On Aren LeBrun
aka @ProustMalone
Tweetdump from Aren LeBrun, aka @ProustMalone on twitter and @arenrlebrun on tiktok.
I found his thoughts/threads compelling, and I looked towards his bookshelf to understand where he was learning from. He explicitly pushed his audience towards Michael Parenti, who I've covered here - for that, I'll always be grateful.
Oct 21, 2019 (src)
I want to like Bernie Sanders, I really do, but I can’t help but notice that he’s causing poor people to act very angry and confident now rather than be quietly resigned to the depravities of capitalism the way I’ve grown to enjoy.
Our system is not an accident. It is not a product inherited by otherworldly design. It is a direct consequence of daily human choice. Billionaires choose to hoard the wealth of a thousand lifetimes while sitting idly by as people starve to death every day all around them.
Feb 22, 2020 (src)
My dearest centrists: Bernie Sanders isn’t “forcing you to vote for Trump.” He is simply forcing you to be honest with yourself about what your politics have always been.
Mar 8, 2020 (src)
The scientist who created the polio vaccine didn’t patent it and he saved lives all over the world. Some people aren’t motivated by greed and domination over others.
Mar 13, 2020 (src)
SCOOP: Cuban doctors have discovered an antiviral for #COVID19 and are collaborating with China, Italy, and Venezuela. This is what happens when you invest in science and public health rather than spend $800,000,000,000 a year blowing up children.
Source: "Interestingly, Recombinant Interferon Alpha 2B has been in Cuba for 39 years; the country began the development of this protein with antiviral properties at the same time that the biotechnology industry was being invented in 1981." link at workers.org
Second source: "Since Jan. 25, the ChangHeber Company located in Changchun city has been producing the famous Cuban antiviral, which is one of 30 medicines chosen by the National Health Commission for its potential to cure respiratory diseases." link at telesurenglish.net
Mar 14, 2020 (src)
David Roth (@david_j_roth) tweeted:
Republicans asking to exempt the largest and most profitable companies on earth from providing paid sick leave during a pandemic is one of the most Republican things imaginable, and Democrats capitulating to Get Things Done is one of the most Democrat things imaginable.
to which Aren replied:
The question isn’t, ‘Are there no major differences between the parties?’ but, ‘Do the differences make a difference?’
—Michael Parenti
Mar 24, 2020 (src)
What has the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation done for you in the time of COVID19? Nothing? Perhaps taxing the shit out of billionaires is better than relying on the tender mercies of breadcrumb philanthropy.
“Hasn’t [BILLIONAIRE PHILANTHROPIST] done enough?”
No, because we are out of ICU beds and ventilators while the rich remain richer than kings and pharaohs.
May 28, 2020 (src)
Looting a billion dollar corporation during a pandemic is an act of revolution you candy-ass liberal fuckheads. I will not be taking questions at this time.
May 30, 2020 (src)
The forced end of Bernie Sanders’ campaign was not the end of revolution in America. It was the end of negotiation.
There’s not a magical 1:1 relationship between Bernie Sanders and these protests. Many of these people presumably (and understandably) don’t care much about electoral politics. But the radical ferment Sanders was tapping into is the same basic energy fueling this social rupture.
Jun 7, 2020 (src)
Absurdity is the state assigning you The Grapes of Wrath at 16 and tear gassing you at 26 for understanding it.
I'll be ever'where - wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there...An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build, why, I'll be there.
The US education system isn’t designed to train people for a life of thought and investigation. It’s a tedium endurance regimen that helps stymie the suicide rate in an industrialized economy. Kids get tested on Steinbeck at 10 and are punished for still thinking about him at 11.
Jun 7, 2020
The Anti-Communist Impulse by Michael Parenti (1969):
That [young radicals] are passionately concerned with the evils of war, poverty, racism, and economic exploitation weighs much less in the minds of many liberals than that some of them have committed acts of incivility.
In this age of missiles, militarism, and mass murder, the young protestors are accused of being peculiar purveyors of violence. Thus do many liberals expend more time attacking those who protest the enormities of this world than attacking those who perpetrate such enormities.
Or as I like to put it:
A Bernie Bro was rude to me online
And I intend to cite it as the chief piece of evidence in my forthcoming argument for why poor people shouldn't have health insurance.
