Musa Okwonga
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okwonga.bsky.social
Musa Okwonga
@okwonga.bsky.social
31K followers 660 following 4.6K posts
Author, essayist, public speaker. Co-founder and co-host of the Stadio football podcast. musaokwonga.com
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okwonga.bsky.social
This essay from 2005 explains so much about the current social and political moment. So much.

“What now, white man?”

Global competition is about to push Western culture into the abyss. An eleventh-hour obituary by Matthias Politycki:

www.signandsight.com/features/353...
The global economic order is out of joint; the global cultural order will be next. For the Far Eastern enthusiasm for innovation cannot be disconnected from a sense of cultural mission: in the globalised economic race, this tremendous success is due to the fact that giant steps towards the future are taken with an intact historical sense of identity. After all, living heritage is not least a store of potential thoughts, structures and behavioural patterns, a source of inspiration for all kinds of current tasks. Meanwhile, we in Central Europe are on the verge of willingly abandoning the last vestiges of our own thousand-year heritage – the diversity of languages and the associated identities – in favour of a rife pseudo-Americanisation. And, in the process, exchanging what could, in its networking of highly distinctive cultural achievements, be understood as our economic base, our version of an Old European position, for a weak drifting along in the current of the globalised culture industry. After the shocking realization of one's own physical and economic weakness, the final humiliation for Europe is coming in the form of cultural orientation towards a new world power that is already beginning to involve itself actively as a global player in the general current of world culture.
November 10, 2025 at 3:25 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
www.reuters.com/world/americ...
BRASILIA, Nov 7 (Reuters) - A five-member panel of Brazil's Supreme Court formed a majority on Friday to reject former President Jair Bolsonaro's appeal challenging his 27-years prison sentence for plotting a coup to remain in power after the 2022 presidential election. Justices Flavio Dino, Alexandre de Moraes and Cristiano Zanin voted to reject the appeal filed by Bolsonaro's legal team. The remaining members of the panel have until November 14 to cast their votes in the Supreme Court's system.
November 7, 2025 at 8:18 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
Still one of the bleakest quotes I have ever read, from one of George W Bush’s senior advisers.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
November 4, 2025 at 4:35 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
everybody was underestimating Hitler and the National Socialists. Ebbutt believed that they would absorb the other far-right nationalist parties because the Nazis ‘know what they want and have a concrete programme, which is more than the others can claim. I think Hitler is going places.’ If the flood of American money invested in Germany ceased, he wrote, ‘you will see a sudden slump here and general unemployment. That will be Hitler’s chance.’
November 3, 2025 at 12:14 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
The former Duke of York told Jeffrey Epstein “it would be good to catch up in person” months after the convicted sex offender was released from prison, newly released emails reveal. The publication of the correspondence comes two days after Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was stripped of his titles and struck from the official roll of the peerage in an attempt by Buckingham Palace to halt the damage caused by the former duke’s spiralling scandals.
November 1, 2025 at 3:50 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...
Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed hundreds of patients and staff inside a hospital in El Fasher, according to the World Health Organization and the Sudan Doctors Network, after the paramilitary group claimed control of the city on Sunday. The WHO secretary general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “appalled and deeply shocked” at reports that more than 460 people had been killed at the Saudi maternity hospital, without assigning blame, in a post on X. In a Facebook post on Wednesday, the Sudan Doctors Network, a medical group monitoring the civil war, said: “The Rapid Support Forces yesterday … killed in cold blood everyone they found inside the Saudi hospital.”
October 29, 2025 at 10:27 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
“you versus the antifascist she told you not to worry about“
October 16, 2025 at 5:14 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
www.gq.com/story/dylann...
“Or crackers or white trash,” I interjected, saying the words he didn't want to say. He grimaced but acknowledged them. “That would almost be socially acceptable to say those things. It just shows you how alienated they are. And these poor white working-class guys, they must realize this. See? So maybe Dylann's family is a good example of downward social mobility. And Trump showed us this, that we underestimated how vulnerable and precarious self-esteem is for white, working-class people in this society. They not only see the white elites, but then they see…” “They see us, black people, coming from behind, eclipsing them.”
October 15, 2025 at 1:38 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
inews.co.uk/culture/book...
Child thinks he overestimated America’s capacity to outgrow its past. “I had always resisted saying this is just about the relationship between white Americans and black Americans, based on the guilt white people carry, first for slavery and then for Jim Crow. I spent decades saying, ‘Come on, it’s got to be more complex than this.’ But I think it’s not. I think that almost everything can be explained by this deep hatred that the majority of white Americans have for black Americans. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
October 14, 2025 at 4:47 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
I had to share this!
October 14, 2025 at 12:21 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
According to the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, most industries just cannot wait. They are struggling to keep open markets, and if necessary realign themselves with the EU by the back door. The chemicals industry exports more than 60% of its output to the EU. Brexiteers boasted it would be liberated from EU regulation, but setting up the UK’s own regulator cost £2bn and has not worked. According to the Chemical Industries Association, output has fallen by 35-40% since 2021. Between 2021 and 2023, British exports to the EU fell by a serious 27%. Brexiteers boasted that leaving the EU would be worth hundreds of billions a year. Cambridge Econometrics estimates that over the next decade Britain’s economy will be £300bn smaller than if we had not left the EU. This is self-harm on a heroic scale.
