Andy Swindler (he/him/his)

Co-founder & Chief Empathy Officer @FeelRealCo, Craftsman of words & photos & music, Champion of art & justice

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

Israel has issued a demolition notice for the Aida camp football pitch near Bethlehem, a vital space for some 500 children to train and play, and one of the few open spaces in this crowded refugee camp.

Kids found the notice at the gate in December, threatening the pitch’s removal. Voices including Ms Rachel, the high-profile children’s educator, are amplifying this crisis, urging athletes, including FIFA soccer players, and journalists to spotlight the demolition threat and stand with the Palestinian youth.

Local leaders and former Bethlehem officials say the land was legally leased and the pitch built with community support, Al Monitor reported.

[Michael Shuffett @mshuffett]

🤯 First look at Everything AI -- think Linear but for managing 100s of coding agents / instances of Claude Code. Early demo below 📷 (filmed 2 months ago - if this blows up, I'll drop the updated version in a week)

[Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם @yuval_abraham]

To the 100s of journalists who follow me here: Masafer Yatta is being ethnically cleansed by the army, we’re organizing an urgent visit on the ground for international media, please write directly for the date and time

[Abier @abierkhatib]

No other land is still making rounds and impact.

Paul Mescal, Star of 'Gladiator 2, Speaks Out Against Censorship of Palestinians in the West

[A New Policy @anewpolicyorg]

This is a refreshing reminder that political change and courage is possible. U.S. elected officials would serve themselves well to take note.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

REPORT: Biden Officials Admit They Never Pressured Israel for Ceasefire, as Israeli Leaders Boast of Playing Washington

“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period… We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.”
—Former Israeli ambassador Michael Herzog:

A sweeping Israeli Channel 13 investigation has exposed the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s 19-month war on Gaza. Nine top Biden officials acknowledged avoiding real pressure on Israel—even as the death toll surpassed 30,000. Israeli leaders openly bragged they dragged out the war, playing for time until Donald Trump’s return.

Former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Ambassador Tom Nides, and others defended their unwavering support for Israel—even as they admitted enabling a campaign one U.S. aide described as “killing and destroying for the sake of killing and destroying.”

Here’s what the investigation revealed: 🧵⬇️

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Right now, there is probably less interest in the US-Israeli genocide of the Palestinians than at any point since Oct. 7.

Also...

"Right now, it is probably the worst humanitarian situation ever seen throughout the war in Gaza." @ochaopt (April 22, 2025) https://t.co/RPEYE12bvD

[Andy Swindler (he/him/his) @aswindler]

Join me @Human+Tech Week Summit! Let's explore the future of human potential. We’re looking forward to hosting you in San Francisco, June 14-20th, to dive deep into how AI & Tech supports humans & society. 20% off with code: “SPEAK20” https://t.co/jEpf2xU1k6 #Human+Tech #CoGoNow

[Spencer Althouse @SpencerAlthouse]

!!!!!!!! the team from No Other Land calling out Trump while talking about Palestine

"The foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path. Why? Can't you see that we are intertwined? There is another way. It's not too late for life, for the living."

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

BREAKING: IDF deploys tanks to the West Bank for the first time since 2002.

Israel's brutal War on the West Bank continues @Obornetweets

[Sulaiman Ahmed @ShaykhSulaiman]

THIS IS HOW WORLD LEADERS REACTED TO TRUMPS PLANS TO TAKE OVER GAZA

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israel carried out a massive attack in the West Bank today and I can’t find a story about it in the New York Times or BBC.

Probably the two most prominent media outlets in the Western world do not think this ⬇️ is newsworthy.

[Taleed El-Sabawi, JD, PhD @el_sabawi]

Trumps proposed $1 billion arms sale to Israel is financed by U.S. military aid, which means we, the American people, are paying $1 billion. What happened to America First and no more handouts to other countries? I spent the day interviewing Americans who work full-time and who are at risk of being homeless— and are talking about getting another part-time job just to pay for food. But we have billions to give away to find endless wars.

[Andy Swindler (he/him/his) @aswindler]

@RepThomasMassie Are you suggesting that a single person can claim to produce those three things without the collective?

[Andrey X @the_andrey_x]

URGENT: Israel is moving the war from Gaza to West Bank

- Intense settler pogroms for five days in a row

- IOF is invading Jenin in an operation that “could last months”

- The number of IOF checkpoints DOUBLED in one day

- Bethlehem is locked down

ALL EYES ON THE WEST BANK

[Mitchell Plitnick 🔥🕎 @MJPlitnick]

Be very clear. This deal could have been agreed to in November of 2023. Hamas accepted it back then. Netanyahu refused it, and Biden fully supported him in doing so, while he and Blinken put on theatrics for the media. Imagine how many #Palestinian, #Israeli, and #Lebanese lives those acts alone have cost.

https://t.co/tQN0NbKxSj

[John @John58657352]

BREAKING: The International Court has declared Israel an illegal state.

Israel saved for last.

[Safia Latif @safialatif]

My painting of a portal to heaven in Gaza

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

Like many others, including J.D. Vance, I’m very much on record in warning about Donald Trump from 2015 onward, including articles and an entire book (which is still valuable) on the rightest version of collectivism.

As we approach election day, my opinions have undergone a shift, particular in the last three years watching as Biden/Harris marshaled a massive ruling class propaganda and compulsion machine to push everything I oppose the most: state consolidation, corporatism, censorship, inflationism, central planning, and compulsory injections of experimental medical products.

