"[Some fear] republican gov. cannot be strong. … I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Gov. on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern." Jefferson

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories. During a Javelin Thrust in Yuma one year, we brought two Navajo Code Talkers out to talk to the comm Marines about doing the job in WW2, get a brief on modern comm gear, and so we could ensure we still had Marines who could say they shook their hands.

Tangential, but I keep seeing an anti-military thread w/ a decent number of flat-out lies, the gist being: "don't join the military it's evil" and I'm sort of dumbstruck. We need a military, and ideally we should have moral people staffing and running it. Don't cede control of that to shitty people!

Watch that. And then tell me how we replace Schumer with her

Block instantly.

please put me first on the "people who defended their neighbors" list. bold and underline it while you're at it

The Montgomery bus boycott worked because black people made up a massive chunk of the transit network's revenue. The Target boycott worked because lots of liberals shopped at Target. The Bud Light boycott worked because chuds drink a lot of beer. You have to be a customer for them to care about you.

The number of Gestapo in Germany was 32,000. The population was 70 million. That's one Gestapo for every 2200 citizens. The number of ICE agents is 20,000. The population of the US is 348 million. That's one ICE agent for every 17,000 citizens. There are more of us.

Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal: “No law enforcement professional wears a mask…No law enforcement professional shoots at a moving vehicle. “What Trump’s private army is doing…is not only against legal law, but moral law.” Vows to arrest agents on site who commit crimes.

I wrote this almost 11 years ago theweek.com/articles/444...

the frontrunners for the Dems should be loudly announcing "we will dissolve ICE, we will delete your pensions, we will prevent any current ICE employees permanently from working in government and will prohibit any government contract to be issued to a company that hires a single one of you"

Charles I was less tyrannical. George III was less erratic. Louis XVI cared more for his people. Nicholas II was less incompetent.

One of the core purposes of right-wing media is to rewrite your memory and reprogram your moral response to an event you saw with your own eyes. George Floyd died of a heart attack. Jan 6 was a peaceful picnic. This process has already begun

this is exactly why having to concede on deployment of the national guard was a big fucking deal

IF WE DIG DEEP IN OUR HISTORY AND OUR DOCTRINE AND REMEMBER THAT WE ARE NOT DESCENDED FROM FEARFUL MEN

cropped sc because tensions are running high so no need to start unnecessary beef, but this is something literally no country on earth has, and it’s fucking annoying when people act superior to you because you’re grappling with this shit as it actually exists rather than airly imaging utopias.

Every one of these is temporary, and can be rectified when Trump is gone. And with any luck, after these cruel years, a new awake America can introduce itself, more aware of its shortcomings and with a humility to make good on its most worthy aspirations.

Embrace tradition

An important victory in taking power away from a horrible billionaire and giving it to a different billionaire who is also horrible in 80% of the same ways but differently horrible in the other 20%

This guy was murdered by the government for absolutely no reason, and this fact will be lucky to get a fraction of a percent of the coverage given to dead squirrels and uneaten house pets.

I gotta say I find a lot of the edgy anti-lib posting these days to be more banal and hackneyed than anything else. This isn't 2012, guys.

Obama’s drone policy was whack as fuck. Obama and Biden both had terrible immigration policies. I’ve openly and publicly criticized them for these things. I’d still be much much much much happier with either of them in the Oval Office than with Trump there. THAT isn’t complex or deep.

Wide-Awake behavior (laudatory)

Truth and reconciliation begins at home!

Around a million Syrians have returned since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. And every day at Damascus airport, families separated by years of war and dictatorship, are finally being reunited.

Remember the part in the old Peter Pan play where Peter tells the boys and girls in the audience that if they all just clap harder they can save Tinkerbell? That's what Trump's Cabinet Meeting reminded me of. A bunch of children wildly applauding him, all in an effort to bring him back to life.

I would argue pretty strenuously that overreliance on nonprofits for social services is, in fact, a centrist position at best. NGO world cloaks itself in progressivism by adhering to cultural signifiers of social justice. Endless land acknowledgements as they take public jobs from union workers.

I do appreciate @sodrock.bsky.social hammering this whole bullshit apolitical military stuff. If following the law becomes partisan then either you join the party of the law you are supposed to apolically follow or be forced by the other party to break it

The boys and I at the battle of Tehran after Joe Rogan convinced a bunch of broccoli haired zoomer incels to vote for trump:

🎶Love...is a burning thing And it makes a...fiery ring Bound...by wild desire I fell into a ring of fire🎶

They lied about it. All of it. A thug cop shot an unarmed woman five times without justification, boasted about it to his colleagues, and then this administration tried cover it all up by arresting her and charging her with felonies.

trying to predict what 2026 will look like

When centrists adopt far-right rhetoric, they don’t make themselves stronger. They make themselves look inauthentic, legitimise the far right, and shift the political debate onto terrain defined by their opponents. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Robert E. Lee killed more U.S. troops in battle than Adolph Hitler and Osama bin Laden combined

i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.

MattY operates from a world where a couple of Dem leaders could tell hundreds of Democratic Senators and Congressmen and thousands of Democratic state elected officials what to do and they’d have to obey, yet can’t think of anything more interesting to do with it than coordinate mass surrender.

People need to go to prison for these stories.

"If I were a student today, the top skill I'd develop is dependency on the technology that drives my profits" is the bravest take I've ever seen, I'm literally in tears at this bold leadership

happy Fourth, everybody. this country is still worth fighting for.

Neoconservatism in 2025 means reimporting liberal democracy in the USA. We will greet ourselves as liberators.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

People called me a madman

i also think that it is only a matter of time before this court rewrites section 1 of the 14th to effectively end birthright citizenship. the 14th amendment is the chief obstacle to a legal regime of tiered citizenship and subordinate castes, and they will not let it stand.

as for the upshot of the decision, the republican court has put the citizen children of non-citizens in a position similar to that of free blacks during the antebellum period. their right to enjoy the privileges and immunities of american citizenship will vary according to state borders