Dr. William Horne
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wihorne.bsky.social
Dr. William Horne
@wihorne.bsky.social
24K followers 3.8K following 2.5K posts
Writer. Radical. Historian at UMD. PhD in History from GW. In Case of Emergency: https://tinyurl.com/mvmrcuvk. (he/him)
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wihorne.bsky.social
Turkey and sausage gumbo night is a success!
A pot of turkey and sausage gumbo on the stovetop.
November 28, 2025 at 10:57 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Whether you celebrate, as we do, with the traditional Pilgrims’ Penises a’Plenty or the Modern Mayo Casserole, a warm & wonderful holiday to all.
A tray of pretzels in the shape of penises.
November 27, 2025 at 2:00 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
"If the black revolt does not succeed... Americans are going to discover what it is like to live as the black man has been living all these years, in constant terror of violence from the mob & from the police, never certain what rights he can exercise under the law & under the Constitution."
Black and white photo of James Boggs, wearing a light-colored sweater, seated with his forehead resting in his hand.
November 21, 2025 at 5:08 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
The double-helping of racism & Islamophobia here is really something to behold. This sort of orientalist thinking only ever spreads the harm it purports to oppose.
Screenshot of skeet from altnoaa: This guy is going to need a strong security team. And honestly, I'd be a lot more concerned about IS-K/ALQ than rednecks. This is not the flavor of Islam they want to see spreading. Linked article: https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/politics/mamdani-transition-team-nyc
November 5, 2025 at 7:55 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Discussing the narrow implementation of the Brown ruling today in class, & perhaps nothing illustrates the nationwide "legacies" of Jim Crow than the persistence of segregated schools today. www.epi.org/publication/...
Bar graph of segregated schools: Black children are five times as likely as white children to attend schools that are highly segregated by race and ethnicity Shares of white and black eighth-graders attending schools with a high concentration of students of color, 2017 Race High-minority (51-100%) White 12.9% Black 69.2% 12.9% 69.2% White Black ChartData Economic Policy Institute Note: Schools with a high concentration of students of color are those in which 51–100% of students are black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian. Source: Author’s analysis of microdata from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
November 3, 2025 at 5:25 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Reviving this sense of the commons with new policies & more vibrant expressions of community offers a key way forward, not only in strengthening ourselves against the precarity exploited by fascists, but also by creating a world where fascism itself is increasingly impossible.
Screenshot of text from article linked above: In this logic of commoning—of shared re- sponsibility for the collective good—we find not only a repudiation of the historical and ongoing white reactionary politics of suppression and exclu- sion, but a way forward in solidarity and mutual liberation. This path rep- resents both a lesson and opportunity that, as the wave of repression that destroyed Reconstruction and cemented Jim Crow illustrates, Americans can ill afford to miss.
October 31, 2025 at 3:57 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Fortunately, historical precedents & norms in “commoning” provide a way forward, offering not only a window into a different way of treating resources, but also an ethic of community totally destroy by generations of capitalist policies.
Screenshot of quoted text: The vision offered by Dana D. Nelson in “The Commons” bears the fruit of this alternative approach. In Nelson’s telling, the commons was both a historical spatial practice—setting aside land and resources for common use—and an ethic of commoning—sharing responsibilities intertwined with democratic practice in the early Republic. Nelson explains that many British colonists “came to the Americas steeped in commoning tradi- tions . . . that concerned the sharing and management not just of natural resources such as firewood and pastures but domestic, cultural, and civic resources as well, and with a political sensibility tempered by decades of re- sistance to enclosure in England” (211). Their commitment to collective re- sponsibility for the public good, Nelson argues, although gradually erased through the liberal civic language of individualism, represented a defining feature of American democracy in the eyes of Alexis de Tocqueville. Nel- son engages Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which provides the intel- lectual frame for this collection of essays. Tocqueville noted, Nelson writes, that social life in the United States is shot through with the same attitude: “There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals” (qtd. in Nelson 215). While powerful elites created and leveraged institutions to constrain and sub- vert the commitment to the public good documented by Nelson, a shared past and lexicons of liberation demonstrate that the desires of a grassroots egalitarian democracy cannot be so easily bound. From abolition, enfran- chisement, and the eight-hour workday to calls for protests, reparations, livable wages, and meaningful social services, the shared responsibility of commoning remains a key feature of democracy in America.
