A slow burn to Woke 3

Typical history classes speed up to wars and then fail to describe the results, even medium term. This all but guarantees a stunted understanding of why large conflicts occur and how/when they are prevented.

For instance, the lead up to the American Civil War (1860-1865)[[1]] is rushed. You may get a smattering of important events - the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, Dred Scott - but most of what you receive in a standard US education fails to account for the rapid emergence of the Republican party driven to a great part by the rise of the Abolitionist movement.

Why did that movement grow? Because people saw the horror and cruelty and were furious.

On May 24 [1854], Anthony Burns, a young African American enslaved man, who had escaped from his bondage in Virginia and settled in Boston where he worked at a men’s clothing store, was captured by his owner on his way home from work.

The city of Boston was outraged. Two days later -

a mob of some seven thousand black and white abolitionists, led by a Unitarian minister, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, stormed the courthouse attempting to free Burns. When order was restored, one US Marshal was dead, and a dozen more individuals were injured

President Franklin Pierce sent in 2000 federal troops to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act while 50,000 citizens watched on. This is simply one of the many radicalizing events during this period, one which saw a wealthy Bostonian by the name of Amos Lawrence eventually turn much of his fortune over to the cause:

“we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

There have been some semi-comic musing about a "Woke 2" reaction to the second Trump presidency and I am here to report that, in fact, "Woke 1" kicked off around 1860.

The Wide Awakes were a youth organization and uniformed "marching club" cultivated by the Republican Party during the 1860 presidential election in the United States. Using popular social events, an ethos of competitive fraternity, and even promotional comic books, the organization introduced many to political participation and proclaimed itself as the newfound voice of younger voters. The structured militant Wide Awakes appealed to a generation which had been profoundly shaken by the partisan instability in the 1850s, and offered young northerners a much-needed political identity

If you were curious as to why Missouri of all places stayed in the Union, the Wide Awakes had a prominent role in that.

I'm reminded of this history as eyes continue to turn to Minnesota, where ICE has continued to attack and kidnap citizens in a baldfaced campaign of ethnic cleansing [[2]]

In Minnesota, Maine, and countless other locations, ICE has begun to target the protestors and legal observers themselves.

Not a few people have likened this to the countless other times colonial or fascist regimes [[3]] put up pictures/info of their political enemies- such as against the French Resistance and during the Eastern Rising. They gleefully publish some information about their captives only to see them celebrated as heroes.

What's clear is this regime is exceedingly unpopular. Not since George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina have we seen such popularity numbers. In districts that elected Trump by 13%, special elections are seeing Democrats win by more than 20 points. The more extreme the Democrat is in opposing the current regime, the greater their margin of victory.

Rigging 435+ legislative districts and massive statewide elections is an enormous reach for a regime that cannot so much as cow a single city into submission. And even if they could do all of that, popular will and legitimacy really does matter. Authoritarian regimes obsess about public opinion for good reason. One of the limited number of sources from the Nazi regime considered relatively objective/reliable is the secret polling by their security service. They wanted, needed real numbers.

Certainly many Republican members of the House of Representatives lack confidence Donald Trump is willing or capable of helping them, having recently broken ranks to vote to release the Epstein files, block future tariffs on Canada, and - as of this writing - shutting down the government. Even the Supreme Court, an entity otherwise happy to invoke largely incoherent legal concepts to justify an imperial presidency, aren't following him on tariffs.

Some stuff

• Humans actually peak in midlife (research paper)
• The French self-stereotype (comic)
• "The Homeland" is a war on America (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair)
• "I will fucking kill you if you answer another question with more than five words" (Epstein associate Les Wexner's lawyer, advising his client in testimony)
• Jesse Jackson, a life in pictures (The Guardian)
• Every time you watch Worf on [Star Trek] DS9, he is thinking about airplanes
• China's carbon emissions have appeared to peaked and have been flat for nearly two years (Carbon Brief)

Some dog

[[1]]: Dated here, in case this post is being read from the future and it is necessary to disambiguate

[[2]]: We can dance around the terms, but what are we to call it when armed agents of the state target populations based on race for mass removal to a growing archipelago of concentration camps? Where children and families are routinely mistreated and denied sufficient food and healthcare?

[[3]]: These are effectively equivalent, with the most critical difference being whether they are inside or outside the metropole.