Jun 7, 2020 (src)
If you happen to like any of my posts on here, most of the reason why is due to a colossally important Marxist writer by the name of Michael Parenti. A lot of people message me looking for reading recommendations. To all of you: I cannot recommend Parenti enough, especially now.
Legitimately a life-changing tweet. Thanks again, comrade. Since 2020, I've come up with my own thoughts on Parenti.
Jun 22, 2020 (src)
It's time to get military recruiters the fuck out of our high schools now.
And while we're at it, it's time to set our political sights on nothing less than the full abolition of poverty in America, because hunger, hopelessness and desperation are the best military recruiters of all.
Jun 27, 2020 (src)
NPR is news for people who are okay with war and genocide as long as the paperwork is filled out correctly.
National Petroleum Radio
National Pentagon Radio
Noncommittal Preening Republicans
Public radio is a vital service and it’s one I support completely. But NPR is not public radio. It is a soothing chorus for liberals who do not know their calming, educational drive to work every morning is being orchestrated by the ideological tyranny of corporate capital.
I’ve listened to NPR for years. Like all corporate-funded media outlets, not once did its coverage call into question the imperialistic drive of US foreign policy decisions. Such a glaring omission of critical questioning is not “objectivity,” it’s bias in favor of the powerful.
NPR’s rep as a liberal outlet can only exist within an overall media universe that’s extremely far-right in its framing of economic and political policies.
Think: NPR has a daily show called Marketplace. Does it have any companion program about the labor struggle? No.
The omission of a real labor section in most corporate-owned MSM outlets (NPR included) is just one of hundreds of examples of the silent but powerful dogmas of “objective” centrism. These dogmas quietly dictate American audiences’ sense of what has news value and what does not.
Why is it that there’s no dedicated Labor, Climate, Housing, or War section in any of our MSM outlets? These issues impact vastly more readers/viewers than the stock market does, but the latter gets more press than those previous 4 categories combined. That is a conscious choice.
Why is it that so many Americans watch and read and listen to the news every day, and so few have even a decent understanding of capitalism or imperialism? Why do we have the most politically illiterate population in the world while having the most-watched 24/7 “news” of anyone?
TLDR - If you’ve gone your whole life considering yourself fairly well-informed, and you’re not ignited with rage by the inhuman marauding our oligarchy has unleashed on foreign nations and its own people throughout this century and the last, NPR is likely a major reason why.
Jul 3, 2020 (src)
Money is not real. It is an abstraction used to represent value, which is real. Value is created by labor. The working class creates nearly all the value in a society and keeps almost none of it. Part of the function of the wage concept is to mask this very obvious form of theft.
Jul 13, 2020 (src)
"[Philanthropy] is not a solution; it is an aggravation of the difficulty...Charity degrades and demoralizes. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property."
–Oscar Wilde
Aug 10, 2020 (src)
A lot of talk on here about the “end of democracy” in America. I’m confused as to when the beginning of it was. The framers abhorred democracy and saw it (correctly) as a threat to the class privileges of rich landowners. That sentiment has carried straight through to today.
The rich have always used false democracy to placate the multitude. James Madison, Federalist 10: “To secure private rights against the danger of [rebellion] and at the same time preserve...the form of a popular government is the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”
Many Americans have a basic (if underdeveloped) awareness of how racist the founders were; far fewer understand how much they despised the unpropertied classes across all demographics. Hamilton said, “The [masses] are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.”
Elbridge Gerry (5th US Vice President) referred to democracy as “the worst of all political evils.” This he said amid the ongoing genocide of millions of native people in order to acquire the land and resources for the early development of American industrial capitalism.
American history is littered with powerful voices admonishing democratic rule. Edmund Randolph, a US attorney who was the ninth governor of Virginia, said that the country’s problems were a consequence of the “turbulence and follies of democracy.”
The Convention delegates in Philadelphia debated hotly for weeks about the wording of the Constitution. But it was not a democratic debate between rich and poor; it was the factional squabbling of merchants, slave masters and manufacturers vying to defend their holdings.
Our government was instituted as the rich person’s equivalent of a union. It existed to serve the interests of the privileged class, not least of which was protection from a landless multitude whose appetite for liberty was not satisfied by the pretentious screed of landlords.
