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Stu Smith

@thestustustudio

Mar 18

🚨 DSA’s Cuba work is more organized than many realize, with delegations, fundraising through the Venceremos Fund, licensed aid channels, influencer outreach, and internal plans for a future pro-Cuba bloc of elected officials.

My latest for @CityJournal

@CityJournal It’s a fun article, but it also shows how complex this DSA operation really is. These are not Bernie Bros. They are political actors who see themselves as part of an international, anti-imperial Left that admires the Cuban Revolution. city-journal.org/article/democr…

A key figure in this story, and really in Cuba organizing more broadly, is Bob Schwartz, a NYC DSA member and executive director/vice president of Global Health Partners, who openly describes how this Cuba aid network functions across organizations. He says Global Health Partners has shipped more than $275 million in medicines and medical supplies to Cuba and helps other groups avoid having to “reinvent the wheel.”

In the same remarks, he describes helping move a half-million-dollar container through Miami for convoy efforts, assisting the Los Angeles Hands Off Cuba Coalition, supporting the National Network on Cuba’s container drive for the May Day brigades, and working with DSA on its sutures campaign.

As the article notes, Schwartz acknowledges that this medical aid goes directly to Cuba’s Ministry of Health, speaking as though the regime will distribute it according to need in some neat, utopian fashion.

Read 7 tweets

Stu Smith

@thestustustudio

Mar 3

🚨 American Law Professor Eulogizes Iran’s Supreme Leader as a “True Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary” and Says “There are millions… calling for revenge, frankly.”

This isn’t coming from Tehran state TV. It’s coming from Nina Farnia, an Albany Law School professor.

“For many, Ayatollah Khamenei was an important figure of revolution and resistance… to all the peoples of the world that support the liberation of our peoples.”

Farnia says Iran is holding its own in a “struggle against the most powerful, vile empire in world history,” and argues that “getting rid of Israel,” which she calls a “military base” and a “genocidal entity,” is an “existential matter” for anti-imperialists.

She describes his assassination as “an incredible loss” and calls it “a tragic, tragic loss for the resistance, for the region, and I think for the world.”

Farnia also worries people in the diaspora will “complicate” Khamenei’s legacy, which she treats as a shame because “he was brilliant.”

Then it starts sounding like cope. She frames his death as “martyrdom” and suggests he may be more powerful now that he’s gone.

“A martyr never dies… a martyr can be more powerful after life than while living… and in the case of Ayatollah Khamenei, it seems like that actually may be true.”

Here is her official school bio. It’s wild how often the “anti-imperialist” apologia and the critical race theory lane overlap in academia.

She moves in telling circles. She’s appeared at Samidoun-linked events and shared platforms with Khaled Barakat the Samidoun figure some may remember from “Resistance 101” and a PFLP member.

Read 4 tweets

Stu Smith

@thestustustudio

Feb 24

🧵From Pentagon Bombs to Praise for Mamdani: Bill Ayers Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

I tuned into this Bill Ayers (Weather Underground) interview and it’s a gold mine—if you’re cataloging unrepentant radicalism.

He casually reminisces about putting “a stick of dynamite in the Pentagon,” then slips into “overthrow capitalism” and “abolition” talk like it’s a morning routine. He recounts meeting Vietnamese revolutionaries in Cuba before going underground, name-checks Rashid Khalidi, explicitly calls Zohran Mamdani’s election “very helpful,” and even jokes about the Leonardo DiCaprio character in One Battle After Another.

Stick around, I’ve got more Ayers clips to share.

Bill Ayers lays out his “two legs” theory for revolutionary change: mobilization from below, what he calls “fire from below,” paired with institutional politics. He explicitly praises Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, and Bernie Sanders, framing them as useful, but ultimately secondary to mass movements.

Ayers is blunt about the hierarchy. Elections do not drive change. Pressure does. He points to Barack Obama as proof: without an independent movement applying force, even sympathetic politicians will fold.

He says he admires figures like Mamdani because that kind of electoral organizing is a skill he does not have. His role, he insists, is agitation.

Ayers ends by saying the movement has to “talk through the contradictions and find common ground.” We’ll come back to that in the next clip.

Bill Ayers recounts meeting with Vietnamese revolutionaries in Cuba, who challenged U.S. activists to choose a single “primary contradiction.” You couldn’t demand both “end the war in Vietnam now” and “bring the war home now.” “It can’t be both,” they told him. “Figure it out.”

Ayers treats it as a formative lesson. Movements, he says, have to decide who’s “in the tent,” and he argues the Left is bad at that. Applied to the present, he says the unifying line during the Gaza war should be: “ceasefire now, end the fighting and killing now, and stop all U.S. aid to Israel.” In his view, that’s sharp enough to matter and broad enough to unify.

He then turns his fire on Democrats, dismissing them as “not a party of opposition” whose only “North Star is no Donald Trump,” which he calls “ridiculous.” The alternative "North Star", he suggests, should be closer to “stop fascism” and “build a new society.”

Read 8 tweets

Stu Smith

@thestustustudio

Feb 19

Shame on @UCLA for canceling the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture featuring Bari Weiss. Code Pink and even Hasan Piker spent weeks pressuring UCLA to pull the plug, and Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans, who lives in China, was celebrating the cancellation on Instagram this morning.

Here’s Jodie Evans’ IG story on it. And remember, just last week the State Department warned that Code Pink was operating as a foreign influence effort.

And you still bent the knee to an astroturfed cancellation campaign.

Given how chaotic the UCLA encampment got, I’m not going to pretend UCLA is “normal” anymore. If organizers are even slightly worried about mass disruption, moving it to Zoom starts to look less like overreaction and more like basic risk management.

And that’s a sad reality, because it speaks to how little meaningful disciplinary action campuses are willing to take when mob behavior takes over.

Read 6 tweets

Stu Smith

@thestustustudio

Feb 18

Cornell Career Services is hosting an info session with @anduriltech tomorrow. Student activists are already trying to get it canceled, and if past is prologue, they’ll try to disrupt it in the room too.

If this gets shut down, it won’t hurt Anduril. It hurts @Cornell students who came to network, learn, and compete for internships, only to have a recruiting event hijacked into a political spectacle.

Debate the politics all you want. Don’t sabotage career programming. Flagging this for you too, @PalmerLuckey!

Here’s a longer version that makes clear the activists aren’t just targeting Anduril. They’ve gone after Boeing and Lockheed Martin too, and it’s becoming routine at Cornell, which is genuinely sad.

At some point you’re not “holding companies accountable,” you’re policing what your classmates are allowed to be interested in. Some students want to learn about engineering, defense tech, military service, or law enforcement careers.

Not everyone wants to spend college cosplaying permanent protest in a keffiyeh.

People may remember when activists first targeted a Cornell job fair. Since then, that effort has rebranded and expanded into the “Demilitarize Cornell” campaign.

I’m consistently skeptical of these efforts, because they read like a pre-packaged campaign, and the end result is always the same: targeted pressure that conveniently undercuts U.S. security and capability.

Read 4 tweets

Stu Smith

@thestustustudio

Feb 8

🧵 Super thread of mugshots from various University of Minnesota protest arrests.

If this is the campus pipeline, it’s fair to ask why parents keep writing checks. And why isn’t @usedgov looking at what’s being enabled here?

Buckle up. Unreal.

As always, everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Quote-tweet your favorites with some 🔥 commentary. I’ll be reposting the ones that actually make me laugh.

Read 16 tweets

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