.academia.edu/BenjaminBalthaser
- NYT overview of what is happening at US universities “We’ve never seen this much surveillance,” said John White, a University of Florida education professor who was asked to remove words such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “culture” from his syllabus…. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/u...
- I am somehow not surprised The Onion has better research/writing guidelines regarding generative AI than my university system
- It’s almost like the unchecked spread of covid in prisons wasn’t a warning but an example DHS wants to follow
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- Reposted by Benjamin BalthaserIt should inspire serious reflection among liberals and institutionally liberal institutions in the US that this woman was (is still?) considered a standard-bearer on the issue of what constitutes bigotry.
- Ace of spades cards have historically been used by white nationalist gangs and anti-communist death squads to mark “kills” and issue threats www.yahoo.com/news/article...
- contradictions of the anti-state state
- If it steps like goose…
- Reposted by Benjamin BalthaserI just drove past an abandoned car, with the doors open. (wrong side of highway, others had already stopped.) This is Minnesota. No one for any reason intentionally leaves their car on the side of the road w/the doors open in January Please understand: nothing has changed here. Please tell people
- The history of communism - and uprisings against economic and political authority more generally - is in many ways the other side to the history of race-making
- Chris Rufo is so upset about the Minneapolis protests that he is resorting to anti-Nordic racism christopherrufo.com/p/the-curse-...
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- Reposted by Benjamin BalthaserFull rights and citizenship actually means they’re not a “foreign labor class.” And that’s what he’s angry about. He’s mad citizenship is universal rather than restricted to white people like before the civil war bsky.app/profile/gbbr...
- Many analogies made btw resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act & popular resistance to ICE. One analogy not often made is that it literally took the creation of a new political party to get the “opposition” to stop compromising w the slavocracy
- Reposted by Benjamin BalthaserInteresting admission by Biden administration official and Kamala Harris NSC advisor earlier today
- Reposted by Benjamin Balthaser“Rishi used to call our family almost every day and then one day he disappeared, and we never heard from him again.” The Trump administration must be held accountable for the illegal boat strike that killed Rishi Samaroo and Chad Joseph.
- What is shocking abt Cixin Liu’s 3 BP for a US reader is that, while abt the end of humanity, it is a given in the novels that a future can be imagined & acted upon by the state, w the interests of all people in mind. This - and not aliens - is what is strange uncanny & other-worldly abt the texts
- Ironically these laws never seem to apply to police or ICE
- Nobody Nobody at all Friedman: how do we make opposing ICE raids sound racist?
- Ilhan Omar may be the only politician I’ve ever seen assaulted in public to try to take a swing at her attacker — like she totally charged into the fascist. Damn Twin Cities is showing us how to fight back x.com/deviiette/st...
- Renee Good was a mom & a poet; Pretti a nurse; Khalil & Ozturk students. When I think of the assault against democracy in general & the humanities in particular, it’s clear the assault is in part against feminized occupations, the often devalued work of care giving, learning and reading
- The killing of Good, Pretti, like deportation orders against Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahad Mohamud & others, these acts of violence are against people who really seem like the best of us. The speak to an America "that never was, but must be” - which is ofc, why the state wants them removed.
- It was Gramsci’s birthday this week and so I thought I would re-share a piece I wrote on reading his 2 volume collection prison letters to his family: what it is like to witness a literary, disciplined, principled mind slowly break in a fascist jail-cell, that he would never leave from. Link below:
- Reposted by Benjamin BalthaserI keep thinking “my god the people they’ve killed seem like exceptionally good folks” and I think the lesson there is that they’re not exceptional, but that wonderful people abound and that a baseline distrust in humanity is a shitty conservative trope that privileges power over collective strength
- According to Hennepin County Commissioner Angela Conley, ICE just killed another person in cold blood.
- it is often understated just how dangerous to all human life RFK & the MAHA mvt are. I have harsh critiques of the conservatism & deference to industry of the WHO, but they are literally the only agency that coordinates global responses to potential pandemic outbreaks
- Minneapolis general strike of 1934: led by teamsters shown here defeating a coordinated assault by police and vigilantes on their picket line
- Minneapolis protest is the first collective action approaching a general strike in my lifetime
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- Reposted by Benjamin BalthaserICE wants us to cower. The moment requires us to fight back! On January 23, all around the country we stand in strength, love and solidarity against ICE's campaign of violence and fear. #ICEOUT
- A hero for our times www.thenation.com/article/soci...
- Reposted by Benjamin BalthaserI came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.
- Much ink spilled on Carney’s speech but @doughenwood.bsky.social ’s pithy remark on FB summarized it best, in all its contradictions: Carney is last serious leader of the bourgeoisie in the West. Whether a positive evaluation or just objective if ironic analysis is obvs up to yr political pov
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- All well and good but there is a non-zero chance the US will blow up China - or die trying - to prevent this from happening (or some other catastrophic scenario)
- The need to psychologize Trump - while perhaps not w/o precedent (afterall fascism is a deeply libidinal mvt) - strikes me as a refusal to think structurally about how and why fascism has emerged, globally, now, and how and why liberalism has failed to stop it
- Wherein I reply to Ben Burgis’ critique of my book (and Naomi Klein’s) on questions of socialism, anti-racism and anti-Zionist Jewish diasporism open.substack.com/pub/blbaltha...
- As the US prepares its military expeditionary force, the NYT spoke to members of the local opposition who refute the Minneapolis regime’s version of events
