Karl Rove in the WSJ: "‘They’ Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk" www.wsj.com/opinion/they... JD Vance again today: "they" killed Kirk www.wsj.com/opinion/they...

Timely. Arrived earlier than expected, @tracinski.bsky.social a.co/d/6O3fjo9

A federal judge has thrown out President Trump's lawsuit against The New York Times. The suit, he says, "stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements" of federal court rules. It is "decidedly improper and impermissible." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This is the playbook, folks. If you're not paying attention now and doing something about it, then you're going to have to sit down the rest of your life because democracy is being taken away. Do not be quiet in this moment.

"The easy way—and the smart way—is to make the fascists fight for every inch." www.thebulwark.com/p/emergency-...

generally speaking, and with the glaring exception of november 2024, the more directly democratic an institution has been, the better it has checked Trump (eg grand and petit juries); the more elite and insular, the less effective (the Senate, the Supreme Court, big business)

Canceling Jimmy Kimmel show is not about Charlie Kirk, just like going after universities was not about antisemitism and occupying DC was not about fighting crime.

Interesting. I was told that both boats that had been struck down were verified to be carrying narcotics and had connections to criminal groups, but we couldn’t see any of the totally real evidence. Surely fishing would be perfectly safe under such conditions?

Peter Thiel gets roasted to hell & back in this amazing @sfstandard.com story. Pro Tip: Thiel should fire his entire staff—and all of his dumb friends—for allowing him to pursue this fanatical fiasco! Great reporting by @eshugs.bsky.social and Garrett Leahy. sfstandard.com/2025/09/16/p...

Sometimes it's nice to remember that even Marcus Aurelius was like "you don't have to comment on everything bro"

Updates on some mysteries I've written about. www.splicetoday.com/writing/inve...

No don't worry, our finely tuned War Department surely wouldn't drop a Hellfire missile on your harmless fishing boat out of Curacao, they will very precisely only do that to the harmless fishing boat out of Caracas, so get out there and finally catch that big one today!

The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?

The ubiquity of these attributions of collective guilt reveal how completely the right has abandoned the ideal of "the rule of law," pretty much the sine qua non of the "western civilization" they claim to be defending. This language of "they did this" appears in every conservative FB post I see.

We could be 5 to 10 years from toothpaste that can regrow tooth enamel. The scales are beginning to tip in favor of Mars once sustaining life. We’ll potentially know for sure by 2040. The blue macaw is up to 160 individuals from an all-time low of 7, and confirmed to be breeding in the wild.

"Personally speaking, I wish America had been the country to save the world from climate change. I wish democracy had proven more effective than autocracy at meeting a global environmental threat. But at this point I’ll take what I can get." www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-is-q...

Elon Musk has shared an obviously AI-generated image of the Unite the Kingdom rally in London. The first AI error is that the Arc de Triomphe is in Paris, not London. And once you zoom in, you'll notice that the Union Jacks and the crowd have other errors typical of AI images.

Having grown up in a red red near-libertarian bring-on-red-dawn-no-f*cker-will-ever-take-our-liberty state, there’s not an hour of any of these days that passes where I’m not stunned absolutely flat by how quickly people just like that are assigning themselves participatory roles in a police state.

you could write an entire book about this post and I will for the right price

It is hard to think of a more explicit directive to the radical right than “I don’t care what you do, and in fact I agree with your motivation.” He’s already pardoned violent extremists and this is a promise to pardon more.

"Don't mock or you'll be deported" is the mark of a weak, decadent nation, a petty and insecure failure unworthy of respect.

A++ correction

"at least 40 of about 320 people hired to work for UG Solutions in Gaza were recruited from Infidels MC"

I really hope Bezos' latest rocket contract was worth this gem.

An impulsive liar very obviously lied again and we’re going full CSI on his signature like he hasn’t been impulsively lying for literally decades.

The demographics of this crowd are so notable.

No kings

ICE is Eating the Soul of America. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/ice-is-eat...

I don't know exactly how and when we'll get there, but there will come a time when the Roberts Court era and especially from ~2024 onward becomes treated as an irredeemably tainted anti-canon, when citing them as a favorable precedent joins the ranks of invoking Dred Scott, Plessey, or Korematsu.

Contemplating troubled times from a hobbit house. www.splicetoday.com/politics-and...

1/ I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable. Read expert analysis by @bcfinucane.bsky.social⤵️

They bombed without warning a non-threatening small boat, which is insane and a violation of international law even if it was carrying contraband which we have no way of knowing, and then gleefully shared it as a snuff video.

“Without the court fights, the public would not know about many of the activities of Elon Musk’s DOGE employees in the early months of the administration… Kilmar Abrego Garcia would not have become a household name… The groundwork for these victories was laid before Trump was even reelected”

New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

"American politics is starting to look decidedly like something you’d encounter in a dysfunctional middle-income nation — Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, or Israel." substack.com/home/post/p-...

It has been wild to see what were always the two most paranoid pro-Second Amendment scenarios—the government snatching people away and sending occupying armies into communities—literally happen this year, to the delight of conservatives

Update: it got funny again

Fed goons are so eager to handcuff a citizen that they let their unattended SUV roll away. They are caught on tape sprinting after it, though it only stops when it crashes into a tree. Real pros! youtu.be/oQCYSzFQYmY?...

One of the founders of the cutting-edge (and now threatened) science project LIGO has passed away. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/s... Background by me: www.splicetoday.com/writing/why-...

National Weather Service meteorologist applicants are now being asked to pledge their support for Trump’s executive orders. (Image reposted with alt-text)

Some jokes echo through history. www.splicetoday.com/politics-and...

David Frum: "Even if the House changes hands in 2026—even if a president is elected in 2028 who possesses a healthy respect for the rule of law—Trump’s second-term perversion of the government will not be easily undone." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Fascinating. bigthink.com/neuropsych/a...

Donald Trump wants to be America’s dictator, and we can’t let that happen on our watch. newrepublic.com/article/1994...

"The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined." Imagine better next time, @wsj.com. www.wsj.com/opinion/john...

Answer is no. www.newsweek.com/are-there-55...

Authoritarian regimes frequently struggle to govern effectively because accurate information doesn't reach the leadership. Trump is basically designing a system to create this problem.

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

I look at some upcoming books. www.splicetoday.com/writing/read...