Benjamin Lowe

A dear friend of mine asked me: "Ben ... serious question: What the fuck do we do? We ordinary citizens without access to any real levers of power." I wrote him a lengthy reply which he said he found helpful, so I thought I'd share it here. 🧵 1/

The five-year-old: “Why did the Jews put lamb’s blood on the door?” The seven-year-old: “So Jesus wouldn’t kill them.” May need to go over a couple things before the next Seder.

Plenty of flabbergasted pieces on Mamdani (including previous articles from the NYT) skip over this basic key to his success: For a year now, he has been actively reaching out, listening, and talking to absolutely every group he can to understand their concerns and see how they can work together.

This is exactly how I feel about my cookbooks -- I love flipping to a favorite recipe and seeing smears and stains from previous attempts, my olive-oil fingerprints pressed into the margins where I had once hastily turned the page.

shout-outs to the best bathroom heating system of all time, A Hot Tube

Particularly infuriating: weekends are the best time for electeds to work with the groundswell of activists trying to oppose rising authoritarianism. Instead, Dem leadership seems committed to hiding from these grassroots movements in desperate need of support.

Imagining this being vandalized with just… direct quotations of Charlie Kirk.

Shana Tovah! Will be making a cardamom apple challah tomorrow, but today the masses demanded garlic-mozzarella monkey bread.

Riding To the airport listening to the Hot 97 drivetime DJs explaining to their audience how media conglomeration is aligned with the rise of authoritarianism and the curtailing of free expression. What a time to be alive.

fuck off you did this

We should, in fact, deepen our divisions with ardent ethnonationalists. We should not make space for them or normalize them or laud them for their dedication to *spirited debate* about whether Black people are mentally deficient or gay people should be stoned to death.

This is really shameful and pathetic, even for Kash Patel. Maybe have qualified law enforcement people head the FBI instead of professional shit posters.

I *wish* this were the Democratic Party’s job. Unfortunately, its primary role is to *reelect incumbent Democrats,* which is why it focuses on amassing cash and moderating rightward rather than representing the interests of its party members from whom it derives little guidance.

Rather than offering a real alternative to the status quo, this crop of candidates is repackaging the boring, moderate politics of the Democratic establishment with inauthentic videos and forced rhetoric.

At my kids’ elementary school PTO meeting. The update on the upcoming active shooter drill, where our kids are taught to huddle silently in the dark, is between announcements about the cellphone policy and fall carnival, because preparing children for these horrors is just mundane and normal now.

huh, guess he really did love Charlie Kirk like one of his sons.

By 2:15 PM today, people started lining up in front of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse to get a seat for Luigi Mangione’s courtroom appearance tomorrow. The blue tents are paid line-sitters who apparently make about $25/hr.

No, @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social, New Yorkers are asking why NY electeds who claim to be Democratic “leadership” are getting lapped by a Maryland Senator. Jeffries and Schumer look weaker and less relevant every day they don’t endorse the Democratic nominee for Mayor over a sex pest and a crook.

Got to screen print a bunch of Jews For Zohran swag ahead of their 200-person JVP/JFREJ canvass in Brooklyn!

Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up? TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years.

Take notes, folks.

Trump is just saying “yeah we got the guy and we’ll talk about it later” which all but guarantees the suspect‘s background and politics are *deeply inconvenient* to Trump and MAGA.

Hey remember every time people said defended Congressional Democrats’ inaction because they couldn’t just ignore the filibuster if they felt like it? so yeah

Kirk said “Jewish communities have been pushing the... hatred against whites they claim to want people to stop using against them,” that "Jews are... financing cultural Marxism," that Jews control "colleges... nonprofits... Hollywood... all of it." This is the "debate" Charlie Kirk engaged in.

As predicted, the right wing zionist hasbara machine is hurrying to make Charlie Kirk a hero to Jews.

Here is the entirety of this story which you must register for at least a free account to even read past the second graph which I foolishly did do bc I was sure they would have printed what the words were in the story under where they fade the print out in a way that makes u think they will do that

Ran into @bradlander.bsky.social at the 2025 @jfrejnyc.bsky.social Mazal Awards!

Charlie Kirk was a fascist. His murder was another example of the continuous political violence woven into the fabric of this country, violence Kirk spent his life defending and promoting. Addressing this violence means pushing against everything Kirk stood for. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.

Happy Sunday from our local elementary school garden where the kids and their grown-ups are training trellis vines, replanting strawberries, and cleaning up berries before the school year starts next week.

There’s also this endless focus on silver-bullet messaging, as though the right sentence is going to give voters a head-asplode epiphany. The reality is that education and persuasion take a much longer time—as does building up trust in the messenger, which this sort of study cannot measure.

I spend more time on LinkedIn than any person should for work, and this AI-driven mental “erosion” is increasingly a topic of discussion. By and large, LinkedIn is *very* bullish on AI, and yet many new AI users quickly report blunted creativity and greater difficulty performing some basic tasks.

Shabbat Shalom from Bristol, Maine.

more of this please, like a hundred more would not be too many

For those just tuning in, Mamdani got his apartment by: 1. Going on StreetEasy 2. Finding an apartment he liked 3. Applying for it 4. Signing a lease Half of NYC rental apartments are stabilized. This is the nonnest non-issue imaginable. This is all in absurdly bad faith.

The many benefits of bringing endless imperial wars home include: - shorter commutes - no need to learn new language to verbally abuse, intimidate - oppressed sponsor their own oppression with tax dollars - decades of propaganda have left many still believing these are the good guys ... and more!

hero www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/u...

This is so sad, and is going to get so much worse soon when AI can render audio and video in close to real time, burning down forests to feed people’s growing psychoses.

This response to America’s descent into fascism by a governor is so woefully inadequate it may have been better if Moore had said nothing. The issue is that federally controlled troops are marching in the streets of America’s cities, not that they haven’t gone through the right training seminar.

The week he resigned, Cuomo’s net favorability rating in New York City was only down to -3. It’s one reason I was concerned about him running for Mayor: it was actually upstate, not NYC, that pushed him out. Turns out I didn’t need to worry. patch.com/new-york/was...

safety rope tester at the punji stick warehouse

In case anyone was wondering whether Zohran Mamdani can throw a punch. Absolutely brutal (and 100% accurate). Cuomo should have lurched off back into the shadows when he had a chance.

I follow a lot of races, and I have never seen a candidate try to simultaneously move *and* punch left in an attempt to run a city he transparently doesn’t give a shit about. It’s really something.

Cuomo is doing his part to address the housing crisis by not living in New York City in the first place. Not to worry, though, Andrew: about the same time you move to Florida, Mamdani’s apartment will be vacant when he moves out of Astoria and into Gracie Mansion.

This is absolutely ghoulish and completely fucked up.