October 10, 2025 at 10:52 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
Can’t fail. 👏👏
October 3, 2025 at 10:56 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general... - the regime saw Bill Burr coming a mile off. He could have educated himself by reading human rights reports, but he was reassured once he got there and saw a Starbucks.
When he flew into Saudi Arabia, Burr’s nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the amount of local Western influence. “You think everybody’s going to be screaming ‘death to America’ and they’re going to have like fucking machetes and want to like chop my head off, right?” Burr said. “Because this is what I’ve been fed about that part of the world. I thought this place was going to be really tense. And I’m thinking like: ‘Is that a Starbucks next to a Pizza Hut next to a Burger King next to McDonald’s …? They got a fucking Chili’s over here!”
October 1, 2025 at 12:47 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
www.avclub.com/riyadh-comed...
Per Deadline, Okatsuka posted about the festival on Threads this weekend, writing, “FYI there are more of us that said no to the Riyadh comedy festival in Saudi Arabia.” In her post, Okatsuka also posted the list of things comedians have been told they weren’t allowed to talk about, including jokes “that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” Saudi Arabia, its ruling government, royal family, or any religion or religious figure, period. Okatsuka also takes time to point out that “The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process.
September 27, 2025 at 9:10 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
This is exactly it. I saw this advert on YouTube yesterday and it was so grim I had to take a photo of it.
September 27, 2025 at 11:41 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
www.hrw.org/news/2025/09... - I just want to know what these comedians are being paid.
(Beirut) – The Saudi government is using the Riyadh Comedy Festival 2025 from September 26 to October 9 to deflect attention from its brutal repression of free speech and other pervasive human rights violations, Human Rights Watch said today. The festival dates include the seventh anniversary of the Saudi state-sponsored murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and takes place just months after Saudi authorities executed a journalist apparently for his public speech. Participating comedians, to avoid contributing to laundering the Saudi government’s reputation, should use the comedy festival to publicly urge Saudi authorities to free unjustly detained Saudi dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists. The festival lineup includes, among others: Aziz Ansari, Hannibal Buress, Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr, Dave Chappelle, Pete Davidson, Maz Jobrani, Sam Morril, Mark Normand, Nimesh Patel, and Tom Segura. Tim Dillon was scheduled to perform but said he was fired after he joked on his podcast about Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights record.
September 26, 2025 at 12:53 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
Farage pledges to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants
September 22, 2025 at 11:39 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
Pundits trying to force Bluesky users to pay attention to Twitter
September 20, 2025 at 8:05 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
Patrick Bateman encourages us to look at the quote tweets
September 20, 2025 at 6:58 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
She said: “This is what makes me very angry. You are not born racist. You are taught to be racist, and you are groomed.” She said the protest had left many of her organisation’s service-users thinking about the support they receive, because as disabled people “you are always having to justify any cost of support, it’s all measured by how much it costs the local authority. “It’s intersectional because you’ve got the disability and then the [attacks around] immigration, so you’ve got the negativity on both sides. “People were already struggling to try and justify their existence, and now it has just made that conversation more hostile.” She said she believed the only way to fight back was for different oppressed groups to work together. She said: “I think that collective voice is the only way to show those who are trying to create this division that it’s not going to work.”
September 19, 2025 at 7:00 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
A growing body of research now suggests that when people see their social status threatened, they become more likely to support the far right. Importantly, the core group of supporters for the far right are not necessarily those who see themselves at the bottom of social hierarchies already but are those that perceive that they have something to lose. Threats to social status can be both economic and cultural. They include developments that challenge a position in society that people value. These can be material economic risks that make it more likely that one’s standard of living will become significantly worse. But they also include transformations of roles in society.
September 18, 2025 at 10:47 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
Yes and also - this happened three weeks ago to a friend of mine in Düsseldorf of all places, a swastika was carved into her car. This stuff is surging everywhere now.
September 14, 2025 at 8:21 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
So reminiscent of the George W Bush era
September 9, 2025 at 1:48 PM
okwonga.bsky.social
This whole thing is so, so depressingly basic. If Farage’s clear and persistent bigotry had ever been taken seriously we would never have heard of him, but now we have to sit and wait for millions of voters - including his own - to realise that his bigotry will be a disaster for them too.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised. The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
August 27, 2025 at 8:31 AM
okwonga.bsky.social
In addition to the legal hurdles, racism is likely to deter many from immigrating to Germany: A 2024 report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 68 percent of Muslim respondents in Germany experience racism. Among the 13 EU countries surveyed, Germany ranks second. The lowest levels of discrimination against Muslims were measured in Spain, Sweden, and Italy. When it comes to racism against Black people, Germany even ranks first.
August 23, 2025 at 9:34 AM