In 2020, after the Bernie campaign failed to take action to preserve the huge movement infrastructure that we volunteers had built, a few of us in Rhode Island founded @reclaimri. We have accomplished an astonishing amount w/ a small number of talented organizers in two years 🧵 Our first big legislative win was making RI's cannabis legalization law most progressive ever by including automatic expungement of crim records AND making us the first state in the country to set aside a portion of limited cannabis retail licenses for worker-owned cooperatives.

In victory speech, Petro said that the opposition didn’t have to worry about them eliminating capitalism because Colombia still needs to eliminate feudalism. He also reimagined left-wing Latin American developmentalism and regional integration in ecological/anti-extractive terms. It's interesting how second pink tide seems like it's exploring profound developmental questions in a way that the first pink tide didn't, and that it's doing so as a way to think through how an expanded public sector can confront climate change by democratizing the economy.

Bernie’s immigration plan is not just a total rejection of Trump’s xenophobic policies. It’s also a truly radical break with the bipartisan war on immigrants that made Trump possible. @BernieSanders without question sets the bar. 1/ berniesanders.com/issues/welcomi… He rejects establishment’s beloved comprehensive immigration reform model of trading draconian enforcement for a legalization that never comes. This is a condemnation of Bush and Obama’s political strategy of mass deportation and border militarization in the name of compromise 2/

What sparked Chile’s protests against neoliberalism? A subway fare hike. This is no accident. Subway rides were already unaffordable. And during rush hour you have to wait for packed train after train to pass until you finally fight your way through the crowd on the platform. 1/ Living in Chile, @triofrancos and I found the cost of living to be high while the minimum wage is $415 a month—all for some of the longest work weeks on earth. People are revolting because the situation is intolerable. The subway is your intolerable trip to an intolerable job 2/

How did white nationalism take over Republican politics and the conservative movement? And why did nativism—the demand to "send them back"—become its most powerful expression? Here's one part of that complex story, involving both the conservative and mainstream media. THREAD. 1/ This is a tweet from Peter Brimelow, editor of leading white nationalist site VDARE, invoking Robert E. Lee to memorialize John Tanton, the recently-deceased godfather of the modern anti-immigrant movement. He played a huge role in making xenophobia central to US politics. 2/

Bernie's comment on "open borders" was bad. It was politically unnecessary. It played into a right-wing nativist trap. And it was deeply misleading. 1/ Immigration flows from Mexico, for example, have never been primarily shaped by border enforcement. Rather, these flows have been the product of political-economic realities in both countries, including migrant networks/pathways shaped in significant part by US capital. 2/

We can understand neither this massacre nor Trump's election w/out explaining how War on Terror came home to roost. The violence US projected outward ricocheted back—not just on 9/11 but in response to the WoT that followed. The home front was absorbed into the battlefield. 1/ On 9/16/2001, George Bush declared "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." It has indeed: the New Zealand shooter is one of its irregular foot soldiers who, amidst ambient violence of empire in crisis, made WoT's mission his own. c-span.org/video/?c475249… 2/

130 days ago, a white supremacist massacred Jews at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue.

Today, defenders of Israeli gov have made @IlhanMN the face of anti-Semitism bc she had the courage to criticize their power.

How quickly we forget: anti-Semitism is a right-wing force. 1/ Hours before the shooting, shooter Robert Bowers posted: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

HIAS is a Jewish resettlement agency that helps resettle refugees like Omar. 2/

The NYT couldn’t have written a better exemplar of the liberal so-half-true-that-it’s-dangerously-false account of how conservative American politics became a xenophobic hellscape. It’s remarkable they missed so much history in such a lengthy account. 1/7 nytimes.com/2018/06/23/opi… As I wrote at @jacobinmag: establishment “predecessors alongside nativist right and their mouthpieces on Fox News and talk radio helped move conservative Overton Window on immigration so far to the right that by 2016 it perfectly framed Trump.” 2/7 jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-…