A Twitter thread is not the place to detail every piece of evidence that proves this argument. For more, read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and Michael Parenti’s “Democracy For the Few,” both still legal only because very few decide to read them.
Maintaining the illusion of democratic rule has been an essential piece to the overall maintenance of the American empire as it has developed through the centuries. The ruling class in this country (yes, there is a ruling class) has done what it wants from the beginning.
All the various iterations of progressives and socialists who’ve developed in America through the generations to resist the dominant capitalist orthodoxy arrive at the same conclusion: democratic freedom means nothing in a system designed to impose economic tyranny on the masses.
All of this is to push back on the liberal argument that workers ought to support a system of rapacious exploitation, corporate monopoly, and genocidal market expansion in order to preserve some rhetorical gimmick that gives the system a legitimacy it’s never deserved.
Aug 23, 2020 (src)
I’m sorry your mom died of COVID and you’re living with two roommates out of a 2006 Nissan Pathfinder ransacked nightly by Walmart’s private security forces as California burns to ash an acre per second on the horizon but have you considered there’s a CHEETO IN THE WHITE HOUSE
The millennial and Gen Z suburban lifestyle dream is to park your three bed no bath 2006 Nissan Pathfinder in a Target parking lot instead of those poor fucks who have to park their shit at the Walmart.
Sep 28, 2020 (src)
If I were a salaried Vox reporter I would spend more time asking why only two Democrats voted “No” last week on the 161st judge Trump has appointed to a district court than I would about the 1.07% of the popular vote Jill Stein got four years ago.
Let’s simplify this for the highly respected political pundits among us: If you believe someone is an “existential threat to our democracy,” you do not vote to confirm their judicial appointments.
Again for the highly respected political pundits in the room: If you believe someone is an “existential threat to our democracy,” you do not vote to give them a $738 billion war budget and the permission to militarize outer space.
And a third time to the highly respected political pundits, who are so full of shit they’re tripping on it: if you believe someone is an “existential threat to our democracy,” you do not vote to fund his anti-immigrant gestapo.
I am of the opinion that pundits who spend more time attacking people without power than they do questioning people with it are weasel-brained narcs who don’t deserve your attention unless it’s to dynamite their takes into oblivion and laugh at the debris.
Also, for the sake of interest, it was Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal who voted No on the judicial appointment. A few Democratic Senators abstained from voting, including Kamala Harris.
In short: I criticize Democrats not because I believe Trump isn't a threat; I criticize them because I do think he is, and I wish they did, too.
Oct 18, 2020 (src)
A lot of people describe our press as “free & open” because it is not owned by the state. They ignore that it is owned by six multinational conglomerates whose shareholders have a unified set of class interests that get reflected in nearly 100 percent of media coverage every day.
A free press means more than Potemkin dissent from MSNBC and the New York Times. It means mainstream outlets critically questioning the economic and political order that rules our lives. There’s a reason Americans consume media 24/7 and know nothing about their country or world.
It’s easy to find stories that criticize whoever the POTUS is at the time, because this form of dissent puts no stress on a corporate-capitalist worldview. Try finding one MSM outlet that reported accurately on the failed fascist coup to privatize Bolivia’s lithium last year.
“People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.”
—Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Reds
"Excuse me sir I've been a senior producer at Hypnotoad Broadcast Group for 20 years and I've only been cattle prodded once for using a Level Three Hostile Adjective to describe Monsanto lobbying against clean water laws. Unlike you I stick to the facts."
Langley, Virginia has entered the chat.
Bolivians waited nervously for the results of Sunday’s high-stakes presidential election even as Evo Morales pre-empted authorities' slow vote count and declared his hand-picked candidate the victor. link at apnews.com
Within the corporate-controlled media system there remain good journalists doing a good job. That's not the point. Ask yourself: Why are the most essential stories/themes of our time (climate change, imperialism, poverty and wealth, etc.) barely topics of discussion in U.S. life?
- Oct 26, 2020 (src)
The neoliberal ideal is inherently technocratic. People learn to be unconscious systems managers, viewing life as a network of rules and regulations divorced from any deeper moral character. This ideal worships codes and systems and numbs itself to the daily horrors they produce.
