Stu Smith
@thestustustudio • 58,654 subscribers
Investigative Analyst @ManhattanInst 🏛️ Dragging radicalism & extremism out of the shadows and onto the public record 🥷 TCB⚡Views My Own 🧠
Shorts
Videos
🚨 DSA Co-Chairs Squirm When Pressed on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua This is a longer clip, but it captures the best parts of a broader discussion DSA national co-chairs Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer had with The Moment hosts Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos. Jorge repeatedly presses them on whether Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are dictatorships. They repeatedly avoid giving him a direct answer. Romer eventually responds that “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not,” pointing to Cuba’s 2022 Family Code referendum as evidence. That referendum was only four years ago, making it an especially curious answer to Jorge Ramos repeatedly pressing her on decades without multiparty elections. Ashik Siddique fares little better. Asked whether Cuba is a dictatorship, he pivots to the U.S. embargo and the state of American politics, responding that “it’s hard for us to judge other countries being dictatorships when we have Donald Trump as president.” Paola eventually steps in and identifies the problem at hand. DSA can be anti-imperialist without becoming apologists for these regimes. They should still be able to recognize and explain what makes them authoritarian. When it comes to international politics, DSA is often at its most revealing. Siddique and Romer are not even among the organization’s most die-hard internationalists. This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how radical DSA’s international politics can get.
Stu Smith797,607 次观看 • 20 天前
🚨 Hasan Names Singham, PSL, ANSWER, and Code Pink in One Breath On stream today, Hasan Piker discussed the reported Treasury scrutiny and said the broader target is “probably Singham” and “his operation,” naming PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, and “anything that he has ever financed.” He then acknowledged that Roy Singham lives in China and has been “a funding vehicle” for political movements and activism in the United States. That is exactly why this matters. This was never just about one influencer’s Cuba trip. It is about the Singham-linked ecosystem, the groups it funds, the delegations it supports, and the political operations built around them. Hasan didn’t refute the network. He mapped it.
Stu Smith4,546,143 次观看 • 3 个月前
🚨 BREAKING: Hasan Piker addressed the reported Treasury investigation on his livestream, and even he admits the news is “not great.” “I’m not gonna lie to you guys. It’s not great. The news is not great, OK? I mean, it’s bullshit, but still not great that they’re after your boy. They’re up my ass.” He then joked with viewers chanting “free me,” responding: “Free me, free me. I can’t believe I’m saying that.” For all the bravado, Hasan clearly understands this is serious.
Stu Smith4,504,607 次观看 • 3 个月前
🚨 Hasan Piker is now claiming that the broader wave of negative news coverage about him is intended to “get someone activated enough to come and kill me.” His comments came while reacting to coverage of his recent appearance, where he performed a mocking rendition of “We Are Charlie Kirk.” Hasan argued the coverage is meant to make an example of him for attacking corporate interests and Israel, saying, “They obviously can’t go after all of us,” so they are trying to “take care of someone who is a large enough platform.”
Stu Smith293,657 次观看 • 10 天前
🚨 Hasan Piker’s Producer Says “The Whole Squad” Knows Roy Singham, Admits Singham Is “Friends With a Lot” of Chinese Communist Party Members This is Eric Hovagim, a producer and researcher for Hasan Piker, discussing his personal friendship with billionaire activist funder Roy Singham and Singham’s wife, Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans. “I’m friends with Roy Singham. He’s dope.” Hovagim laughs off the idea that Singham has secret ties to the Communist Party of China, before immediately acknowledging that Singham “is friends with a lot of them.” He says he also personally knows Evans and texted her when the Treasury subpoenas arrived. According to Hovagim, she told him not to worry because “they do this shit to us literally all the time.” He then makes clear that these relationships extend beyond him to other Americans in his China-based social circle, including Dana “Showtyme” Burton and Dante Muñoz. “The whole squad out here, we all know him.” Hovagim also praises Evans as “the real deal,” citing her relationships with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro’s son. The most revealing part may be how ordinary all of this appears within Hovagim’s social and political world. Singham is not described as a distant donor or shadowy figure. He is a friend whom “the whole squad” knows, while Evans is someone Hovagim can text directly when subpoenas arrive.
