The Proudhon app routes us,
waking on Karl-Marx-Straße,
we confess nothing.
Each stop a small betrayal.
Each detour a party congress.
The doors open in the middle,
the driver obliges,
and everyone exits
where they meant to arrive.
All posts by Davi Ottenheimer
This Day in History: 1921 Arditi del Popolo
The anti-fascist militia Arditi del Popolo (AdP), was founded in Rome in late June 1921. Faced with a growing threat of armed fascist gangs, regular people gathered around the AdP defense organization and managed to keep streets of cities and neighborhoods safe from the domestic terror squads known as “blackshirts”. Its first action was July 19 in the port city of Piombino, in Tuscany, Italy.
Sung to the tune of Giovinezza (fascist party hymn):
We beat back the violence
of mercenary fascism
all to arms, on the calvary
of human redemption.This eternal youth
renews itself in faith
for a people who demand
equality and liberty.
Two days after Piombino, at Sarzana, a column of five hundred fascists marched to free their captured leader Renato Ricci. A dozen Carabinieri fired on the right wing extremists approaching the railway station, and AdP fighters joined by local workers and citizens hunted the survivors on the run through the countryside. The chief of staff of the defeated right-wing terror squad reflected:
The squad, so long accustomed to meeting an enemy who nearly always ran away, or offered feeble resistance, could not, and did not know how to defend themselves.
Food for thought.
Axel Springer Honors Man Who Hates Democracy and Bankrolls the CEO’s Son
Axel Springer disgraces itself and betrays its founding principles, for a dollar, by giving right-wing extremist Peter Thiel its top award on September 24 in Berlin.
Thiel opposes democracy. His words, his byline, Cato Unbound, 2009:
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Got that? Thiel doesn’t believe in democracy. He wrote that extending the vote to women wrecked what he calls capitalist democracy, and his answer is to create spaces where votes carry no weight. The premise comes straight from the Doctrine of Fascism, 1932, when Italy’s infamous bully claimed the majority has no right to direct society. Maybe the Axel Springer pivot means they should be giving Mussolini an award first?
FEC filings show fifteen million dollars went into the PAC that made JD Vance a senator, wealth curating government. He admitted funding the covert lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. This spring he seeded Objection, a two-thousand-dollar AI tribunal for putting journalists on trial, built by the same lawyer who ran the Gawker operation.
Indeed, Manager Magazin reported in February 2025 that Thiel put 50 million dollars into Doepfner Capital Fund I, a fund documented in SEC filings with a target of 75 million. The fund belongs to Moritz Döpfner. Moritz is the son of Mathias Döpfner, the Springer CEO who chose this year’s laureate. Moritz was Thiel’s chief of staff.
The CEO’s company is giving an award to the man financing the CEO’s son, yet the press release discloses none of that relationship. Thiel bankrolled the family that hands out the honor, a fitting joke: the man most opposed to democracy collecting a prize his money corrupted into an appointment.
Bari Weiss delivers the disgusting, suicidal tribute. Paramount’s Ellison family bought her Free Press for 150 million dollars in October and installed her atop CBS News. Since then she has pulled a 60 Minutes investigation of the CECOT deportation prison off the air, removed producers Tanya Simon and Draggan Mihailovich and correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, and fired Scott Pelley one day after he told a staff meeting she was murdering the program and drew a standing ovation. CBS Evening News sits at historic ratings lows, perhaps teetering on disappearing entirely. Her “Free Press” took early money from David Sacks, Thiel’s PayPal partner and co-author of The Diversity Myth, and a week after the 2024 election she handed Thiel her microphone to celebrate together. The woman gutting one storied newsroom will laud the man who bankrupted another.
Perhaps it’s worth noting here that there was a wind-up to the Thiel capture. Springer’s “Essentials” had bound every employee to democracy and a united Europe. Those words were just thrown out with the bath water. In June 2025 the company quietly deleted the united Europe and trimmed “soziale” from the social market economy. Thirteen months later Thiel is showing up to be honored by the Berlin stage that just deleted the Jewish people from its principles.
Apparently “what defines us” at Axel Springer are no longer the obligations German history imposed. Springer wiped its own history away, replaced with generalities any multinational could sign and mean nothing.
The DJV chairman called the award incompatible with Springer’s values. He was citing the way things were before Thiel opened his bags of dirty cash. The Springer Essentials have been made compliant with Thiel. He paid in advance.
Don’t Mention the Children
Michael Rosen reads his poem Don’t Mention the Children
Related: Genocide Hidden in Arkansas’ Cadron Settlement on Trail of Tears
Thirty of the list’s 50 victims were children, hardly any with listed identities. The inscription explains that “before 1850, it was common for Cherokee children to be unnamed…”