The Counterpublic Papers vol. 9 no. 15

Author

Lester Spence
February 17, 2025

I’m going to begin these posts with a set of media sources people should draw from, because they provide fine grained analyses of what’s happening and then in other instances because I think they deserve support. I’m going to start with what I think are the two most important ones:

I start with these two because Nathan Tankus (Notes) and David Troy (America 2.0) have been providing fine grained analysis of what’s currently happening in DC and a macro level account that connects the dots internationally. Any number of scholars and activists on the left have argued that we’d see the downfall of the neoliberal order, but Troy is the only one to my knowledge to grasp the nature of the coalition we’re now warring against. Further, he’s been pushing against this tendency for more than ten years. A few days ago he reported that a group of anonymous whistleblowers generated this memo on the threat we face. For those interested in a deeper account, here’s a 33 page evidence briefing.

Google’s NotebookLM generates AI podcasts from documents—grasping that people might not have the time to wade through either document, Troy created two NotebookLM podcasts, one on the short memo, one on the evidence briefing.  

If these ring true to you, share, whether you’ve access to journalists and policymakers, or know people who want to know what we’re up against. After these two, I’d suggest these:

There are other newsletters, but I’d start with those. And then as far as general news sources:

Outlier (Detroit)

The Contrarian (to give you a sense of how the new media works, this is a substack created by disgruntled Washington Post journalists…I couldn’t even find it through google.)

Please reach out if there are sources that I’ve missed.

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One of the things I told people to do in the last issue was contact representatives. Even gave a link to do so. From what I understand the average number of phone calls a representative gets normally is about 40 calls a minute. 

That’s increased to 1600 calls a minute.

(That’s not a typo.) While calls are usually better than emails—the latter (along with letters) are usually ignored while the former are tracked—in this instance there are so many calls they can’t be tracked at all. This is a good thing but it’s complicated. It’s a good thing in that the representatives are now getting a sense of how important it is for them to treat the coup, well, like a coup. 

On the other hand citizens call representatives for all different types of issues and those issues are getting crowded out. I believe that people are also beginning to camp out at representative offices, where they can be found—Senator Angela Alsobrooks for example is so new people didn’t know where her office was. I can’t count how many marches and protests have been organized at the local, state, and federal level, but my hope is that sooner or later political representatives begin to not just take part in these activities, but they begin to actively organize these events themselves. 

We’ve finally seen lawsuits filed with some of them winning. Musk’s DOGE has been barred from accessing some Treasury data, USAID employee cuts have been frozen, as has Trump’s federal grant freeze. Trump’s federal buyout program was  briefly frozen, as has Trump’s executive order rescinding birthright citizenship. Trump recently attempted to force the Justice Department to drop its case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, even as the case against Adams was strong (understatement), only to find that at least seven Justice Department prosecutors refused to drop the case, resigning instead of doing so. (The case has to be formally dropped by a prosecutor for the move to stand, and even here it has to be signed off by another judge.) Forbes has done a good job of keeping track of the various cases. 

Read these all as victories. Not only are these actions robust signs of people actively beginning to take stock and action, these actions show signs of coordination, and they’re curbing, if not stopping the behavior. Some would have you think that this is all part of Trump’s plan. Those people couldn’t be more wrong, empirically and politically. Empirically speaking what data we have suggests that Trump and Musk would both rather have these actions pass without contestation. Their goal is at best to transform the United States into a constitutional (tech) oligarchy/monarchy. 

Politically speaking, reproducing the line that Trump wants this, has the effect of rendering Trump and Musk far more powerful than they actually are. 

(I’m going to trace out the logic to make the effects of this “Trump stays winning” stance a bit clearer. 

I. Trump and Musk take over the treasury and face no contestation. They win because they didn’t face contestation. 

II. Trump and Musk take over the treasury, face congestion, and they are halted by the courts. They win because they wanted contestation, to flood the courts. 

Under these circumstances there is no losing condition—Trump wins no matter what. This doesn’t strike me as empirically accurate—the Project 2025 tendency has a much better sense of what they wish to accomplish than they had, but i’ve seen no signs they are that sophisticated. To use a popular phrase, they aren’t playing chess while we’re playing checkers.)

I don’t know what will happen as these cases continue and then likely go up the food chain. But I know these cases are likely to generate other cases, as the harms of the administration increase in scale. To those directly involved in these cases, thank you. To those of you who might think you’ve experienced harm please become aware with some of these cases so as to see if you can participate. And relatedly, to the extent our struggle is about not just creating a new vision of the world we want but of a new constituency that can bring that world into being, all of the workers directly or indirectly involved in these cases are workers who can be and should be organized. (Hell. All of the people who voted for Trump and now realize that they didn’t vote for the harms they’re experiencing? They represent folk to be organized as well. That work might not be my work. But it is somebody’s work.)  

It’s funny not quite in a haha way to read people ignore the white supremacy involved in Musk and Trump’s project. Last weekend Ezra Klein interviewed journalist Kara Swisher about Musk and what she thought of him. Swisher gets a lot right about Klein although it’s clear she doesn’t quite get the scope of what Musk is up to. But then Klein asks about Musk being white and South African (like Peter Theil). Here’s the exchange:

That she can’t quite wrap her head around the possibility that white supremacy is at work here is…I want to write “astounding” but I can’t. (Historian Adam Tooze takes the same approach.) 

It’s still my plan to deliver a lecture of some sort on zoom to capture what’s going on and to give people opportunities to figure out what to do. It’s just that things are moving so fast. But fortunately there are signs all over the place of people taking action. 

So to that end, if you’re reading this, and haven’t found something to do yet, don’t stop looking. As far as a lot of us are concerned, the only thing that we know we don’t want is some combination of collaboration/cooperation in advance, and lethargy. Rest for a while, but commit to a policy of “Non-abdication.” I have a dear friend who still hasn’t quite gotten over the election to the point that he can read the news. But what he’s doing is training people in resilience, something we sorely need right now.

(Oh. Doomscrolling—->lethargy.)

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That’s it for now. Find your people. 

More soon.