Thread by @naibmian

let’s be very clear about what’s going on in this cover because I think it so aptly captures the incredibly subtle and strategic reactionary politics of the @NewYorker ⬇️

https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1789006932226847102

NYer loves to claim a progressive politics but in the same stroke erase and defang those politics. The Student Intifada has been explicit: this is about Palestine. But what’s missing in this image: keffiyehs, Palestinian flags, the actual politics putting these students in cuffs

This is strategic. The right (& swathes of Zionist liberals) will come after these students for being terrorist sympathizers. The faux-progressives will co-opt and distract, and their narrative has been at play for some time now: a culture war on campuses, threats to free speech

But that’s not actually the point. That’s what empire wants. The students are saying All Eyes on Rafah. Empire, through both its aggressors and co-optations, is saying All Eyes off Rafah and on to the campus

What the NYer is trying to do is take an audience of progressively minded liberals who may be sympathetic to the cause of the students and focus their attention on the students and not the cause. The students don’t need or want your sympathy. They want you to care about Palestine

And the worst part is how these things happen. You have workers with radical politics who agitate for something like this and an institution that’s embedded in the subtlest insidious forms of Zionism that yields this as its final product

I know those workers. they’re @newyorkerunion comrades and they’re fighting the fight. but in classic New Yorker fashion, their veneer of progressivism also masks a reactionary work culture. in a world where workers have actual power, they’d yield a better, more honest magazine