If the war ends like this, Iran will have won

I enjoyed this conversation by @sean-d-illing.bsky.social with @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social — one of the few journalists who truly understands the current threat of the far right.

As much as you may be tired of hearing about how democracy is backsliding under Trump, according to @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social, the legibility of the threat to democracy is one of the more powerful tools we have.

Dune: Rise of Skywalker

Democrats Are Too Cozy With Hasan Piker: There’s no excuse for failing to call out antisemitism on the left. www.wsj.com/opinion/free...

Framing the Iran war as "for Israel" is intellectually lazy and ignores a lot of what we know about the Trump's decision-making. At best, it indulges in nativism. And, let's be honest, writing this without acknowledging how this narrative is being used by bigots and neo-Nazis is... a choice.

The part where he blames Israel and (heavily implied) AIPAC not just for the current Iran war but the 2003 invasion of Iraq and also somehow ISIS is pretty explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory crap, not just being a dovish critic of Israeli policy.

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to an antisemitic tract www.vox.com/politics/482...

Anti-war antisemitism is still antisemitism. www.vox.com/politics/482...

Joe Kent's resignation letter is an antisemitic tract — the ur-text of a "stabbed in the back" myth that could do enormous damage to American Jews www.vox.com/politics/482...

<Baby Billy voice> Teenjob!

On the one hand, the war is bad and principled resignation is good. On the other hand, Kent's explanation for why the war is bad is thinly veiled antisemitism.

This, and it's not especially close IMO

@zackbeauchamp.bsky.social got fed up with reporting on “democratic backsliding,” and decided to instead investigate “democratic resilience.” One thing he learned was about how anti-ICE resistance can be a blueprint for saving democracy.

This is not an excuse, but I do not think Hegseth actually knows what he is saying here. He just thinks “no quarter“ means “we’re going to kick their ass even harder,” because he is incapable of thought beyond slogans

The Trump administration's war memes are not merely grotesque — they are symptomatic of an administration that experiences the online-media world as more real than reality www.vox.com/politics/482...

‼️On Today's @msignorile.bsky.social Show‼️ @noahmichelson.bsky.social of @huffpost.com @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social of @voxdotcom.bsky.social @jonathanlarsen.bsky.social of The F***ing News 🔊Listen Here: Signorile.com 📞Join the Conversation: 866-997-4748

The upshot of @dandrezner.bsky.social's piece is that the US has no way to quickly solve the Straits of Hormuz problem — and the Iranians know it. Which means our options are either accepting strategic defeat or else a regime change invasion danieldrezner.substack.com/p/im-sick-an...

I had a blast talking about how authoritarians lose with @chrislhayes.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=krEX...

When Jean Baudrillard wrote "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place," he wasn't entirely wrong — just ahead of his time.

One thing that has surprised me, getting back into IRL Magic: The Gathering in the last few years, is how LGBT-friendly the community has become. I've met more trans people at my LGS (local game store) than at the queer bar where I went to trivia every week.

Does anyone here know any historians or political scientists who study wartime propaganda? Bonus points if they specialize in the American context specifically, but not necessary

“It's not impossible to imagine that one of the norms in countries like the United States, where democracy has come under threat by a major political faction, is ping-ponging between authoritarianism and democracy" - @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

You know what’s great? Seeing a friend do their thing and realizing they’re just so intellectually ready for this moment. This is a @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social praise tweet.

Genuinely hard to count the number of ways this could go predictably wrong - let alone the unpredictable ones!

I would like to hang out on a social media site with many many more people like Henry and many many fewer people like the blue-anon slogan shouter he is addressing. Where is that site? Calgon take me away.

What we’re reading: “How to stop a dictator”by @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social ⬇️ https://www.vox.com/politics/479924/democracy-us-brazil-south-korea-poland-backsliding-resilience

The open antI-Semitism this has unleashed, visible in the horseshoe right and left over at the other site, is something to behold

Happy to talk with @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social for this piece. We discussed the pathways and contours of a worst-case outcome. Not particularly likely, of course, but a scenario you have to at least contemplate.

I talked to a lot of smart experts about how the Iran war might end. The consensus was that Trump's idea of regime-change-by-bombing was a "fantasy" www.vox.com/politics/481...

Wrote this piece in 2016, and it's sadly aged perfectly www.vox.com/world/2016/5...

One more time, you are 100% free to use the term "USian" but you're not changing anyone's mind about imperialism and you're not driving us angry with an insult. You're just guaranteeing that no one here takes you seriously. I block people who use it because it's clear they have nothing to say.

"For the United States to make it out of its own crisis, we need to take this lesson to heart: not marginalize discussion of Trump’s threat to democracy, but bring it to the fore," writes @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social. Great piece. www.vox.com/politics/479...

The US has launched a war on Iran. But why? The short answer is nobody really knows. Vox’s @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social explains why the incoherence at the heart of Trump’s latest, biggest war is particularly scary. You can read more coverage here: www.vox.com/politics/481...

We are at war for no good reason because we created a presidency with unbounded war powers and then elected a madman to it www.vox.com/politics/481...

This, too, is anti Semitic, and also completely insane.

Never has a president launched a war of this scope for such incoherent reasons www.vox.com/politics/481...

The United States has just begun a massive, open-ended war — and nobody knows why

A bunch of gift links for @vox.com incredible series "America after Trump." You need to read this, I promise you — especially @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social's article "How to stop a dictator," which should be required reading for American citizenship right now. www.ifyoucankeepit.org/p/america-af...

How I feel doing vertical video as an Elder Millennial

Jamelle is right. I've spent years writing about the Hungary-US parallels, and this is one of the key areas where the US has more points of democratic resilience

Congrats to Benjamin Netanyahu, the worst prime minister in Israeli history by a wide margin

I’m an American actually living in a foreign country (Canada) and this just isn‘t true. The US political system is absolutely broken. But in terms of everyday life, it simply isn’t the case that things are visibly less functional than in other developed countries.

Legal scholars: does anyone know of good research on what the Founders thought about the pardon power? I'm trying to figure out it was intended to be as unlimited as the plain text suggests it is

🇺🇸🇵🇱🇰🇷🇧🇷 "I'm from the US, and I understand something about CEE" is usually an alarm bell, but here I could safely glide into the couch for some quality reading when I saw that Zack read the book by The Stanleys about Poland. That choice of Polish eagle, tho, very niche taste.

Real talk: This article by @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social for @vox.com might be the single most important piece of writing in the Trump era. For the love of democracy, read it and send it to every single one of your elected officials. www.vox.com/politics/479...

When Donald Trump falsely claimed tonight that Democrats only win when they cheat, he betrayed the anti-democratic contempt for the notion of political opposition at the core of his project www.vox.com/politics/480...

The state of the bunion is painful