I should be able to seize any country, steal any funds, break any law, assault any woman, invade any city, silence any critic, and deport anyone who doesn't look like me. If you question any of this, you are a low-IQ, radical, far-left, woke Communist who should have no rights. (See DSM-V 301.81)

Trump's fascism would not be possible if it weren't for all the dedicated accomplices carrying out his agenda under cover of darkness. Good stuff here.

New research: Even in childhood, narcissistic leaders are most admired by people with low self-esteem: psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

Every recipient of social security and/or Medicare is now receiving pro-Trump propaganda from the department charged with overseeing their benefits. As civil servants and experts are fired or silenced, the federal government is transformed into an authoritarian cult.

Helping kids to develop both the capacity and the inclination to question what they’re told — and, when necessary, to refuse to go along. That's on the latest episode of Kohn's Zone: "Raising Reflective Rebels" - is.gd/JiaK2w

A.I. detection: now featuring generous helpings of both Type I and Type II errors!

Republicans: "We're making tremendous progress thanks to our unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering and the Supreme Court's evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. But without the voting-suppression SAVE Act, there's a real danger that some of us could lose to candidates preferred by voters."

It's just narcissists all the way down

Oh and it’s precisely because this is their definition that no amount of flag waving will convince them that dems or the left are patriotic; the definition of patriotism is “holding right wing beliefs”

Every July 4 I like to recall the political philosopher Benjamin Barber's observation that this country was created not by individuals but by neighbors - and therefore what we really need is a declaration of interdependence. Never more important than now, with purveyors of hatred and fear in power.

I don't mind a challenging crossword puzzle clue, but come *on*. Is Will Shortz asleep at the switch?

Elie Mystal warns that the Court's decision allowing red states to discriminate against a handful of trans women and girls in sports will be used by the Trump regime and other Republicans to *require* discrimination against trans people - and not just on the athletic field: tinyurl.com/3u2xm78z

1/2 From @johnfugelsang.bksy.social: "Just as the argument for MAGA Christianity collapses when one actually reads the words of Jesus, the belief in America's Christian origins evaporates under the most cursory reading of the Constitution: tinyurl.com/mpbnwtbd

Critics decide that victims are ultimately to blame for bigotry to which they're subjected

1/2 Interesting insight from social scientist Stephanie Coontz (paraphrased in a review of her new book): A stereotyped and often toxic version of masculinity assumes that men and women must be opposites, but "manhood was once counterposed more against childhood than womanhood....

My podcast (Kohn's Zone) celebrates its one-year anniversary today! The 26th episode, just posted, is called "Raising Reflective Rebels"; it offers practical suggestions for teachers and parents who aim beyond compliance in order to support kids in questioning what they're told: is.gd/JiaK2w

JD Vance says his faith makes him averse to “low wage foreigners”

The real headline from the birthright‑citizenship case isn’t the outcome. It’s that four Supreme Court justices signaled they believe a president can effectively rewrite the Constitution through executive order.

you see the difference between Iran and America is that in one country ultimate power lies with a cabal of robed theocrats that pays only lip service to democracy, whereas the other is in the Middle East.

Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News

Being a pioneer in the use of A.I. in education is "like saying, 'I was the first one to eat an arm in the Donner Party.'" (Here I'm quoting a character in "The Comeback," whose recent season dealt with the use of A.I. to write TV shows.)

A new study finds that teachers are significantly more likely to defer to an inappropriately low grade (for a specific student assignment) that was suggested by A.I. than if the same harsh grade was proposed by a human colleague: tinyurl.com/mr8hejru

Absolutely. Witness the same court's inclination to curb executive authority when Biden was president. This headline on WashPost is more accurate in its specificity than they may have intended:

Slaughter is an earthquake: SCOTUS has overturned a 90-year-old precedent that facilitated much of modern governance by granting many agencies meaningful independence from the president. Now SCOTUS crushes that independence ... for seemingly every agency except the Federal Reserve.

