Phew, y’all. For a grassroots project of our size, every new venture feels like an expedition. Weeks of planning, collaboration, the production. It's a lift. But in the midst of our inaugural Brake Room dialogue—in which Deceleration’s newsletter correspondents covering water, power, immigration, climate, and people's movements fighting for a livable future in Texas and around the world—the pleasure of simply being together shone through. We hope our reflections, analysis, and encouragements in deeply troubled times find you today in a good and safe space. (And, if not, help lift you up a tad while we continue to work together for a more just and secure tomorrow.)
In this first episode, Deceleration founder and editor Greg Harman sits down with correspondents Roxana Rojas, Gaige Davila, and Syris Valentine. We connect the stories we’ve been covering and look ahead at what we have in development.
With the midterms just weeks away, here are a few of the topics we're taking on:
ICE, SB4, and the fight over a San Antonio concentration camp
Roxana Rojas breaks down how Texas’s SB4 and 287(g) agreements turn local police into immigration enforcers. She explains how family separation is being used to pressure people into abandoning their cases, and what happened in Houston when an ICE vehicle ran over a man in a parking lot. She also explains the San Antonio City Council resolution forcing CPS Energy and SAWS to assess impacts before serving a $128 million (property plus renovations) ICE concentration camp.
Plus: We pull a clip from a recent interview with U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro chiding communities for cutting deals with ICE.
“No police department right now should be working with this abusive agency.”
— Rep. Joaquin Castro
A 41-point shift and a referendum on Trumpism
Polling shows Texas Latinx voters swinging wildly back out of Trump's orbit. Here Gaige Davila reports on why messaging that consistently calls out billionaires is landing. Meanwhile, the group discusses what comes after the election, and why a return to mainstream Democratic politics won’t be enough.
“Democracy beyond electoralism is really what I constantly come back to.”
— Syris Valentine
Abbott’s plan to break up city-owned utilities
With a brief nod to the pause on Big Bend's border wall and lament for the violence continuing elsewhere (including the demise of the"grandmother tree"), Greg Harman unpacks the governor’s campaign-season push to force roughly 70 public utilities onto the open market. Here we also pull a clip from Austin Councilmember Mike Siegel that casts that effort within a broader attack on public faith in government.
“They want us to be cynical. They want us to disbelieve the government can do good things.”
— Mike Siegel
Techno-fascism, SpaceX, and the Mars fantasy
Drawing on Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich, the team examines the billionaire worldview behind rocket launches in Boca Chica, data centers, and the strangely eliminationst philosophy of “longtermism.” Syris Valentine, a former space-tech worker, shares how he studied his way out of the tech bubble.
“At its very core, techno-fascism is adamantly opposed to democracy, because it’s democracy that creates from the grassroots the solutions to all of this.”
— Greg Harman
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