It all seems surreal to me. I think back to what worried me the most about Trump: demagogic nationalism, nativistic protectionism, executive centralization, and the leadership cult. Features of his last term confirmed my worst fears, particularly his green lighting of lockdowns for Covid and disregard for religious and personal freedom in the period. He also has a terrible record on spending, mitigated in part by solid efforts toward deregulation and higher quality picks on the bench.

To my amazement, when Trump realized he was wrong on Covid controls and began to argue for opening up again, he was denounced by the whole of the political opposition! Then once he was out of office, everything became vastly worse, including mask mandates, forced closures, and finally the unconscionable forced shots that have no only killed and wounded many but demoralized and subjugated the population in ways that can only be compared with wartime conscription.

As regards Trump himself, what we’ve seen emerge since then is a changed man in many ways, or so it seems. He has new appreciation for the wicked power of the deep state and the toxicity of lawfare of which he is a main victim. The kinds of people he has gathered around him, including RFKJr and Elon, is also encouraging.

At the same time, I’ve changed too on many topics on which I thought I had settled opinions.

On nationalism, I had never imagined the conditions in which that impulse would favor rather than oppose liberty, and amount to a form of decentralization from what is called globalism. The Covid response was largely dictated (from Feb 26, 2020) by the World Health Organization, which is mostly funded privately as a corporatist racket pushing pharmaceutical products. This is why the Covid response was the same the worldover (but for three nations). Even the CDC claimed to defer.

And that’s just the start of it. It’s true for censorship and financial power too: both are global initiatives pushed by corporate elites, as we see in Europe. The treatment of Elon Musk for daring to permit speech is indicative: they really want to turn the Internet into a curated information machine controlled only by stakeholders. I’m not making this up. This is what they say!

Indeed, the problem is even deeper. There is a machine being built globally that necessarily disenfranchises voters the world over. Once they have power, democracy is at an effective end, which means that citizens no longer have any possibility of influencing the shape of the regime under which they live.

Nationalism in this case means taking back power from usurpers. (Generally speaking, as I’ve long written, whether nationalism is good or bad for liberty depends on circumstances of time and place.).

On the matter of immigration, I never imagined that I lived under a regime that would deploy the free movement of peoples as a weapon of vote manipulation and power consolidation. Voters in the UK saw it, and Murray Rothbard saw it as a possibility as early as 1993 but I couldn’t imagine it.

I was wrong. It became our reality. The liberal and broad-minded impulse to welcome strangers has been weaponized as a vote-getting scheme operated at taxpayer expense. This has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with the aspiration for a one-party state and premeditated demographic upheaval to break up opposition to state consolidation.

On matters of trade, I’m with Rand Paul in opposing tariffs as industrial protection. That said, the loss of domestic manufacturing is driven in part by a bad monetary system that broke all monetary settlement mechanisms that had smoothed trade in the 19th century and replaced it with a one-way industrial policy that came at the expense of the citizenry.

It has become clear, in addition, that the longing for a system of fiscal financing via tariffs rather than income taxes is on the table, as in the 19th century. That would certainly amount to an improvement over the current system. If that kind of nostalgia drives Trump’s tariff push, there is some basis for it and not automatically a form of what I feared the most.

The number one shift I’ve undergone in my thinking concerns the source of the real problem in the US. It is not the politicians elected by the voters as such but the permanent state structures that exist on three levels: shallow, middle, and deep. The consciousness of this is as new as it is ominous.

The deep state refers to the intelligence community which very obviously exercises massive power not only internationally but domestically as well. I’m not sure I was fully aware of that.

The middle state is the civilian bureaucracy, some 2 million strong plus 400 agencies that imagine that they are the real and permanent rulers of America.

The shallow state is the retail end of this machine: the media, the medical systems, the tech companies, and the corporate structure itself whether it controls advertising or philanthropy or banking or financial markets. The corruption is deep and wide.

There is only one way to break up this wicked cartel,: with executive, legislative, and judicial action. The Trump forces have a bead on this, in part because his last term was utterly foiled by this machinery.

We’ve never had an incoming administration so finely focused on the real problems and floating real solutions to actually save freedom in this generation from utter destruction.

Of course it might not go well: usually politics betrays us. But this much I know: we cannot endure four more years of whether things are headed now. Everything we love is being lost.

Most Americans have a simple demand: we want our lives back. It’s that simple. We don’t even need to take recourse to far-flung ideological precepts to understand it. We need only draw on moral intuition and what we remember (if we can) of what normal life should be like.

[David Shapiro (L/0) @DaveShapi]

I used to believe technology would inevitably lead to Utopia - better tools mean better outcomes for humanity. Star Trek showed us that vision of automated abundance. Hyper-abundance, post-scarcity Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism!

Studying attractor states from Liv Boeree and Daniel Schmachtenberger revealed how complex systems naturally evolve toward certain configurations. Technology amplifies existing power structures rather than automatically improving them. Power begets more power, and wealth concentrates at the top.

Current economic and power structures are steering us toward cyberpunk dystopia by default. Capital concentration plus automated production creates an attractor state that's remarkably stable and remarkably terrible. We're headed inexorably towards a "high tech, low life" outcome unless we do something different.

The path to Star Trek or solarpunk requires both technological progress and new coordination frameworks. That's why I'm developing Post-Labor Economics - we need new stories about how society functions when automation reaches maturity. We need to get off this path with new narratives and new economic theories.