Stu Smith897,851 次观看 • 1 个月前
TIL that Hasan Piker’s interviews are researched behind the scenes by Eric Hovagim, a socialist producer who now lives in China and has been featured by Chinese state media for his pro-Beijing commentary. Shoutout to the Periphery Podcast and Noa Fears for this lovely little piece of information.
Stu Smith816,725 次观看 • 1 个月前
🚨 Abolitionist Professors Say Rapists Should Face “Care and Accountability Circles,” Not Punishment Seattle University law professor Dean Spade and Birkbeck criminology professor S. Lamble take prison abolition to its hardest question. What happens to rapists and people who commit serious sexual violence? Hovering over the entire discussion is Spade’s opening call for a much larger movement engaged in “militant struggle” and “fighting back,” language that goes largely unexamined as the conversation turns to sexual violence and abolition. Spade argues that “care and accountability circles work better than punishing people who have engaged in sexual harm.” Lamble then addresses what they call the “what about the rapist question,” rejecting the idea of being “an abolitionist except for rapists” and insisting that even in these cases, abolitionist politics must maintain that “no one is disposable.” The conversation also ties abolitionism directly to trans politics. Spade rejects the instinct to answer attacks by saying “we’re not sexual predators,” while Lamble argues that fears of sexual violence are routinely attached to trans people, especially in bathroom debates. Rather than simply separating falsely stigmatized trans people from those who have actually committed sexual harm, their argument challenges the broader logic of treating either category as disposable.
Stu Smith290,250 次观看 • 18 天前
🚨 Meet Mamdani judicial adviser Jared Trujillo Trujillo, a former sex worker turned law professor, now helps recommend New York City judges and brings an abolitionist view of the criminal legal system to the panel. He has pushed to decriminalize sex work, called the criminal legal system “a continuation of slavery,” and described mandatory minimums as “the real culprit for mass incarceration.” And while Mamdani has moderated much of his public rhetoric, Trujillo and his fellow judicial advisers suggest the far more radical direction in which New York’s courts may be headed. Our latest City Journal, as I team up with Daniel Edward Rosen!
Stu Smith82,373 次观看 • 6 天前
🧵 What a rough night for Nithya Raman. Hasan Piker put the LA mayoral candidate and DSA member through a full-on struggle session over her record, repeatedly pressing her to explain where she had fallen short of the movement line. And honestly, even as a conservative, I felt bad for her. This was brutal. One flashpoint was a DSA criticism over Raman’s role in a city resolution tied to the UTLA BDS fight. But the exchange was bigger than that. This was not a good-faith interview. It was an ideological audit. Raman mostly tried to answer politically. She came to DSA through housing and homelessness, said this was not her area of expertise, said she had learned more, and promised she was “committed to learning more.” Stick around for more, because by the end of this even Hasan’s chat wanted his head.
Stu Smith1,903,633 次观看 • 3 个月前
🚨 Inside DSA’s Labor Strategy: Abolish Money, Occupy Workplaces, Run “Cadre Candidates,” Pursue “More Militant Actions” DSA’s electoral work often overshadows its organizing in other arenas, but it would behoove people to pay closer attention to how openly militant parts of its labor strategy can be. Even the bread-and-butter labor work comes with radical qualifiers. Higher wages are “important at least until money is abolished.” Another panelist argues that fights for reforms should be “subordinated” to the “revolutionary struggle” and, ultimately, “to communism.” The goal is to get the working class to a point where workers are willing to “push past things like Taft-Hartley,” “occupy their workplaces,” and pursue “more militant actions.” And when normal union structures cannot deliver a broader strike, “the remaining alternative is wildcatting” — an unauthorized strike undertaken without union leadership’s approval and, as Alex puts it, “illegal by definition.” At the same time, the strategy is to gain more influence inside organized labor itself, through the “rank and file strategy” and even running “cadre candidates” for labor councils and AFL-CIO boards. The stated objective is to keep “building workers towards militant labor action.” The question eventually becomes whether a general strike should win better contracts, force the president to resign, or “bring the system to its knees.”
