“I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it it shared rather than depreciating with use.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry, 2025, pages 90-91

“By ‘capitalism’ I mean the social system in which the means of production — the stuff that makes all our stuff, which includes land, equipment, and also intellectual property, such as patents and the like, and also the stock that gives you a controlling interest in these things — is allowed to belong to individual people, who have a legal right to pass it on to their children, sell it to other individual people, or whatever else they might take a mind to do with it. That’s it. That’s all I mean. It’s not something Christians have to make our peace with because of our fallen nature, any more than feudalism was, or rule by gangsters, or the culling of the left-handed. We can and should severely check it and restrain it, or get rid of it outright. It is the right to property run amuck.” [pages 63-64]

“I am personally a big fan of the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury, to quote a mantra of ecosocialists. A society where nobody has a private swimming pool but there are well-maintained and beautiful public pools every few blocks; few people have cars but public transit is a sci-fi dream; I can’t own the books I covet, but every last little township library has a robust collection and a direct line to the fanciest research libraries in the world.” [pages 66-67]

“One of the most important things about leftism is a rejection of the existing reality in favor of moral values that no society has made concrete yet.”
[pages 162-163]

— Phil Christman, Why Christians Should Be Leftists, 2025

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“It’s not necessarily something that we can ignore as a possibility that this administration, they want to pursue, essentially just stretch the truth, to fit its policy objective, in this case going after left-wing or progressives through the lens of using counterterrorism tools,” Blazakis said.

“The president himself during a roundtable at the White House turned to his senior advisers whose job it is to designate these entities and instructed them to do it, on TV,” [Brzozowski] said. “So yeah I think they might do it. And people are not ready for it. People are not ready for it. If that goes through, I’m telling you, unbelievable.”

As Trump talks of designating antifa a foreign terrorist group,
experts see danger, NPR, 10-28-25

“Everything was still in place in February 1933. Children sledded down hills; shoppers purchased linens at white sales; doctors consulted patients; secretaries opened mail at trade union offices… But the frame of events tilted just a little bit every day after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, and soon things started to slide out of place with greater speed. Opposition newspapers were suspended and political opponents attacked or silenced. Seemingly far-away events that people read about in the papers one week, they suddenly saw happening down the street the next. The Weimar Republic was finished off in a sequence of events over just a week or two in March 1933.”

— Peter Fritzsche, Hitler’s First Hundred Days:
When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, pages 136-137

I saw one of these today. I had just pulled my kayak up onto the beach at Annawamscutt and it jumped up and landed on a little green tangle of seaweed a couple of feet away. I thought it was a grasshopper. But when I got closer, there was no mistaking it. Those dots. “I am supposed to squish you,” I said to it. So I did. I took a random clamshell and crushed it into the sand. Feeling rather triumphant, I splashed along the waterline in my bare feet for a while and then saw another one. This one was in the water. Actually it was on top of the water, perhaps borne up by the surface tension against its spread wings, and looked like it was swimming, trying to get to the rocks next to the dock, the red patch on its exposed underwings like a tiny life vest. “No way,” I said, and drowned it with my foot. On the way back through the cove, I saw more lantern flies on the water, all swimming with intent toward some object – a boat hull, a mooring float – that would allow it to crawl up out of the water and dry off. There are plenty of hungry fish in the cove, but none of them were getting anywhere near this bug. I reached out with my paddle and sank a few of them as I went past, but there were too many of them out there. It’s over. We’re doomed.

All will be well, the thinking goes, if the red people and the blue people would just sit down for some talk therapy and give a little to the other side. In earlier times this may have been sage advice. Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.

— Katherine Stewart, Money, Lies, and God, 4