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2 weeks ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. If you are not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up: This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. At 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks. And it’s still less than the “recession special” at Gray’s Papaya — $7.50 for two hot dogs and a drink.
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2 weeks ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
I know that my whole thing of writing ill-tempered responses to reviews is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I beg dear readers’ patience once again. I think it’ll be clear that this one is particularly egregious: I believe it’s written in patent and obvious bad faith, it’s riddled with basic factual errors, and out-of-context quotes. It neither competently reconstructs the book's contents nor accurately characterizes my opinions on other subjects.
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3 weeks ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
On his Substack, has a two-parter on “Trump’s futurism,” dealing with whether or not Trump’s movement contains a positive vision of the future.
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1 month ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
Starting later today and until May 7th, Unpopular Front will be on vacation! I often make these announcements and then end up writing newsletters anyway, but this time I’d really like to not work — at all. I’ve taken basically no time off since the release of my book last year. Although this vacation was planned for a while, it’s also timely since I’m not exactly enjoying my job at the moment. As I wrote a few weeks ago on Twitter, it’s both too awful and too easy.
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1 month ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
Karl Kautsky’s “Ultra-Imperialism” may be the worst-timed article ever written. In the September 1914 issue of his party’s theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit, the German Social Democratic Party’s chief theorist—“the Pope of Marxism”—argued that a massive war was not the necessary outcome of competition between the great powers.
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1 month ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. If you are not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, I ask you to consider signing up: This newsletter is totally reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. At 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks. And it’s still less than the “recession special” at Gray’s Papaya — $7.50 for two hot dogs and a drink.
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1 month ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz |Max Read
Three months ago, speaking to Quinn Slobodian and , I proposed that the market might be the only remaining form of rationality and therefore the only thing that we might be relying on to temper Trumpian madness. Now, as a person whose scattered thoughts on economics are shaped by the traditions of Keynes and Marx, this is not a particularly hopeful idea. I don’t happen to think the rationality of the market is very rational at all.
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2 months ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
It’s long been my contention that you can understand Trumpism as the synthesis of two ideological currents, which were long dormant and marginal in the American political scene, and then came roaring to prominence. One is radical libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism, articulated most fully in the thought of Murray Rothbard, and the other is national populism, represented by the writings of Samuel T. Francis.
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2 months ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. A huge piece of news that got obliterated in the tariff apocalypse: the conviction of French far-right politician Marine Le Pen. I refer you as always to Arthur Goldhammer’s essential commentary: The RN, taking a leaf from Trump’s playbook, will of course attack the “weaponization” of the judicial system.
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2 months ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz
One of our country’s worst commentators on politics, Batya Ungar-Sargon, recently compared Trump to a “21st century FDR” since he is supposedly trying to help out the working class. This is, of course, totally absurd. I cannot say if Trump is the anti-Christ, but I can say with some certainty that he is the anti-FDR.