I'm realizing now that a daily cadence for writing may have been optimistic; or, at least if I am to keep it up then I will need to lower my standard of quality, which I do not want to do. My intellectual process occurs is seasons and the one which has fallen upon my mind in the last few days has been one of ideation. So, this post will be a collection of ideas I have about which I intend to write more completely on later. I will challenge myself to keep each summary no more than a paragraph:
(any feedback on the validity of an idea, alteration/expansion to an idea, or a new idea is more than welcome.)
Anti-Populism: Populism is an essential sociological force to understanding domestic, and global politics and culture. A deeper definition and understanding of the history feels necessary to put the subtle zephyrs of the current political and cultural winds into context. I want to illuminate how populism is a shadow of democracy and its oppositional relationship to pluralism which is a cornerstone of liberal democracy itself. Beyond the provision of the mental apparatus necessary for a complete analysis of the modern climate, I want to highlight the seeds of anti-populism I see forming through a case study of Zohran Mamdani's campaign and how he overcame the advanced populism which defines modern America.
H-mart-gate: Perhaps I am too chronically online, but there has been a recent moment in the Asian American community which I hope will become a watershed moment. A simple video from a Wasian content creator on her impulse to "side-eye" white people in Asian grocery stores sparked a large discourse which has—hopefully—broken the inertia of the Asian American identity as assimilationist and shed light on their complicity in white supremacy. This momentum, I hope, will continue its path toward bringing the younger Asian American community into solidarity with the black community and allow us to adopt and develop the kinds of critical race theory and revolutionary consciousness which has become a unifying factor for the black community. Furthermore, I would like to use my commentary on the topic as an opportunity to both explore my own experience as a Wasian American in my own identity and use it to contextualize and ground the whole discussion.
Citizen Victim Blaming: To really drive home the idea that societal scale problems are systemic and not individual (society exists as its own entity, burn in hell Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), I want to go case by case through the failing parts of society which get blamed on citizens rather than systems and debunk them. This could be economic trends like people not upgrading their iPhones as often anymore, or bringing lunches to work instead of buying their corporate slop bowl from Chipotle or Cava, to political blames on voter behavior or party infighting. I am open to any specific examples you would like to see covered and researched deeper.
The Need for a New Left: Effectively call out the contemporary left for being ineffective due to a lack of modernization of theory. The contemporary left appeals repeatedly to the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Sankara, Castro, Guevara, Mao, Gadaffi, etc. Yet, we see almost no innovation on this theory which is why it remains ineffective. The social, political, and material conditions of 2025 are far different then the times the theories of those men came from. We need to adapt for changes in social behavior, the political consciousness, the setup of global supply chains and pressure points, the advent of the internet, ai, and surveillance. Without theoretical innovations which account for these new factors, we will continue to be striking a screw with a hammer. Additionally, it is likely that these new ideas will be better received because they more accurately apply to our current situation and don't carry the decades of negative propaganda the old theories have been burdened with.
In Defense of Human Goodness: Rage against cynicism! Argue that human behavior is heavily conditional on material conditions and class relations, and that we see the worst of human behavior because we live in a system which rewards alienation, suspicion, division, competition, inequality, ignorance, and selfishness. Under a system which rewards more virtuous aspects of life, we would see the development of kinder, happier people of stronger and more robust character. Primarily, humans are not inherently bad, and the very fact that an opposition exists to our horrid system, and that our system creates such widespread unhappiness for its participants, is itself support for the notion of an inherent human goodness.
Revolution Will Come from the Global South: This one I am so psyched about! I owe this idea to MochaYappuccino and want to dive deeper into what this will look like. The basic thesis is that the next step in revolutionizing the world will come from the liberation of the Global South from US imperialism and neocolonialism—and that leftists in America's next goal ought to be facilitating this liberation. The thought behind this is that when the Global South achieves liberation, we can no longer exploit them and retain our abundance of cheap resources and labor. This will force a revolution of the American political and economic systems. I would like to build this out as a broader project incrementally over time to theorize an international anti-capitalist revolution order of events based on modern geopolitics, economic landscapes, geographic resource landscapes, and other maps of social and technological power. The project would be a contribution to the idea of a new wave of leftist theory, an idea which I discovered MochaYappuccino also shares as I looked through his work.
Kalshi and the Speculative Economy: Go deep into and explore a recent INSANE quote from the co-founder of Kalshi where he said, "The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion." Congratulations to this quote for blasting its way into the top 5 of the 'most dystopian things I've heard in 2025' leaderboard! We've had some steep competition this year! But I want to use this to explore the history of how the US pioneered the speculative economy and deindustrialized to support this speculative economy due to our status as the global hegemon and world's policeman. I may expand this into AI or use it as another recent example of manufactured value that does not produce anything with a material grounding of value. Also note the specific danger of Kalshi on world events since it can easily turn into a much more insidious version of insider trading.
The GOP's Coming Language Change: Take a look at the upcoming fall of Trumpism as a cult of personality built around Trump. Note the anti-intellectualism Trumpism has fostered and see that the next shift the GOP will make it toward pseudo-intellectualism. The wave of ant-intellectualism has already primed their base and centrist and liberal bases to respond well to this because there has been years of targeted erosion of the epistemic authority of traditional intellectualist figures. This leaves the door open for a wild west of intellectual charlatanism where people can speak in the structure intellectuals do but without the substance of actual strong arguments and still carry the epistemic authority which used to lie with proper intellectualism. See: Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker.
White Support for Trump: Argue that a large subconscious drive that impelled white American's to vote for Trump is that his policies would explicitly slow the rate of white disposition. Trump's policies almost explicitly focus on maintaining the status of white American's as the socioeconomic, and therefore cultural dominating group within America. While it is never something that will be openly admitted, propose that white culture, white identity, whiteness as a category itself is founded on racial superiority and domination. Their unifying thread of whiteness has been keeping their position as the pinnacle of the social hierarchy for centuries. Tldr; whiteness is fundamentally racist and supremacist. IMPORTANT: this does not mean white people are this way, but whiteness as a concept which many of them identify with is this way. Every white person can choose the build their identity in a different way through finding solidarity with all mankind and discovering spiritual truths to ground their identity in something more forceful than a category like whiteness.
I imagine these 9 ideas will take me a few weeks—at least—to get through and that I will come across many more ideas worth writing about during that time. However, for my sake and yours, I thought it best to take today to formalize my ideas and put them down in a structured and intentional way so as to subject myself to preemptive critique and bind myself to executing on these ideas through the creation of expectation. Let me know what you think.
Until next communion, all my love! <3
Micah Xavier Probst