It is core to the nature of reactionary politics that its adherents *always* conceive of themselves as aggrieved victims, no matter how much power they amass. It's a permission structure for their own lawlessness & violence.

1/2 Texas is mandating the assignment of Bible excerpts at most grade levels in all its public schools. That's another crack in the wall between church and state, a barrier critical to a democratic (vs. theocratic) society. Also, though, *any* top-down, statewide curriculum mandate is troubling...

Pungent analogy

Extraordinary detail in the new book on Trump's second term administration

From @adamserwer.bsky.social: Alito and his five colleagues have made it clear that racism, no matter how egregious, can never rise to the level of an actionable harm (unless it's white people who "could be perceived as the victims of racial discrimination"): tinyurl.com/y5pvyem8

My impression is that far-right parties across Europe, while defined mostly by their opposition to immigration, also share (with MAGA) a disdain for efforts to deal with the climate crisis. I wonder if anyone is using the recent heat wave to mobilize public support for green policies: is.gd/ZrsymQ

It's not that Trump didn't show. He's holding the bill hostage until his voter suppression legislation is passed. He or his handlers apparently figure that a concrete accomplishment to point to may help the GOP win, but a safer bet is to sabotage elections so they literally can't lose.

"When US biotech worried about the neg. potential of genetic engineering in the '90s, it didn’t rush to clone humans before China; it [tried] to limit the odious possibilities for these innovations....That another actor might do something bad doesn’t [allow] you to do [it 1st]": tinyurl.com/3tas7zct

For what it's worth, he didn't just misspell the word. He "corrected" a child who had spelled it correctly, nudging her to accept his error as truth.

Help! The Democratic party has been taken over by people who think everyone should have affordable healthcare and also believe it's wrong for a country to commit genocide! These "far-left" whippersnappers must be stopped!

Donald Trump “ping-pongs wildly between the two problems that narcissists have, which is this overblown sense of self and this constant insecurity. I can’t win this election without cheating—I’m also the most popular president of all time. It’s like, you’ve got to choose, man.” trib.al/59mlsSQ

The reasoning here is absurd enough that it should be part of the story: "Supreme Court rules that Trump statements that Haitians 'probably have AIDS,' are 'poisoning the blood of our country,' are 'eating cats and dogs," do not constitute racial animus."

Evil on a historic scale. Those who respond to this with rationalization, deflection, or indifference - or who label as "pro-Hamas" (or "antiSemitic") anyone who bears witness to Israel's crimes against humanity - have utterly lost their moral compass. tinyurl.com/48wvwzvj

These are the actions of an authoritarian regime, where their agents come to intimidate you if you share public information about how they have killed American citizens

People smile for different reasons. This new study (of a representative sample of 1,385 people) found that the strongest predictor of how people viewed others' smiles was that Republicans mostly assumed they're used to signal superiority or appease someone more powerful: tinyurl.com/5xssvec2

as a committed centrist, it saddens me that both parties are falling captive to their extremes - the right to insurrectionist cultists who want to invade american cities, and the left to socialists who want better bus service

Thoughtful thread by Emily Bender about people straining to take a moderate position on A.I., as in "Well, as long as we use it (or teach our students to use it) *responsibly*....": mastoreader.io?url=https%3A...

My favorite part of news stories these days is the series of automatic denials from Trump lackeys that the paper feels obliged to include (in parentheses).

“Authoritarianism is about how we can do less for each other & still feel OK about it,” said Remelya Jackalope, the founder of the Transcendence Care Network, which helps trans people... “A key piece of fighting against authoritarianism is asking the question, ‘What more can we do for each other?’”

When someone says, "I don't want to interrupt...", that means he or she has decided to interrupt. Similarly, "Well, that sounds nice in theory..." means "I don't even like the theory."

Not just how much time is devoted to teaching it, but *how* it's taught: www.alfiekohn.org/podcasts/wes... www.alfiekohn.org/article/civi...

What he means is "Straight, white, Christian men have the right to exercise dominion over everyone else."