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A message to Congress, then MAGA, and then to our main course.
First, an urgent message to comrades anywhere! Call your cowardly Congress people and urge them to take up Ro Khanna’s simple but brilliant plan: use the debt ceiling as a negotiating tool to police Musk and Trump’s lawlessness. They want to bankrupt the working and non-working poor? Let’s make them bankrupt the whole damn thing.
Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein have drafted fourteen articles of impeachment in the Capitol Hill Citizen. Demand the Democrats use them. Tell them they can blame Ralph as they steal his ideas. We don’t need platitudes or even radicals. We need fighters. Know the law. Use the law. Before we lose it.
I want to give an explanation to MAGA. First of all, thank you for engaging. Second of all, I’m not like the Democrats, Republicans or corporate media (especially “alternative” media). I don’t think you all are stupid. That’s never my game. I think you all have an agenda to eliminate us all and you don’t mind going down with the ship, you just don’t expect to be first.
I think you’re right that you will be rewarded for your loyalty to the fascist regime and I understand why you want out of this world. I have been there. I don’t know what you have against people poorer or less powerful than you. But I know where it comes from. Not from stupidity. Rather this is directly from hatred and fear. I’ve been there. Even in a similar way. Luckily at this point I’m not there. I have hate for the ruling class.
Most of the people who don’t care about you try to justify the hate because they make money from it and they are cynical. They love the hate from MAGA. And as you already know Mr. MAGA, they hate you. I actually don’t hate you. I love you. I love everybody. I hate the hate.
So I’m not going to go easy on you MAGA. I’m a strict pacifist. I’m here to beat you somehow, some way. I will get down in the mud with you. I love to play in the mud. I will speak in a direct and vulgar way. Frankly, I don’t appreciate your dishonesty in hiding behind the direct style.
You know better. We all make choices and tomorrow forgiveness is possible, even if trust takes much longer. But these people who bend over backwards to point out how oppressed you are while they don’t mention anything about what they do to water protectors or other environmental activists? These people want to use you as snitches and accomplices.
I just ask one thing from you Mr. MAGA. Don’t call Don. Don’t call JD. Don’t call Elon. Let’s meet outside and duel fair. You for a fascist order. Us for a socialist order. No cops. No ICE. No private contractors. No violence at all.
There’s redemption in this world my MAGA sisters and brothers. It’s not an easy path. It’s the rewarding path. I will never condescend to you. I will spar and enjoy sparring. Let’s fight and let’s fight fair, Mr. MAGA.
Kendrick Lamar. I can never turn against him. But I don’t appreciate Hollywood and the NFL falling head over heels for him now. I saw the Bob Dylan movie and I see a remarkably similar path for these two lyrical geniuses.
Both men were the voices of their time. And that’s forever. Kendrick came up with Black Lives Matter and anti-police/prisons. Bob with the peaceniks and anti-military industrial complex. The two best movements in modern history. Both men were the leading voices for these movements even though the most important and impactful voices will never be heard in history as they were violently erased.
There are conscious rappers. And folk musicians. And these are more principled people but they could not popularize the movements in the same way. Kendrick and Bob are both geniuses but they are also tortured figures who relate a specific political human struggle to a timeless personal human struggle.
And I would argue both were always ambiguous about being radicals. They were artists in open conflict which was what made them so relatable and so compelling. What changed for both men as the movements were crushed was that they retreated into other artistic adventures. Not unrelated but also less direct.
They both told us not to worship them. They were trying to be honest. As they always are. As they can’t help being, as artists. However they retreated and the movement toiled on. Bob and Kendrick are forever. Their stories are heroic. And in some ways, tragic.
What I like about later Bob and later Kendrick is that while they may not be as wholesome as we want they also are smart enough to troll the mainstream and make money doing it.
I do like some of Drake’s music too and here’s the reason for Drake fans to have some appreciation for Kendrick. This beef exposed white liberals, not the rappers hurling unproven accusations at each other. Kendrick made the best songs of his generation about all the issues they claim to care about. And they only reward him for revenge porn against Drake.
It would be generous to read Kendrick’s vicious roast as a backdoor campaign to expose the real pedophilic elite. He wants us to think for ourselves. And he really hates Drake. But do we? The charts would say no. I think we just don’t love Kendrick enough.
I feel the same way about Drake as I do about USAID. Are we really anti-colonialist when we oppose these things? Sure, Drake uses Afrobeats style. But has the music in Africa not grown for the Western audience? I’m not saying give Drake any credit for that but were we all really supporting Afrobeats before him?
And yes USAID politicizes food and medicine. So, so awful. Corrupt, wasteful, contingent, secretive. Where is that money going now? To billionaires. Anyone celebrating people losing food and medicine overnight I say it’s time to log off. On balance are we better off with sick and starving people who are “free” to engage in the free market? Or is 1% food and 99% bombs too radical a demand for us Americans? We want 100% bombs because we have accepted the demonization of the female-led work of care. We don’t believe in caring for each other anymore.
And the situation is even more clear domestically. The amount of poor people without essential services overnight. The amount of people who gave their lives to serve the public with no future. Stop telling me this is all for the working class. There is no working class. There is no work that makes life affordable. This work of care for each other? That’s all we got. We all need it, whether we have realized it or not.
Back to the show. People want to read Easter eggs into Kendrick’s Super Bowl performance. He’s a step ahead. By claiming the revolution will be televised he is fooling people into believing that liking Kendrick is revolutionary. He tells us not to, and yet we do anyway.
Meanwhile a revolutionary activist named Zül-Qarnain Nantambu holds a Sudan Palestine flag and he never reaches television. When Al-Jazeera asks if he’s sad he can’t go to a NFL game for the rest of his life the man of conviction replies that he was glad he wasn’t shot, proving how no one knew of his protest.
The dialectic of Kendrick, and of Bob, and why they will live forever, is that the activist was inspired by Mr. Lamar. Kendrick surely would be pleased to know that some people still get what he’s saying. Even if he’s fooled the establishment for his own amusement, the soul of the movement beats on. Some bodies mangled, some on the biggest stage, all with a history no amount of big tech programming can make us forget.
Pour one out for Bob. And one for Kendrick. They cashed in and somewhere they are winking at us, letting us know victory is ours, just as their music is ours. With the other eye they are warning us to build ourselves rather than relying on a false prophet, no matter how charismatic. Meanwhile the right wing apostles believe their leader is God and act as such.
The warning of Kendrick and Bob is not to accept the destruction as revolutionary. The right tells us gutting health and safety standards and throwing the poorest off the social services they need to survive is freedom. Bob and Kendrick challenge us to imagine freedom in the mind. They oppose the use of state violence, not the poor using the state to survive.
And therefore there is no shame to be reliant on the government or your community. To believe in yourself is a dead end. A privileged illusion from those who built their self-reliance on the backs of the exploited.
Long before Kendrick claimed the revolution would be televised he warned on Hii Power:
“And everything on TV just a figment of imagination
I don’t want a plastic nation, dread that like a Haitian
While you motherfuckers waiting
I be off the slave ship, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs.”
A practical warning to stop relying on corporate media, especially those claiming to be alternative, and rely exclusively on the ground game. The people are dying. The people are coming. There are very few on television who will tell us to turn it off. That’s because it’s very rare to find a genius on TV, and impossible to find a revolution.