October 31, 2025 at 3:47 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
The historical & current fascist iterations of the Supreme Court illustrate this problem to brutal effect. Actual democracy simply isn’t possible when you allow fascist actors to define the parameters of freedom. Kinda obvious.
Screenshot of text from linked article: The Supreme Court’s contingent commitment to constitutional democ- racy during the long nineteenth century raises the central question of our time: Is it possible to maintain democracy with a group of people stead- fastly committed to its destruction? Jack Jackson’s chapter, “The Constitu- tion,” illustrates the depth of the problem. The antidemocratic nature of the Court is embedded in the Constitution “by design,” he argues, because “the people and their passions are imagined as a danger to justice in both their capacity as a legislative majority and as an active source of constitutional authority and power” (65). Thus, Jackson views American democracy as intentionally undermined and “checked by an unelected judiciary” (65). To Jackson’s analysis we might add the Cruikshank (1876) decision, under which the Court ruled that the roughly one hundred Black victims of the Colfax Massacre of 1873—wherein a white militia killed all of the local Black officials and their families—had not had their civil rights violated be- cause their murderers acted as private citizens. In a farcical twist, however, the white paramilitaries stormed the courthouse where their Black victims had taken refuge because they claimed that they, the white mob, and not the official Black officeholders, were the true victors of the recent election. Thus, in the eyes of the Court, the white militants attacked the courthouse as claimants of legitimate state power but performed their mass execution as private citizens beyond the reach of the state. Decades of similar juris- prudence illustrates Derrick Spires’s key argument in chapter 20, “Sham.” “Democracy in the United States,” he observes, “has functioned as a sleight of hand in which white majoritarian rule has stood in for rule ‘by the peo- ple,’ with whiteness as sovereignty’s ensign and anti-Black violence its call- ing card” (231).
October 31, 2025 at 3:38 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Which is to say that they will cease to be Jews...

But yes, there's no centralized theology, so many different versions of antisemitism.
Screenshot of a quote of the above skeet: For many evangelicals, there’s a belief that the temple has to be rebuilt before Jesus comes back, so they support Israel in the hopes that the temple will be rebuilt. Josh: "Some Evangelicals believe Jews will the die and be sent to hell, although that’s hardly universal. Some believe they’ll convert…"
October 30, 2025 at 11:15 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
In fact, renouncing fascist violence & repression *requires* that we go beyond criticizing those genocidal systems to articulate an actually-livable world for which we struggle in solidarity. We need both!
Screenshot of text from article linked above: The question simmering beneath the surface in public celebrations of solidarity, defiance, and common interest —what might liberation look like—is a crucial one because it asks us to dream, hope, imagine, and create. And implied in the question, actually, is something unspeakable: deep down we know—most of us, anyway—that the state as it exists is organized around exploitation and repression. A regime that serves the interests of its people would never dare to cut a trillion dollars from its hospitals. It wouldn’t dream of sending masked agents to snatch working people from the streets or even fleetingly consider orchestrating midnight raids to drag and shackle them naked in front of their apartments. A government that honors and serves its communities would not turn them into occupied territory or designate anyone opposed to its lawlessness and repression as terrorists.
October 28, 2025 at 2:45 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
This world beyond fascism has been a big part of my unpublished writing for the last few years, a topic I explored in my recent essay. While we often (& by necessity) criticize fascist tactics, looking & working beyond them is central to their destruction. drwilliamhorne.substack.com/p/protest-ce...
Screenshot from article linked above: "A parade of penguins. A procession of pigs. A phalanx of frogs. Many of us encountered a politics of public celebration this weekend, some for the first time, complete with brass bands, inflatable suits, and dancing. As a native New Orleanian and historian, however, I recognized these events immediately as more than mere “performances.” The celebrations and spectacles remind me very much of the radical strains of Mardi Gras that challenge and defy authority while bringing to life new ways of living and being. These forays into the carnivalesque create the “optimism of the will” essential to liberation movements. They help popularize slogans and ideas that explicitly reject fascism and demand accountability for the lawlessness of the regime and its Republican backers. The diffuse nature of the ideas chanted, sung, paraded, and posted in public spaces amplify the importance of these demands, which far outpace the cautious rhetoric and tactics of the institutional opposition party."
