Welcome to The Pitchfork

What Is This?

First and foremost this blog is about bottom-up politics. The kind of little “p” politics that places building and supporting social movements, the vital messy motor of real change, and left organization as one of its primary focuses. The blog is a personal call back to political writing and thinking having drifted away from a career in labor journalism. Expect windmill tilting on a range of subjects that tickles the fancy.

The tremendous upsurge of the last year unlocked by the rising movement floating around and alongside the edges of the Sanders campaign carried me along and this blog aims to capture the fluid up and downs of that wave as it hits the tough existential challenges ahead.

It's also a blog about Texas and the dogged resistance that has popped here in this big-talking old bird of a state with its long, bloody borderlands history.

What's with the Name?

The Pitchfork was a Dallas-based socialist/left-populist rabble-rousing magazine founded and run by the irascible muckraker Willam Bascom Smith more than 100 years ago in 1908 and running until his death on the eve of World War 2 in 1939.

Smith was a champion of the cause of working people and a sharp critic of racism and medical/social/religious fraud, views that led to public burnings and censorship of the The Pitchfork on multiple occasions during its run. Indeed Smith was such a profound pain in the rear and tenacious critic of the local DFW establishment that the Dallas Morning News—who he sued in 1918 for $.02--obit on his death crowed “Death Wins Argument with Pitchfork Smith.”

I can think of no better publication name to aspire to.