This is a major reason why U.S. liberals believe they are the good guys, fighting to restore "normalcy," while proudly supporting candidates owned by weapons manufacturers whose business model relies on flaying the innocent from machines that blacken the sky.
This mantra might come from the powerful but it doesn't stop there. Log onto Facebook sometime and read the run of memes and whatnot of your more liberal-minded friends. The main theme is that Trump is a violation of the rules, not that the rules are themselves inherently fucked.
Nov 16, 2020 (src)
Trying to get cancelled today, here’s my best effort: the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an extraordinary achievement in military industrial complex propaganda written at a fourth grade reading level and should be laughed out of the building.
Every time I see one of these abominations it brings on a deep depression that lasts about a week. Millions of kids imparted 5-10x per year with the idea that (a) foreign marauders are coming for them and (b) a trillion dollar national security state is justified and inevitable.
But don’t take my word for it. Here is the United States Department of Defense. Airmen Fly Higher, Further, Faster With Captain Marvel (via defense.gov)
So far my favorite protests to this well-documented fact is that (1) hating juvenile war propaganda as a citizen of a nation permanently at war is elitist, and that (2) Antman & The Wasp should be viewed on the same tier as Macbeth because both were written for the masses.
MCU movies can’t be jingoistic military propaganda! They are merely enjoyable multiple hour long Hollywood productions funded by the Pentagon and designed to be watched by millions of people across all ages and demographics up to 10x per year. Stop overthinking it.
Anna Banerjee: “Marvel movies are state propaganda” (via the Daily Iowan)
The political content of these films is covert. Many of them feign critique of the state and the weapons industry. But never (ever) is the broader capitalistic purpose of imperialism brought into question. Per MCU movies, the system isn’t wrong, it’s just run by the wrong people.
This is the perfect cross section of cancellability. Libs hate it because they need to believe imperialism can be morally virtuous as long as the correct heroes are in charge. Libs who call themselves leftists hate it because they think demanding smarter pop art is ableist.
The dichotomy in Ironman remains “America good, ‘terrorists’ bad.” There is no broader critique about the wars themselves or why we are fighting them. Stark’s main issue is that Americans are dying at the hands of “terrorists,” not that we are an unjust occupying force.
The MCU levies a highly controlled critique of the MIC and the national security state in a way that quietly absolves those things of the real criticisms they deserve. The evil is never the INTENT of these systems, but that they’ve been hijacked by bad actors. That is propaganda.
Everyone who is angry at this benign and easily verifiable point sounds like this to me
and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.
Anyway, happy birthday Martin Scorsese.
- Dec 5, 2020 (src)
Guys I’ve looked into it and I’m beginning to think the CIA and the State Department aren’t exactly shooting straight when they provide intel on our “enemies.”
If a flurry of corporate news outlets immediately seem to be wanting you to feel the same malevolent way about a foreign country all at the same time, there is a reason, and that reason is never because they have your own interests at heart.
“It is firm & continuing policy that Salvador Allende be overthrown by a coup...It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely & securely so that the American hand be well hidden.”
—Cable to CIA operatives in Chile, from Kissinger’s “Track Two” group (Oct 1970)
“The more successful China proves to be in its internal development & relations with Third World nations, the more it is again becoming a target of western elites, defamed as a mortal threat to US national security.”
-Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism (published in 2010)
“[Our] military machine creates a world of client states open to corporate penetration, on terms that are completely favorable to the [corporations]. It’s not too much to conclude that such a policy is produced not by dumb coincidence but by conscious effort & deliberate design.”
-Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism (2010)
“Half the world’s wealth is owned by 2 percent of the richest adults. It is time that liberal critics stop thinking people who own so much of the world are ‘incompetent’ or ‘misguided’...When we think the empire builders are being stupid, we’re not being very smart ourselves.”
Dec 6, 2020 (src)
Zero people die when a protestor shatters a Starbucks window. Tens of thousands die each year because the market denies them health care coverage. The state deems one of these a violent act, the other not. This is because capitalism values private property over human life.
It is 100% legal for US corporations to produce weapons of mass slaughter and sell them to fascist dictators & rightwing paramilitaries all over the world. Our government literally oversees this process. But it’s illegal for a homeless person to steal a can of beans from Walmart.