Stu Smith173,594 次观看 • 15 天前
This moment from Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast is one of the cleanest arguments against communism and socialism you’ll hear in under a minute. “It's important to study communism, because all, you know, the youngsters these days, they think it's far out and fly... It's not. It usually results in about 50 million people dying.” “It starts with the seizure of private property. That's f*cking crazy... It's built on the government taking everyone's property. What the f*ck? The government's terrible. I don't trust them with anything.” Comedy podcast or not, Matt and Shane basically nuked the entire ideology in under a minute.
Stu Smith1,205,084 次观看 • 3 个月前
🚨 Bill Ayers and Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Mark July 4th With No Patriotism, No Borders, and “Fuck the USA” As you celebrate Independence Day, remember that there is an entire class of activists, including many embedded in higher education, who spend their days trying to dismantle the country. Take last night’s “250 Years of Resistance” event at the National Public Housing Museum, featuring Brian Jones and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in conversation and introduced by Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers. The event was framed around the 250th anniversary of America not as a celebration, but as “250 years of resistance.” Ayers recalled a 1976 underground press poster declaring “200 years is enough” and said, “Now it’s 250 years, and I kind of feel similarly.” At one point, Professor Taylor even acknowledged the vibe in the room, joking, “This audience is all like, ‘Fuck the USA.’” Taylor rejected patriotism outright, saying, “We have to reject the idea of loving a nation state, which is what patriotism is.” She called the nation-state “destructive,” said “borders are deadly” and “borders kill people,” and later declared that the nation-state “should not be revered” because it is “a tool of death and destruction” that should be “the object of political struggle, not embrace.” She also said, “I want nothing to do with claiming the United States in some patriotic fashion,” before joking that when someone handed her child an American flag at the airport, she did not set it on fire, though the thought “may have crossed my mind.” To put this into plainer English, when Taylor says the nation-state should be the “object of political struggle,” she is talking about delegitimizing the nation-state itself and advancing a worldview that would dismantle the United States as a sovereign country. No nation-state means no real borders. No real borders means no meaningful sovereignty. No sovereignty means the people have no country left to govern. This is the old Marxist fantasy of a world where workers are not bound by nations, borders, or citizenship, but are free to move wherever they want. In practice, it means dissolving the country out from under its own people.
Stu Smith715,865 次观看 • 2 个月前
🚨 Teamsters Turn San Diego Card Party Into a $150 Union Toll Booth Card-show vendors at San Diego’s Card Party say they were charged $150 just to roll their own inventory into the event on carts. These vendors are not giant corporations. They’re mostly hobbyists, collectors, and small business owners trying to bring boxes and cases of cards to tables they already paid for. They expected loading-dock rules. What they say happened instead is that the “anything with wheels” rule was allegedly enforced at the front door too. This is union power running wild — a $150 toll booth for ordinary people trying to move their own inventory into a show they already paid to attend.
Stu Smith1,163,562 次观看 • 3 个月前
🚨 Media figures rushed to fact-check Trump by insisting Democratic Socialism is not Communism. But a majority of DSA’s national leadership is shaped by Communists, Marxist-Leninists, and members who see the org as fertile ground for radicalization. My latest for City Journal!
Stu Smith639,710 次观看 • 2 个月前
🚨 Meet Mamdani judicial adviser Amber Baylor Baylor, a former public defender turned Columbia law professor, now helps evaluate and recommend who should become judges in New York City. She has called for schools to decriminalize student discipline through “retroactive and reparations-based redress,” while arguing that the criminal legal system traces back to anti-Black criminalization “from the time of enslavement.” Baylor says students should think about criminal justice through a “reparations project” aimed at addressing systemic harm, including expunging records and pursuing a “restoration of stolen opportunity.” And while Mamdani has moderated much of his public rhetoric, Baylor and his other judicial advisers suggest the more radical direction in which New York’s courts may be headed. Our latest at City Journal, as I team up with Daniel Edward Rosen!
Stu Smith42,905 次观看 • 5 天前