On this day in 1740, South Carolina barred enslaved Black people from learning to read, earning money, and gathering, and authorized white enslavers to whip and kill them for being "rebellious."

Nina Simone performing ‘Mississippi Goddam’ live in Antibes, 1965. The song was written after the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi in June 1963, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed 4 black girls. Levi weargrits

It’s telling that Alabama took 14 years to implement Brown (you MUST desegregate) and < 14 days to implement Callais (you CAN eliminate Black districts if you call them Democratic, but you don’t HAVE to).

Perhaps we could name the recession after him if the closure of the Strait of Hormuz causes one.

This. And SCOTUS has blessed partisan gerrymandering, and there's no federal prohibition on mid-cycle redistricting. According to SCOTUS, every single state legislature could reconvene in January of every odd-numbered year, look at how their maps performed the previous November, and redistrict.

What is especially galling is that this saved zero dollars, since the cruise ships pay for the inspections. And now their industry is less trusted because of perceived health risks. Amazing lose-lose policymaking.

When a town had no African Americans or Jews, the Klan kept itself busy attacking Catholics. Thus, anti-Catholic hate was crucial to the breadth of its spread, especially in the Midwest.

Worth noting that historically, the Klan was strongly anti-Catholic in addition to their racism and antisemitism. Given that modern Christian nationalism has antecedents in Klan ideology, this is completely unsurprising.

If the Europeans don't want to get criticized, they should think about gifting the President a tricked-out airplane or giving Don Jr. some free shares in a profitable business. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

Leaving aside substance, and the obvious hypocrisy of blocking Democrats' constitutional challenges in the lead-up to elections while expediting Republican ones, a court driven by law would want full briefing and oral arguments. If you want to claim the role, at least go through the motions.

"First Bourbon Investigator"?

Difficult to disentangle the effects of tanking the economy with assaults on vital workers from those of tanking the economy by trashing the rule of law from those of tanking the economy with corruption from those of tanking the economy with reckless wars of choice constricting energy supplies.

So is adultery but they never bring that one up for some reason

curious how Trump decided to attack NATO right after his long phone call with Putin

All of this so that we could (checks notes) drive up the price of gas, increase the risk of global recession, slaughter innocent schoolgirls and lie about it, and put one of our worst enemies in control of the Straits of Hormuz. Maybe not a good trade, unless you are Putin.

Amidst the very appropriate outrage over what it means for the country to demolish minority voting rights, I also am struck by how purported Originalists embraced partisan gerrymanders when parties did not exist at the Founding. This cannot be original public meaning. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/u...

Much of this dispute is that President Trump's backers just assume away many constitutional limits as impractical or bad policy. If you add the powers the Framers actually gave the President with the war-making and appropriations powers he has seized, only then do you get a very powerful executive.

These charges are particularly remarkable coming from the administration of someone who takes great pleasure in suggesting that "Second Amendment" people will come after his opponents. Far, far less ambiguous.

It will require a METICULOUS investigation. And if the seller possesses any seashells, that could lead to a sentence enhancement.

Just terrible that so many workers at four of Russia's five most important oil ports keep smoking and starting such terrible fires. And very nice of Russia to let President Zelenskyy have a photo op in Kupianask after Russia "conquered" it.

And again, a reason I hate the TACO meme is in how it generates a false sense of predictability when it comes to a US president whose defining trait is erratic sociopathy

So much winning!

Obviously Bhattacharya is a hypocritical hack. That’s who he is, it’s priced in, so I’m not so angry at him. I’m mostly angry at the useful idiots who accepted and promoted the “he’s part of a new generation of freethinkers open to new ideas” bullshit.

Curious: I don't seem to recall Justice Jackson ordering a war of choice that was doomed from the outset for reasons recognized by at least seven of her predecessors. THAT is what one might call "low-IQ behavior".

i think it is cool that the president of the united states routinely slurs black people as biological inferior

Valuable 🧵 about the remarkable cynicism and dishonesty of DOJ's indictment of SPLC. But on the simplest level, when DOJ and FBI fire or force out so many experienced attorneys and agents for adhering to ethical standards, what does that say about the organizations' leadership?

Having an official sadistically obsessed with "lethality" quoting the Bible would be blasphemous. Far better for him to quote a crude, violent movie.

