But this time we're going to win, goddammit!

Axios Bold As Love is a very funny political junkie autocorrect

i usually like mono mixes more but the new mix of axios bold as love sounds obviously inferior to me which is weird and makes me wonder how much of it has to do with hendrix wanting to do his vocal takes separate from the band

in all seriousness the reason writers need editors — especially opinionated and charismatic writers with lots of ideas — is the same reason why a slave would whisper "memento mori" to whoever was being celebrated during a roman triumph

with @nlanard.bsky.social we ran the numbers on where Mamdani-mentum peaked—and checked back on the neighborhoods where Democratic support cratered in 2024 www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

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A very generous column by @bgrueskin.bsky.social today, in Columbia Journalism Review, highlighting the work of our team at @boltsmag.org. Bolts is "one uniquely excellent place" to learn what's at stake in elections, he says. I'm glad this resonated with many of you this week! Thanks for reading!

I think it may have been a more general term that then became a shibboleth over 'racism' in the conservative press? essentially I've never seen it in the Guardian post, I dunno, 1980 or so, but it's all over the Spectator well into the 1990s.

elon musk will be one of the main things our progeny will blame us for allowing to happen.

this isn't a MAGA coinage, they got it from UK conservatives who were using it - not always maliciously - well into the 1990s. it's an older coinage that they adopted as a shibboleth, basically

the word "racialism" is one of the more striking examples of MAGA newspeak

ive read a few examples now of journalists being like 'mamdani took the gloves off now that he's won' and you scroll to find the quote and it's something like 'i am done talking about andrew cuomo.' 😐

i feel like the company behind gta vi is trying to figure out if you can hype the stock market to such a point that there is no way for you to actually release a game, no matter how mind-blowing it is, without losing $

there is a way of looking at the 2025 elections and the mood of the country more generally as a reflection of how insane democracies can be. in 2024, trump promised to brutalize immigrants, surge deportations, and gut the state/fill it with cronies. Ds agreed. voters were the ones who said "no way"

I thought people were complaining that the guides had gone woke (started telling the truth about the slaves etc)

I was there this year and the guide I got was NOT good on this.

yes if you look online there are so many stories from current and former guides about how much of the job is countering this bullshit from guests

--John Adams

I've said this before, but the truly gothic horror of the Hemings story is that as well as being his dead wife's slave, she was his dead wife's sister.

let's help my man out. what's everyone's favorite "jefferson fucking sucked actually" book?

It’s hatred, but also just profound disappointment in a man who charted the course for what we as a nation could be through his immortal words and then proceeded to commit deeds that profaned those words over and over again. He is the final boss in the Death of the Author pantheon.

A perfect student of Ancient Grecian culture.

I was on the receiving end of more pro-TJ propaganda than most and to me he was a product of his age in that he was so upper crust that everything he did was like this interesting experiment and he just didn't care what real world impacts it had.

P O S T E R S

as a "Martin Luther guy", can't relate

Much smaller potatoes, but to the two button meme there; championed a small decentralized government/did more to put the power in the federal than any other founder.

Totally. When I was like 13, he was my favorite. And then I started reading... So, yeah, an element of my antipathy is almost like a scorned lover. But that's what's so objectionable about TJ, imo: he *knew* he was wrong — often. But he managed to turn his hypocrisy into a sign of his wisdom.

Yes. That was a searing memory for a lot of the New Dealers, FDR included.

New Deal architect Frances Perkins might've felt vindicated. She was threatened w/impeachment, the subject of a birther conspiracy, went before the Dies committee, & was roasted by Coughlin on the radio. She said the New Deal was born the day she witnessed the Triangle shirtwaist fire.

it goes deeper too. - championed populism / was an utter & unapologetic nepo-baby elitist - lauded hard work over the luxuries of wealth & leisure / had many, many slaves do the actual farming - demanded frugality / was a truly pathological spendthrift & debtor - everything about the LA purchase

yeah, the aristocratic class is never *completely* "louche layabouts who are afraid to lose the money they were handed but never knew how to earn", there's some real achievers and sharks and successful personalities. But they only heighten the contrast to the main crowd of floating urchin, imo.

Yeah, just to say: FDR thought a lot of his fellow aristocrats were basically anti-democratic, but more than that what he thought they were was lazy, selfish, entitled, spoiled, decadent. He knew about Hearst and the Liberty League types. But he feared appeasement more than counterrevolution.

takes one to know one sometimes, and I think a good-faith member of the elite class having their eyes opened has more withering estimation of the elites than anyone else, including revolutionary theorists or skeptical middle class supporters. FDR knew them to be inert, for vividly personal reasons

Jefferson is the most American framer, imo, in that he simultaneously articulated and instantiated some of the noblest ideals ever articulated — which are part of the very foundation of this country, and its best hope — while behaving with a level of decadent hypocrisy that bordered on nihilism.

FDR would've felt incredibly vindicated by all of this. A core proposition of the New Deal was that the country's ruling class was incapable — at best — of defending the Constitution, and that it was up to a dissident vanguard of intellectuals, in conjunction with workers and farmers, to do it.

Time to dust this off again, I guess. [🎁 link] www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/o...

The Insider Politics Sheets Are Scurrying for New Conventional Wisdom talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-i...

This is the fundamental question of the year, isn't it? If an idea that was once taboo has become normalized, do you have a right to continue to treat it and its adherents with moral repugnance, or are you obliged to bow to the shifting bounds of public opinion?

rare to see “i would simply do good things, not bad ones” presented so straightforwardly as cogent analysis.

this is an incredibly useful datum for explaining to people the basically disingenuous and bad-faith work the word “liberal” does in headlines like these

one of the more discouraging things is leftists who are reactively disdainful of, like, civic authority. they don’t want to listen to a little person with a badge and a spreadsheet. the problem is that socialism and all leftism relies upon an army of devoted people with badges and spreadsheets.

WOOF

I'd read the hell out of a detailed, historically informed, CRITICAL treatment of know-nothing strategies in politics, with attention to current events.

wondering when ross is going to do an episode titled WERE THE KNOW-NOTHINGS RIGHT THAT CATHOLIC ELITES WOULD UNDERMINE DEMOCRATIC SELF-GOVERNMENT?

straight-up jury nullification. this guy did it, confessed to it, and the jury instructions explicitly said that if he did it intentionally, it was assault.

how could this be true when this very same newspaper spent the last 11 months screaming that Ds had given up on persuasion?

forgive some promotion but i think the team at vox has been doing some great coverage of the elections this week and im going to thread the pieces here. first up, @christianpaz.bsky.social offers clarity on one of the most vexing questions of modern politics: what do latino voters think?