Bunker mentality, hope and history, fighting back

Weekend reads for April 19, 2025

Hello, friends! And happy Saturday…um…Billy Bob Day!

Somewhat more seriously, it’s Easter weekend, a break for many of us but also the most significant observance of the year in Christianity, the end of the Lenten period of penitence, the recognition of sacrifice and suffering — and the celebration of rebirth. It’s spring, and time to get moving.

Speaking of which, many of you reading this (and millions more Americans) are likely getting ready to take to the streets again for the follow-up to the huge “Hands Off!” rallies of two weekends back. Get out and make your voices heard, and let’s hope it’s an even bigger demonstration of the will of the people and mass opposition to the ongoing destruction of the Trump-Musk regime.

And as we do for our supporting subscribers each weekend, we’ve gathered below the most challenging and interesting writing we’ve come across this week. As always, we hope you make some space today for reflection and that these readings give you food for thought.

Remember: Ink readers are not doomscrollers. We are bloomscrollers. Going deeper and thinking outside of the firehose of bad-news updates.

Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on how elites abandoned the future for an apocalyptic bunker mentality

• Why it feels like we’re trapped in polar ice (and what can we learn from those who have been)

• How institutional compliance is sometimes just complicity

• Rebecca Solnit on the growing protest movement — and what it can achieve

• How tech entrepreneurs are gamifying informing on your neighbors

• Reflections on the Easter story — and lessons for today

You won’t want to miss any of it. Thank you so much to our supporting subscribers for making this newsletter possible. If you haven’t yet joined our community, why not become part of this, and help us build the future of independent media today?

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Something’s happening here

We’re willing to bet that few of you had this on your 2025 bingo cards:

I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

That’s New York Times columnist David Brooks, calling for mass mobilization and paraphrasing Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

The vibes really do seem to be shifting. It’s becoming apparent that — horrible and devastating as the news from Washington may be — the American people are increasingly angry and willing to show it, and the Trump regime is clearly unable to face resistance, not just by the financial powers that be (though the bond traders did show the way), but by the people.

Republicans have largely avoided town halls during the two-week congressional recess. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s appearance — and her public admission of fear was a notable exception; a hometown crowd shouting down Iowa’s Chuck Grassley on ICE kidnappings was even more revealing. Democrats took up the slack, hosting alternative town halls in districts where GOP representatives feared facing constituents, while Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew tens of thousands to rallies, even in the unlikeliest of places.

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, long a human rights advocate, seized control of the conversation by flying to El Salvador to — successfully — force a meeting with kidnapped constituent Kilmar Ábrego Garcia. He finally picked a fight with the Republicans on immigration and demonstrated Trump’s essential weakness in the face of negative public opinion. The White House has responded mostly by trolling.

This week marked the 50th anniversary of the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which set out to erase history and reorder society by upending institutions, destroying the universities, and turning the intellectual workforce to agrarian labor. But no matter how much the Trump regime might want to emulate the disastrous schemes of past dictatorships, Americans have no appetite for another Year Zero, and they’re making it known. It’s something to keep in mind this weekend — the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution.

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And now, your Weekend Reads

Bunker mentality

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks. [The Guardian]