Trump can dump as many classified files on the public as he likes. Every headline’s still going to read like this.

If truth is an incitement to violence, it’s not those speaking it who are at fault, but those making the world so.

Nothing that’s radicalized me is half as meaningful as the things that moderate me.

At least one or two MAGA supporters listening to Stephen Miller directly quoting Goebbels speaches, I’d hope…

Democracy may imperfectly vouchsafe against corruption, but everywhere democratic institutions and norms recede corruption takes root and grows.

I guess when it’s your own poll, you kinda have to tell people the results.

this is what courage looks like

Stephen Colbert: “Tonight we’re all Jimmy Kimmel…. With an autocrat, you can’t give an inch. If ABC thinks that this is going to satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive, and clearly they've never read The Children's Book If You Give a Mouse A Kimmel.”

Just speaking for myself, when I call someone a fascist, I’d like them to stop being a fascist.

Joining the growing number of people cancelling Disney-related streaming services. I don’t need to make a monthly contribution to a company willing to aid through their compliance in the administration’s stifling of free speech.

If using Charlie Kirk’s own words can get you cancelled, then Kirk should have been cancelled when he said them.

I’m man enough to give the president credit when he gets something right. Attn Democrats, this is your new coalition — safe to forget all other demographic distinctions.

We cannot move forward or escape this nightmare until mainstream figures finally admit that there are many, many people on the right - including some of its most powerful voices - who are openly seeking violence and tyranny and exploit every situation to move it closer.

If you’re using the “Discover” tab on Bluesky as your default, why not just be on X? Like, it’s your experience to do with what you will, but I think one of the reasons it’s so confusing to me when people talk about Bluesky becoming a toxic echo chamber is that I never use “Discover.”

“Leni Riefenstahl was making films the right way,” is the sort of thing one could only get away with once nazism’s threat had been consigned, at least proximately, to the dustbin of history. It’s a bad take in 1935.

It doesn’t make it right, but institute a regime of violence and oppression over 340 million people and someone’s bound to eventually do more than throw a sandwich. That the target was a symbol, a mouthpiece, and not an administration official is testament to how potent symbols are.

Charlie Kirk was a monster who was an active champion of harming millions. I’ll not let an assassin’s bullet cause me to pretend otherwise. His story deserved to end in disgrace, not martyrdom. It’s a sad day for that if nothing else.

How long before MAGA talking points bottom out at, “look guys, he wasn’t a politician having sex with underage girls, he had sex with underage girls and *then* became a politician. So that’s totally different than what QAnon is conditioned (by us) to rage against.”

Disgusting, but even more disgusting will be the millions of supporters pretending that this doesn’t say what it says or mean what it means.

Anyone who thinks being a “moderate” means giving ground to Trump on immigration should stare deeply into this graph until they repent.

The outrage from the intellectual set at trump declaring war on American cities will likely not land with a rural base whose prejudices have been cultivated and fanned to the point of not viewing the residents of places like LA, DC, and Chicago as fellow Americans in the first place.

In America, we have to wonder what our government’s throwing out of windows. In Russia, one has to wonder who the government’s throwing out of windows. I hope, and pray, that’s one metric we continue to lag behind.

841,000. That’s how many fewer tourists visited the US this summer than last. Chart: The Economist

🤫 Nobody tell the GOP that they’re now the major beneficiaries of high-turnout elections and maintain much of their electoral margins on the back of low-propensity, low-information voters. MAGA will ultimately be the big loser if it successfully erects significant bureaucratic barriers to voting.

Those thinking Vance would be preferable to Trump on the theory that he’d have a weaker base of support than Trump, perhaps even so much so that he’d cause the MAGA coalition to fall apart, have not been very good students of history when it comes to how power consolidates in authoritarian regimes.

Let the hoagie soar, Like she's never soared before. From rocky coast to golden shore, Let the mighty hoagie soar.

What Cracker Barrel apparently doesn’t realize is that the people they’re trying to placate hate backtracking and apologies even more than they hate whatever random things they’re told to be upset about.

When a country attacks the freedom to burn a flag is precisely when that country’s flag becomes worth burning.

The Democrats need a few dozen more politicos willing to troll as hard as Newsom is right now.

My most recently immigrated ancestor was circa 1920. My most distant, the 1600s. Pretending there is any such thing as an American racial identity is absurd. Americanness is a function of civic virtues and philosophical commitments, both often lacking in those who wish it were something else.

There are many Republicans who are decent people. They just have a different focus, different priorities than we do. They’re uncomfortable with the casual bigotry and hatred, but they vote GOP anyway because of economic issues like [checks notes] implementing centrally planned industrial policy. 😬

It’s not just socialism, it’s national(ist) socialism!

Iykyk

The US’s refusal to join the ICC is as damaging to establishing meaningful international rule if law as its refusal to join the League of Nations a century ago was to establishing meaningful international peace between states. This admin never will, but its opposition should commit now to doing so.

When George III deployed the military to police his own subjects in Boston in 1775, colonists turned out in the streets and began pelting them with snowballs, ice, and oyster shells. It’s hard to believe there was a time when you couldn’t find a good sandwich in Boston.

Its anti-professionalism may not be one of fascism’s greatest crimes, but it is one if its most pernicious.

Looking forward to the start of @ismapolicy.bsky.social’s annual conference today!

C’mon…

Real conversation today at a large menswear shop. Me: “Do you know at this point when your Fall/Winter inventory will be coming in?” Clerk: “No. It’s August, so it should be soon, but we really don’t know. It’s getting harder and harder these days to know when you’ll get things in from overseas.”

I’m pretty sure the US Congress’s website is not the official repository of our founding documents. That said, how embarrassingly incompetent is it to not even be able to get that right?

If you want to inoculate yourself against neofascism, rejecting conspiracism is a great start.

Nationalism does not yield economic policies that are viable across any reasonable time horizon. They are, however, sometimes bailed out in the short term by unrelated circumstances. Should we find ourselves in such a circumstance in the future, remember days like today.

“AI will maximize what it is trained to maximize, and do so relentlessly. Italians will disappear for an hour to get a coffee, and that’s their biggest cultural advantage.” tylerjohnharris.substack.com/p/americans-...

I hope fiscal conservatives and budget hawks are ready, thanks to this administration, for “small government,” to become a term as politically radioactive as “blood and soil,” at least for a generation or two.

When someone at xAI turns a knob to instruct Grok to be “less woke” and it responds by becoming antisemitic “MechaHitler,” that says something very clear about the patterns common to the real, human “anti-woke” messaging in it’s training data.

One thing that’s tragically clear to me at this point is that most of MAGA will increase the chance of their children dying if it means they get to hurt people they’ve never met who they’ve been told are their enemies. I don’t know how to begin penetrating the conditioning implied by that mindset.

Anyone else noticing the similarities in the names of Musk’s new “America Party” and the mostly-defunct George Wallace vehicle “American Independent Party,” or is that just me projecting given other similarities?