Fun thought experiment: Imagine if Biden told Ted Cruz he would withhold funds for a new highway overpass in Dallas until Cruz agreed to name the entire Texas interstate system after him.

He really is impressively quick on his feet

This happens with*everything* now. No matter how grave the crime or one-dimensional the injustice, after four days the hivemind of American punditry decides that the Real Story is how the people upset about it are the real villains.

Pour one out for every professional political pundit, writer, consultant whatever that has spent the last decade trying to pretend that the Trump phenomenon was about trade or opiates and not a big chunk of white america losing its mind over having a black president bsky.app/profile/kyle...

Notable that this is true not only for voters but for many journalists as well, who are willing to endlessly buy into “pivots” and otherwise act like his policies are anything other than what they actually are

Reading just about everything there was to read about Hunter (it was my job) mostly gave me sympathy for what sounded like a fundamentally pretty decent guy who got trapped in a really horrible self-destructive spiral, which does not seem to apply to any of the Epstein Files crowd

Killing the CIA World Factbook might seem like small potatoes, but it was a touchstone of curated facts in a sea of disinformation.

Shutting down (the stellar) books coverage at WaPo is a real telling move when your owner is literally Jeff Bezos

one thing the trump era has made clear, i think, is that the american people themselves are far more committed to the values of our founding documents than our elites

the wapo bloodbath once again proves that our wealthy and powerful deserve neither their wealth or power

Amazing coda here.

Congratulations to every reporter who decided to treat the administration’s attacks on Harvard as anything other than a scheme with this exact endpoint in mind

Each of these 7 items would easily be the biggest scandal for like 45 Presidents.

There was a contingent of supposedly serious people during Trump 1.0 whose stance was “Trump isn’t a threat to free speech, journalists just don’t like that he’s criticizing them” (see, e.g., www.cnn.com/2017/07/05/o...)

Whenever you see a story about how liberals aren't making their conservative peers feel welcome enough, this is who they're talking about.

It’s especially funny because his British accent in “Game of Thrones” is not particularly good

Has anybody written anything about the increasing complexity of insurance commercials? There are now, like, these whole universes with a bunch of lore and individual ads that are basically inscrutable unless you also remember an ad the same company ran three years ago

Sorry guys, it’s Woke Settlement now, them’s the rules

let’s not forget: there is NO FUCKING REASON for them to be there. there was no crisis, no incident, no event. just a barely-literate youtuber making up racist shit about Somalis

He’s so charitable.

My first job under Trump 1.0 was writing about how Trump’s business created conflicts of interest with his presidency. I remember how incredibly careful we were about language, but also how we early on settled on principle: There is no merely *alleged* conflict of interest; it either is or it isn’t

Few public figures have been as publicly committed to a staunch and fully intentional far-right worldview as Stephen Miller in my lifetime.

It’s hard to imagine someone more universally enjoyed than Catherine O’Hara where the opinions range from “I like her and her work” to “I love her and her work” and that’s a pretty good legacy

RIP to an absolute icon

Much of the media has bought every Trump “pivot” for a literal decade. It’s hard not to read that as a sign that many of them desperately want to be able to cover him as a normal politician, even if that means getting tricked into normal coverage.

I think the defining quality of Bari Weiss media is her insistence on the need for dramatic change or bold action - followed by a parade of the most aged, tired, impossibly dull figures or ideas, except they’re also always underqualified amateurs or cranks.

The fact that people spent so much of the offseason/early season speculating that the Thunder would challenge the all-time win record and they lost their 10th game just over halfway through the season really goes to show just how ludicrous 73-9 was

Now that TikTok has changed ownership in the U.S., it's as good a time as ever to again say how much I truly hate algospeak euphemisms like "unalived" and whatnot. I wish people would knock that off.

this is a fake problem. no one is saying this to regular, offline people who are coming around. they’re saying it to people who are engaged in professional political analysis who committed professional malpractice by scolding people who saw what was coming. no, those people shouldn’t get a break.

Happy for Sam Darnold tonight. He was a great guy when he was on the 49ers and has more than earned his career renaissance. I hope he throws six interceptions in the Super Bowl and loses by 40.

Counterpoint: It looks really, really cold there

I recently read “Did It Happen Here?” (a post-Trump 1.0 collection of essays on whether Trump was fascist), followed by Robert Paxton’s “Anatomy of Fascism,” and I was really struck by how much of the naysaying in the former was just pure, completely un-self-aware sophistry

Even if this were the main problem (which I think it pretty obviously isn’t), one meaningful difference from Trump’s first admin is that he is now fully surrounded by *his* people, not the GOP establishment’s. Their advice is the advice he has chosen!

A. Of course you can B. It wasn't a protest

Years from now, it'll be difficult to explain the things people in media were wailing about before all this. Sophomores writing underconsidered op-eds about cultural appropriation. Protests against demagogues on campus. YA drama. "Mobs" on Twitter. These were the threats to free society.

The people who spent years defending and even lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashli Babbitt now want us to believe that an unarmed mother in her car and a disarmed nurse were domestic terrorists who deserved to be murdered by law enforcement.

Somebody made this point when the bird-watching guy became a BLM flashpoint: Pointing out the victim’s virtues isn’t saying “this one special guy didn’t deserve it,” it’s a way of saying “you can do everything they say past victims should’ve done to protect themselves and they will still attack you”

When was he supposed to do that? Between the bursts of pepper spray? Between the blows to his head?

People should not have to be perfect victims to not be murdered by the state or by a racist game show host and his lawless den of jackals and elite pedophile cover up conspiracists, but still HOLY SHIT MAN

Just staggered by the complete moral void of not even *pretending* to wait for more information before pivoting to “the opponent of the state deserved it.” It is so insanely depraved. Soulless.

I have spent my entire adult life being lectured by Republican politicians and conservative legal movement types about how important it is to preserve the sacred constitutional right to self-defense of *specifically this person* and then secret police murdered him in the street

“Everyone should be allowed to carry a gun for their safety but the government can murder you in the street if you have a gun” is an incredible endpoint for the conservative moment

Remember when these guys lied that they were preserving Confederate monuments because you had to leave up the whole messy contested historical record rather than erasing history?

nine years old

It’s absurd enough when it’s something like “the mayor of New York should think more about how people in rural Kentucky see him,” it’s downright surreal to see “international institutions need to do a better job of catering to MAGA voters”

Content creators are among the most important and powerful people in conservative politics, so they all think the most important and powerful thing you can do is be a content creator

Jesus, Allah, Buddha, why is Gmail giving me "Tab to improve, Esc to dismiss" AI prompts when I turned off all their awful "smart features" in Settings months ago? They are really trying to wear us down on this stuff. Anyone have ideas?