Feb 2, 2021 (src)
Capitalism is when a vaccine to a deadly pandemic exists but we can’t create or distribute enough of it because two pharmaceutical conglomerates refuse to lose out on shareholder profits by sharing the patent information.
My patience is too thin to deal with people who have been intellectually destroyed by pharmaceutical propaganda but I appreciate their efforts to generate sympathy for Pfizer in this most difficult of fiscal quarters.
It turns out that the economic model aggregated from man's most selfish impulses does not result in a society capable of handling crises navigable only through communal organization.
This myth that capitalism created the vaccine is wrong. The research/development was taxpayer funded. Public medical research is a democratic element of U.S. life that has managed to withstand post-Reagan privatization. That is what created the vaccine.
US taxpayers are funding six Covid vaccines. Here’s how they work (CNN)
Feb 5, 2021 (src)
The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.
—Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
Feb 12, 2021 (src)
I am once again asking liberals when they will resume caring about kids in cages.
Oh my bad we’re not calling them that anymore.
Biden Admin. to Open Migrant Overflow Facility amid Increase in Unaccompanied Minor Apprehensions (via Yahoo!News)
Mar 19, 2021 (src)
If unions didn't work, Amazon wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to stop its workforce from unionizing.
Aug 19, 2021 (src)
As a reminder, @Nestle’s economic role is to steal Earth’s natural water from its inhabitants, sell it back to us at an upcharge, and pollute the planet with billions of plastic bottles per year. Per the laws of capitalism this is both morally correct and a sound business model.
The ideological machines that stunt the minds of Americans on purpose teach us it is morally unimaginable to revolt against a corporation like Nestle but that Nestle businessmen have every right both legally and ethically to steal our water during a drought.
Aug 27, 2021 (src)
The fascist response to homelessness is to punish the homeless in defense of investor profit. The socialist response is to give them free homes in defiance of investor profit. You can choose one & only one. This exercise should help explain what side “centrists” are actually on.
There are way more fascists in America than anyone is willing to admit. To tolerate things like homelessness, private health insurance, poverty wages, etc., means we’ve bought into the main thrust of fascism, which is that those without power are weak vermin deserving of death.
Despite all our feigned humanitarian progress, the poor and intersectional underclass remains the group most acceptable for a “liberal democracy” to hate and demean — if not in our direct behaviors then in the values we hold reflected back onto us by the economic order we defend.
Jan 19, 2022 (src)
This Psaki lady represents a particularly macabre element of the national undoing. A whole job devoted to gaslighting the sick and poor into believing it a hysterical demand the White House do anything to help them that might inconvenience Aetna shareholders. And she’s bad at it.
To be fair, this explains the role of every Press Secretary for every administration. But you once got the sense these people felt some pressure to concede (at least superficially) to public needs, versus mocking them out loud on purpose while smiling.
Feb 24, 2022 (src)
Can someone explain clearly why Ukraine/Russia amounts to a conflict involving the West, but Saudi Arabia’s years-long genocide of the Yemeni people (a genocide for which US companies are knowingly providing money & arms) does not?
My unsolicited suggestion is to prepare for an ideological climate in which any critique of the NATO position going forward is met with immediate accusations of treason.
You’re not evil or dumb for maintaining some skepticism re: US intelligence sources or State Dept. reports, just as you’d have for Russian state TV. Given what we’ve lived through since 9/11 it is in fact irrational to embrace our national security state as the arbiter of truth.
Lastly, remember that I am not an expert. The only thing I will say definitively is that American bombs, machine guns, tanks, warships and fighter planes will not make this situation better, but rather drastically worse, as they do every time.
Response to any who feel this question is illegitimate or perhaps in bad faith given the current circumstances.
The situation in Yemen (mainly, our active role in it) casts doubt on the State Dept's claims that its only interest is preserving democracy in Ukraine. Were that the case, we would not be arming/funding genocide in Yemen and shipping arms to fascist autocrats around the world.
Nov 17, 2022 (src)
I was surprised to learn those cartoon monkey jpegs for sale for $1,000,000 apiece didn’t pay off in the end
index tags: Twitter, Backup
category tags: Modern Communists, Tweets