October 28, 2025 at 2:35 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
I kinda want to be this guy.
Guy in an upside down frog costume.
October 24, 2025 at 1:05 AM
wihorne.bsky.social
This all day!
Protestor dressed in gold with a sign that reads “No Kings YAAAS QUEENS!”
October 18, 2025 at 6:55 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Cops go to protests to brutalize protestors. That is their job. It’s what they’re for.
Cops line up outside the Mechanics’ Institute in New Orleans on July 30, 1866 before attacking Black protestors & storming the building to murder voting rights activists. https://www.wwno.org/podcast/tripod-new-orleans-at-300/2016-07-14/an-absolute-massacre-the-1866-riot-at-the-mechanics-institute Cops beating John Lewis and other civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday, 1965. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/07/this-day-in-politics-march-7-1965-437394
October 17, 2025 at 4:24 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
So very tired of this nonsense.
Variant of the “is this a pigeon “ meme. “Americans” sees “fascism” and asks “is this communism?” Meme background: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-pigeon
October 16, 2025 at 1:06 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
This prospect of a multiracial alliance btwn Italian immigrants & Black Americans is precisely why, after railing against the evils of segregation, W.E.B. Du Bois concluded his inaugural editorial in The Crisis with an account of anti-Italian lynching in Florida. babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=em...
Excerpt from W.E.B. Du Bois's inaugural editorial in The Crisis: "Two Italians were lynched in Florida. The Italian Government protested, but it was found that they were naturalized Americans. The inalienable right of every free American citizen to be lynched without tiresome investigation and penalties is one of which the families of the lately deceased doubtless deeply appreciate." https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=emu.010000154224&view=1up&seq=11&skin=2021
October 13, 2025 at 12:43 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
We really need to be thinking abt the current regime through the lens of the Second Klan, which helped to nationalize systems of Jim Crow state & vigilante violence & exploitation while creating an explicitly white nationalist immigration system. They even paraded down Pennsylvania Ave.
A 1926 klan parade marching down Pennsylvania Ave. The front of the column holds banners that read Connecticut & Rhode Island. Original available via the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001706338/
October 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Which is why they didn’t bend over backwards to recruit ex-Nazis to the US, or….

Anyway, go read Hitler’s American Model or the vast lit on Jim Crow as a protofascist regime & spare us the feigned indignation.

Blocking nonsense like this bc I don’t need to be your nationalist fix.
Screenshot of quoted tweet nudeafrica.gov ‪@theophite.bsky.social‬ Follow this is even more ahistorical than the thing it is criticizing. even arch-segregationists were wildly antifascist! there is, in fact, a difference between the Athenian / Jeffersonian ideal of an equal citizenry of petty tyrants and fascism. ‪Dr. William Horne‬ ‪@wihorne.bsky.social‬ · 39m Tbh this is why I hate those stupid WWII “our grandparents were antifascists“ memes, bc no they absolutely were fucking not & in fact the majority of them participated in an apartheid state even *after* seeing the ravages of fascism in Europe.
October 4, 2025 at 5:42 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Whitewashing the vigilante & state violence promoted & advanced by Kirk & so many others fails to address the role it plays in our system. It may make you *comfortable*, but it can never make you *safe*.
Screenshot of article linked above: The problem of chronic state and vigilante violence preached by Kirk and so many others is often a matter of denial for millions of us whose lives and livelihoods aren’t directly threatened by these tactics. For those, like Klein and Newsom, it’s easier to pretend that such a system of violence not only doesn’t exist, but couldn’t exist in the U.S. The history be damned!
September 11, 2025 at 3:02 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Kirk used this exact framework—identifying the success of a targeted group & then calling for violence against that group—against queer folks & countless others. It was central to his politics. "Watchlisted" professors know exactly what I'm talking abt.