True. But it's also coupled with fierce attacks on viewpoints beyond conservative ones. Various left views are described as too far outside the mainstream to be serious. What makes some conservative viewpoints "serious" is not their rigor or popular support but self-interested money pushing them.

TRUMP, throwing insults at Pope Leo: “weak on crime” “terrible for foreign policy” “catering to the Radical Left” “owes his position to me” “sit down and mind your own business” POPE LEO, unbothered: “We are called to love.”

“The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of $$ are spent on killing+devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education+restoration are nowhere to be found”

You cannot call yourself anti-imperialist and yet think Ukraine shouldn't have tried to leave the Ru "sphere of influence" for its own good and the West should've endlessly rather than partially accommodated Ru's self-asserted "sphere of influence". I can't believe this needs to be said. Again.

You can't simultaneously lament the fall of the USSR and be a minimally credible anti-imperialist. You just can't. The USSR was an empire and it was brought down by anti-imperialist, local liberation movements and mobilization. In addition,...

It can hardly be about negotiations if the U.S. has neither a coherent negotiating position nor competent negotiators -- nor the patience to last more than two days in negotiations nor any self-awareness about how badly the war has gone so far.

Hungary is an inspiring but limited lesson. This valuable 🧵 shows it limits in more completely corrupted places like Georgia. It also may not apply to the U.S. because too many progressives think President Trump is a transitory problem to ally with pro-democracy conservatives like Magyar. And no EU.

Some voters tend to tune out critics' warnings about President Trump's distorted worldview, but I have trouble imagining any Christian denomination that would not find this picture horrendously offensive, especially in the season that commemorates Jesus's extreme sacrifices. Truly jaw-dropping.

For all its bluster about bringing business skills to government, I increasingly believe these people don't know the first thing about real negotiations. If talks ended when one side rejected the other's demands, almost no deals would ever be made. It takes creativity www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

"Under God"! Someone is making an all-in bet against divine thunderbolts. I, for one, would rather get my theology from thoughtful, prayerful scholars than masked thugs toting weapons of war in densely populated cities.

a criminal conviction isn’t required to say someone does not have the moral character to run for office and i don’t understand why this needs to be said over and over and over again.

Any story of national greatness must include both the raw capacity to do good and a governance system that supports rather than obstructing that capacity. We are in the process of demonstrating how to make America less great again. This should cause serious introspection.

Orban has conducted master classes in gerrymandering and voter suppression so the opposition needs far more than majority support to win. They appear to have that, but both Hungarian and Russian security forces are quite capable of cheating. The last Belarusian election is a cautionary tale.

Trump's Cabinet Asked To Invoke 25th Amendment Against President - Newsweek share.google/P5SbigxbLGt3... Talking about the 25th Amendment is a formal way to say that the President is not all there and to hold Vance accountable, but given this ghastly cabinet has zero chance of success. Distraction?

Striking revelation here is not that the Administration's leadership has no moral standards - we knew that - but rather that they have no conception of people who do. If the Pope became even a fraction as transactional as they demand, he would cease to be the Pope.

Pretty remarkable: not one of the countries they name is a success story for the U.S. We provided many of the arms to install the Taliban in Afghanistan (twice). Nicaragua has the same president now as then. Angola has the same Marxist party in charge. Honduras is still a big problem for the U.S.

He truly is omnivorous in his embrace of international law violations. And it says something that blocking freedom of navigation appeals both to him and to Iran.

I could not have written this explanation of how Congress is letting Trump seize its power without the help of @davidasuper.bsky.social (I could have written something, but it would have had many more mistakes!)

The analysis in this 🧵 is excellent. But I deeply wish Americans would stop using the TACO dig. This is a deeply insecure, prideful man without internal or external constraints. If we goad him into resuming attacks on civilians, we will not be the primary ones to suffer. Analysis, yes; mockery, no.

Very true. Like it or not, we live in a world where malign actors can put their puppets in charge of whole nations. Pretending it is not so only encourages more meddling and makes the problem worse.

Of course that ought to be Russia: no country has done more for Iran. And of course it will not be Russia: no country has done more for President Trump.

I don't usually look to Sen. Johnson for the voice of reason. That even he is speaking so clearly gives me some hope that serious pressure is being put on the President. We have to assume the Gulfies are pretty nervous, too.