in our ongoing moment of awfulness, this symposium on Kirstie McClure can remind us how approach the intellectual life of democracy with fearlessness and rigor

I’m grateful for the experience of editing this symposium for our teacher Kirstie McClure with my friends @megangallagher.bsky.social, @arashdavar.bsky.social, and @fredleept.bsky.social. I am also grateful for the pieces by our contributors which I think do justice to Kirstie’s memory.

Dvora Yanow's contribution to our symposium on Kirstie McClure in 'Philosophy and Global Affairs' is now available! #poltheory

The final piece of our symposium dedicated to Kirstie McClure, Vicki Hsueh's "On Narrative and Unruly Readers," is out! #poltheory

#StarTrek #Sisko197 #AbolishICE

Oh, my heat went out

You have to read this. Firsthand affidavit from one of the women who was there and recording the video. She talks about how Alex Pretti was directing traffic when she arrived. She watched him be killed in front of her. She's afraid to go home, worried she'll be arrested.

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."

Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse serving veterans. He died trying to protect protestors being assaulted. A group of anonymous & masked men fired chemicals into his face, beat him, disarmed him, and shot him in broad daylight in front of witnesses. Then his government smeared him & defended his murder.

Our initial analysis is up. The video footage appears to show that the gun was taken away from the man before he was shot. He was UNARMED before any of the shots were fired.

DHS is the paramilitary wing of the MAGA movement at war with the constitution and lives of the American people

They’re fighting for their city but they’re also fighting for all of us

Abolish ICE and dismantle DHS

Wise words from WEB DuBois to gird us today: "It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists & gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources."

I’m so damn proud of the Minneapolis labor movement!! ✊🏾🥹

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

“Liam’s older brother, a middle schooler, came home 20 minutes later to find his father and brother missing”

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional! ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

I'm extremely late on posting this, but it was a huge missed opportunity for Mamdani to appeal to me specifically when he did not lean into idea that his support came from "nowhere" by saying that his election brought "news from nowhere."

Our remembrances of Kirstie McClure, political theorist www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf...

The introduction for our symposium in honor of Kirstie McClure at Philosophy and Global Affairs is now online. I am grateful to have written this piece and organized the symposium with Arash Davari, Megan Gallagher, and Fred Lee and I hope that many will read it in remembrance of Kirstie.

The introduction for our symposium in honor of Kirstie McClure at Philosophy and Global Affairs is now online. I am grateful to have written this piece and organized the symposium with Arash Davari, Megan Gallagher, and Fred Lee and I hope that many will read it in remembrance of Kirstie.

A postdoc is available at @sotonpolitics.bsky.social in a Horizon project on 'the emotional expressions of grievance politics and implications for democratic governance': www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQD118/r...

2025 was the fourth warmest year on record for the USA www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/nationa...

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

I feel like James Cameron found out about Ursula K Le Guin’s offhand remark that Avatar rips off The Word for World is Forest but erases the tragic account of mass violence and then he created the whale plot line to double down.

Wendy Brown's comments at a memorial for Kirstie McClure, organized by Davide Panagia back in 2024, are now available. #poltheory www.pdcnet.org/pga/content/...

Asked what gives him the personal right to “run” a foreign nation, Mr. Trump responded, “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”

The first piece of our symposium in honor of Kirstie McClure is available from Philosophy and Global Affairs. Thank you to Patchen Markell for his lovely essay and to Jane Anna Gordon for shepherding it through the publication process. #poltheory

“John seemed an extreme version of a kind of intellectual ideal. Wasn’t the freedom to read for much of the day one of the draws of graduate school, after all?” www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Minnesota Public Radio says today marks the first and only shooting and homicide in Minneapolis in the year 2026

Worried about increased surveillance of syllabi & course curricula at your institution? Check out these resources from the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom to integrate in your course, such as language for academic freedom to put in your syllabus, a teaching module, and a reading list.

masked, unidentified goons who assault and murder with impunity. a literal gestapo.

Abolish ICE

From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

reading my students' work has been a bright spot these last few days

Democracy rarely emerges from external deposition of leaders or sudden power vacuums. It emerges from negotiated exits with guarantees and credible domestic opposition to corrupt or repressive regimes. This intervention actively undermines both.

War as an act of domestic law enforcement and militarized domestic law enforcement are both manifestations of lawless tyranny.

Still hasn’t been a year. None of how Trump is running the country is sustainable. He will be removed or the country will collapse.

The U.S. constitution is not in effect

This is some bullshit

Anyone who conflates "academic" with "elite" hasn't seen the academics' apartments I have

Twitter/X these days sounds like a manifestation of the waking nightmare of the tyrant's soul from Republic IX. No thank you.

there are endless headlines about "grok apologizes" or "grok says it will be fixed" after it generated CSAM using pictures of minors and zero headlines about "grok being shut down" or "musk and xAI in big legal trouble" and I think something fundamental has broken here

As faculty, I think we get things backwards if we see LLMs as our enemy. They are our students' enemy. We just happen to care about our students. Insofar as we see the goal of liberal education as cultivating habits of thought that support a free life, we are our students' allies against these tools

This was my fourth time teaching my Marx class and I think I finally figured out how to do it

Trapped! In the Orlando airport for 12 hours.

thanks to AI you can now become the malignant illusion spinning demiurge whom Descartes had to axiomatically banish in order to make Rationality possible

W.E.B Du Bois, 1940: “Some of my friends protest. They like Christmas. And if Christmas were what they imagine it is, I should like it too. If, for instance, it meant rest, not exhausting debauchery; peace, not bickering and quarreling; good wishes, not presents; kindness not expense…