Screenshot from article linked above: That framework, in fact, is exactly what Kirk deployed against the queer community. To paraphrase: “it’s becoming safer to be queer and we’ve got to do something about that.” That “something,” as it turns out, just so happened to include capital punishment. In less effete circles, we call that genocide.
September 11, 2025 at 2:58 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
And we see this same pattern, over & over, both historically & in contemporary fascist politics. "The threat is the economic success of a racially-subordinated group. But the 'solution'? State violence that suppresses, plunders, and excludes that population."
Screenshot from article linked above: If we think all the way back to Trump’s first race-baiting presidential campaign in 2016, one of the central fears he stoked is that Latines were finding economic success. Maybe the most famous instance of this was when Trump surrogate Marco Gutierrez warned that “If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” The horror! The threat is the economic success of a racially-subordinated group. But the “solution”? State violence that suppresses, plunders, and excludes that population. And then there’s Trump’s more recent claim that migrant workers are “attacking—and they already are—Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too.” While it’s worth wondering what in the actual fuck a “Black population job” is (the imagined racial hierarchy is white clear), the threat-solution framework remains the same. White conservatives suggest that a racialized group might find economic success. The solution? Deploying state and vigilante violence against that group.
September 11, 2025 at 2:55 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
The historical pattern couldn't be clearer. "In every instance, white conservatives met the prospect of successful racialized groups with violence."
Screenshot from article linked above: In every instance, white conservatives met the prospect of successful racialized groups with violence. They led a mob of white veterans into Black Wall Street and burned it to the ground, plundering and murdering residents with impunity. They outlawed Asian immigration, organized pogroms, and stripped Japanese farmers of their land. This relationship of white conservatism to state and vigilante violence has been arguably the defining feature of what we have called democracy in the United States. It is one that, given our current political landscape, should surprise exactly no one.
September 11, 2025 at 2:52 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
These efforts to normalize a fascist politics of repression hide the Big Lie that animates white conservatism: conservative claims to white Christian superiority are not only nonsense, but are "totally dependent on state violence to exist as an idea, an identity, and a mode of power."
Screenshot from article linked above: White conservatism is bound to the presumption that whiteness, Christianity, and Western Civilization are naturally superior to other groups and their ways of living. But here’s the catch: that “superiority” can only exist under overwhelming regimes of violence. Give Black Americans the chance, and they’ll build a Black Wall Street. Give Asian Americans the chance, and they’ll create a rich agricultural system from the decaying white boomtowns of mining country. And so forth.
September 11, 2025 at 2:49 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
The bizarre liberal eulogies of Kirk by Klein, Newsom, & others overlook his relationship to violence & that of the white conservative movement more broadly. If we're serious abt not wanting to live in a society where ppl are subjected to this sort of thing, we absolutely can't normalize this stuff.
Screenshot from article linked above: In the aftermath of Kirk’s slaying, liberal figureheads like Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom have rushed to put out statements celebrating Kirk and his work, with Klein gushing that “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” and Newsom vowing, puzzlingly, to “continue his work.” They ask us, in short, to ignore or even embrace Kirk’s encouragement of state and vigilante violence against marginalized groups as just normal everyday conservatism. In a way, they’re right, but that’s actually a massive historical and ongoing problem that we should reject, rather than accept as a grotesque cost of doing business.
September 11, 2025 at 2:44 PM
wihorne.bsky.social
Who among us hasn’t had a personally signed letter celebrating the “wonderful secret” of raping children sneaked into a 22-year-old leather-bound book for a renowned child sex trafficker by a time-traveling Deep State agent to discredit our otherwise spotless fascist character?
Image of a birthday letter written by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein inside the drawing of a pre-pubescent girl. The letter imagines a conversation between the two men celebrating that they have “certain things in common,” knowing that “there must be more to life than having everything.” Both men say they know what there is, but that they won’t say what it is. The letter concludes with a note from Donald that “a pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” The letter is signed “Donald,” roughly where the public hair of the female outline might have been. Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/see-the-alleged-trump-birthday-note-to-epstein-released-by-house-democrats
September 10, 2025 at 2:20 PM