Ice Storm | Chapo Trap HouseEpisode 1005 - Ice Storm (1/26/26)Will and Felix talk about the horrific killing of Alex Pretti. We talk about the execution, the man Alex was, why the right despises him, the inspiring response of the people of Minnesota, and reasons to hope that we haven’t irreversibly opened the gates of Hell. We also talk about the public responses, ranging from the bizarre justifications from Mike Cernovich and JD Vance to Sohrab Amari’s attempt at aloofness to the [???] from Tom Friedman. Plus: Marie Glusenkamp Perez dealing the shittiest weed in the world.
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/1005-ice-storm-12626The ACLU Wants to Shrink Workers’ Speech ProtectionsBack in 2024, I wrote about a curious case at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was pursuing exotic legal theories that would, if adopted by the NLRB or courts, curtail the rights of workers across the country. This included the theory that the then–general counsel of the NLRB, Jennifer Abruzzo, was illegally appointed and the theory that the NLRB must defer to private arbitration proceedings even in the absence of a collective-bargaining agreement. The former theory would have invalidated a large amount of precedent established by General Counsel Abruzzo, while the latter theory would have allowed employers to limit the rights of workers to pursue unfair labor practice charges at the NLRB. The ACLU was pursuing these theories as part of a scorched-earth effort to not provide back pay and reinstatement to one of its former employees, Katherine Oh. Oh, along with her coworkers, had criticized the way certain managers treated employees and the ACLU fired her in response to those criticisms. In firing her, the ACLU claimed that Oh, who is herself nonwhite, was being racist by criticizing her likewise nonwhite bosses even though her statements contained no racial content at all. Both a private arbitrator and an NLRB administrative law judge (ALJ) have since ruled in favor of Oh and against the ACLU. The arbitrator ruled that, in firing Oh, the ACLU had violated its own just-cause termination policy, while the ALJ ruled that, in firing Oh, the ACLU had violated Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act. Despite losing in both forums, the ACLU still has not reinstated or compensated Oh. Instead, they have opted to keep litigating against their former employee by appealing decisions and contesting remedy calculations.
https://jacobin.com/2026/01/aclu-speech-protections-labor-nlrbMark Fisher: Not failing better, but fighting to winCapitalist realism, to sum it up briefly, can be seen as both a belief and an attitude. It is a belief that capitalism is the only viable political/economic system, and a simple restatement of the old Thatcherite maxim, “There is no alternative”. People like Paul Mason have been saying that since 2011 there has been an upsurge in global militancy, including a number of uprisings, and this represents the end of capitalist realism. But that is clearly not the case. It is true that the major crisis of capitalism from 2008 led to a situation where capital has never been weaker ideologically in my lifetime, and as a result there is widespread disaffection, but the question is why nevertheless capitalist realism still exists. In my view it is because it was never really necessarily about the idea that capitalism was a particularly good system: it was more about persuading people that it is the only viable system and the building of an alternative is impossible. That discontent is practically universal does not change the fact that there appears to be no workable alternative to capitalism. It does not change the belief that capitalism still holds all cards and that there is nothing we can do about it - that capitalism is almost like a force of nature, which cannot be resisted. There is nothing that has happened since 2008 that has done anything to change that, and that is why capitalist realism still persists. So capitalist realism is a belief, but it is also as an attitude related to that belief - an attitude of resignation, defeatism and depression. Really then, capitalist realism, whilst it is disseminated by the neoliberal right, and very successfully so, is a pathology of the left, or elements of the so-called left, that they succumb to. It was an attitude promoted by New Labour - what was New Labour if not instantiating the values of capitalist realism? In other words, we resign ourselves to the fact that there is no getting around capital: capital will ultimately run things, and all we can do is perhaps bolt on a couple of tethers as gestures toward social justice. But essentially ideology is over, politics is over: we are in the era of so-called post-ideology, the era of post-politics, where capital has won. This so-called ‘post-political’ presentation by New Labour was one of the ways in which capitalist realism imposed itself in the British context. There is a problem, however, in seeing capitalist realism just as a belief and an attitude, in that both are based on individual psychology. The discussion needed is one that interrogates where those beliefs and attitudes come from, for what we are actually dealing with is the social decomposition that gives rise to them. For that, we really need a narrative about the decline of solidarity and the decline of security - the neoliberal project achieved its aim of undermining them. Capitalist realism then is also a reflection of the recomposition of various forces in society. It is not just that people are persuaded of certain beliefs, but rather that the beliefs people have reflect the way that forces in society are composed in contemporary capitalism.
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/936/mark-fisher-not-failing-better-but-fighting-to-win/