Texas worker accused of being on drugs was actually dying of heatstroke

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/20/texas-construction-worker-death-lawsuit-greg-abbott

Mother of Gabriel Infante, 24, sues employer for $1m, saying construction workers had no protections from extreme heat

#fascismkills #negligentemployer #protectedexploitation #noOSHA #heatstroke #BCommConstructors #SanAntonio #GregAbbott #SocialMurder #StructuralViolence #impunity

The last eight evenings, so long, so dark, were a practice in attempting to trick my despairing mind into seeing some light by writing 8 Hanukkah stories as I lit my candles. Fire as muse, words as fire.

(For those who’d like to read or share them as a whole, the 8 posts are “Hanukkah 5783: Ritual as Resistance” at https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/hanukkah-5783-ritual-as-resistance/.)

In the end, as the last of my 44 candles went out, I came away with illumination but not light. Or to borrow words posted by Kathy R. Bunny on FB, “I don’t actually believe that light will return, but I’m acting as if it could.”

I tried acting “as if it could” because usually that works, and I almost felt a bit of the promise yesterday. It’s hard not to be warmed by the brilliance of a full menorah! Sometimes, though, the reality interrupts our acting, and what gets illuminated is exactly the darkness, the danger, we fear and abhor.

On the one hand, there was the light of the many kind responses to my Hanukkah posts here. So unexpectedly many—enough that it should have overshadowed the small number of fascist responses. But on that other hand—the hand that does a Nazi salute so publicly now—someone called me a “kike” in the comments (an antisemitic insult, which I deleted and blocked). And two fascists started “following” me, with one proudly listing a neo-Nazi code number in his profile; I blocked them too.

It’s not that I fear three cyberspace fascists. It’s that they, more than we, define and shape the present, and I despair for what that means, now and ahead.

My friend Ami Weintraub’s words (in my “There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart” anthology) keep returning to me:

“Our practice teaches us to fill our cemeteries with rocks.

“I want to take the pebbles that we set on graves and join the children who throw stones at the men who murder in my name. I want to throw them at the men who want to murder me too.
We arm our dead with weapons of resistance.

“I imagine running into Jewish graveyards, fleeing from the hatred that haunts me. And even when death surrounds me, I find the tools I need to stay alive.”

We must resist, but there’s no light in the reasons why.

(photo: Jewish grave, Pittsburgh, 2020)

#WeMustOutliveThem
#FascismKills #SmashFascism
#RitualAsResistance

#alert #FascismKills #fuckfascism #FuckFascist

A list of 5,000 “antifa” accounts on Twitter has been circulating today, with the fascist aim of purging these voices—an eclectic mix including liberals and even some conservatives, but mostly made up of anarchistic folks of many genders, races, cultures, etc. The responses on our side—the side firmly against fascism—are varied, but overwhelmingly, there’s been palpable and tangible solidarity. That’s crucial. We’ll need more and more of that—fierce, empathetic, unflinching solidarity. Taking the side of antifascism, and sticking side by side together.

What struck me more than anything was the shift this seems to mark. From such “antifa” lists being shared on shadowy, “fringe” platforms, or ones that mostly attract fellow fascists, to now being mainstreamed on one of the world’s biggest and oft-turned-to news platforms, owned by one of the world’s wealthiest people. This, in turn, mirrors what increasingly feels like the mainstreaming of the most explicit, virulent, violence-inspiring racist, transphobic, anti-Black, antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic, etc., sentiments on purportedly/formerly liberal, progressive, and/or “neutral” platforms, whether in the form of Chapelle’s jokes on Saturday Night Live or the vacuous “condolence” statement by Biden after the Club Q murders.

When it becomes “controversial” or scary or dangerous in a society to say one is against fascism; when it becomes “common sense” to see and treat antifascists as scary or dangerous, or more plainly, the enemy to be eradicated—we are already in fascism. It is the sea in which we must swim, or sink, as antifascists, not some surface or even subterranean phenomenon now.

Whether Twitter survives or not isn’t the issue. It’s whether whole categories of us—all the beautiful, varied identities, traditions, and experiences, and their rich and frequently millennia-long practices of communal care, mutual aid, and life-giving rituals, that are represented on that list of 5,000—will survive Christian fascism in the States and other fascisms globally.

#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon, in all of its beautiful diversity of forms.

#FascismKills #FuckFascism #SmashFascism #CommunitySelfDefense #WeMustOutliveThem
#TowardAWorldWithoutFascism

(photo: #AntiAntiAntifa sticker seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal’s anarchist bookstore, 2021)