Matt here. Spring is in the air, I saw a whale yesterday and the fresh harvest of links is in.

Keir Milburn has a piece in Novara on the rise of the Cosmic Right - a weird blend of hippies, fascists, anti-vaxxers and QAnon people who’ve come out of the woodwork to protest lockdowns and fight back against the Illuminati. He’s also got a podcast episode on the subject, which might be a nice chaser to our CIA episode from last week.

Interview with union activists at a Melbourne laundry who were forced to work through a COVID outbreak until they went on strike and made the bosses back down. The system works!

Racists or comrades: the role of the white working class in the American BLM struggle.

The Appalachian Trail: a monument to democratic socialism.

A new study documents how Australian academics and environmental scientists are being systematically silenced and forced to censor their work, under threat of being persecuted by the media and having their funding cut. Not really a surprise that mining companies are paying universities to let them off the hook.

And David Graeber fucking died. Not too happy about this. He was very much a real one and he will be sorely missed. Novara and the New York Review of Books offer some extremely touching obituaries. If you haven’t read him before or you want to remind yourself why he kicked ass, here’s some of his greatest hits: against economics, against the centre and a whole collection of essays for us all to delve into. May he overthrow God and drop truth bombs on us from anarchist Heaven.

Photo by Jason Pofahl on Unsplash