O'DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao? TRUMP: Are you ready? I don't know who he is O'DONNELL: His crypto exchange Binance helped facilitate a $2b purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin. And they you pardoned him. TRUMP: Here's the thing -- I know nothing about it

I kind of wonder if Trump’s random demand to renew nuclear testing was just him getting confused about the option of the senate using a nuclear option on the filibuster?

The whimsy and weirdness in these protests is just damned delightful. It dispels the gloom of this terrible moment and laughs in the face of lies about America-hating terrorists’ organizing the demonstrations. Now vote.

It has to be said - again and out loud - that it’s Republicans in Congress who’ve unshackled him.

Los Angeles came out in droves. #NoKings

Big protest crowd in New Orleans.

Boston. Wow.

It's a republic. Let's keep it.

My first thought at the news was, “yeah this tracks.”

Hey. Hi. Tom Homan is on camera taking a $50k bribe and no one knows where the money went. If this was any other administration, this would be non-stop on the news. Why are we normalizing this stuff?

Am I the only one who wants to know where the chain break is on that chainsaw? And what the heck is on the bottom of it (is that a Christmas tree stand)? That chain saw is just gonna take off the user’s hand if it even had an engine in it.

“the constitution forbids race conscious remedies” would be news to the people who wrote the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments

Tip for anyone discussing the Roberts court: Taney sounds like “Tawney.”

1)You may remember the articles criticizing liberal students for their hesitancy to make friends with conservative students—alleging that they were less open-minded than their conservative counterparts.

LSU Press is getting started early with the annual holiday sale. You can receive 40% off North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715-1885 and many other titles using the code SAVE40LSU. lsupress.org/978080717176...

Freed Palestinian prisoners are barred by Israel from celebrating the release, or speaking to the media about their imprisonment, on threat of arrest and re-imprisonment or even death. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

If you want to understand the Supreme Court this article may do the best job of explaining the shadow docket and how the court is undermining the law. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Someday Stephen Miller will be the villain in many a historical drama set in the Trump administration. I used to say Bond villains aren’t realistic. However, Miller and Musk showed up and I changed my tune.

20 paragraphs down in the NBC News story that broke the information that the administration is considering invoking the Insurrection Act is the report that Stephen Miller is driving the issue.

Hey Military Historians, esp Grad students! The SMH is announcing its 2026 Summer Seminar in Military history, hosted by the Adams Center at VMI. This is a fabulous opportunity to learn the field outside your specialty, to network, and enjoy the Blue Ridge Mountains. www.smh-hq.org/summersemina...

IL Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh: "I think Kristi Noem should have consequences. I think she should be tried at The Hague."

The SC allowing Trump to refuse to spend Congressionally appropriated funds makes budget negotiations impossible. This is breakdown of constitutional order stuff. There is no political way out of the shutdown if Trump can violate any agreement. And he has said he will. www.yahoo.com/news/article...

The Hatch Act is among the things that they’re not even pretending to comply with anymore.

This NYT podcast on the cratering of coding jobs is an advertisement for a liberal arts education. Don't train for today's jobs b/c they might not be there tomorrow. Develop enduring critical thinking skills that allow you to adapt to an evolving world www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/p...

Democrats "blocked" this bill by ... not voting for it. No dirty tricks or sneaky moves, they just didn't vote for a GOP bill. It needed 60 votes to pass, 53 Reps and 2 Dems voted for it. That, according to the broken Washington Post, means Democrats Are To Blame even though the GOP runs it all.

Next year is going to be a busy year for me. I have not one but two books coming out in 2026. Freedom in the Age of Slavery: A History of Free People of Color will be released by the UVA Press in May 2026. www.amazon.com/Freedom-Age-...

Just a reminder to reporters the House and Senate and White House are all run by the GOP. At no point were democrats consulted in the creation of the GOP bill to fund the government.

We Should Have Finished Reconstruction: A Brief History Of American Politics, 1865-2025

Pete Hegseth: only clean-shaven men can win wars U.S. Grant:

I can't get over how the right-wing doesn't understand modern militaries, with the majority serving non-combat roles. You think the best IT security & logistics personnel spends two hours in the gym every day to look like the cast of 300? They're at furry conventions and model train shows.

Pete Hegseth watched Patton and missed the message of the movie.

OpenAI's products are utterly unnecessary and run off of stolen human-made content. Students don't need them. Teachers don't need them. None of us need this regurgitated AI slop that didn't even exist four years ago.

Finishing a Ph.D. on slavery in early American or Atlantic history this year? Consider applying for the University of California's President's Postdoc program. I'd love to sponsor at applicant if working with me @ucsantacruz.bsky.social might be a good fit! ppfp.ucop.edu/info/how-to-...

Troops. In an American city. Using full force. Your now-regular reminder that Republican members of Congress are letting this happen.

I must admit, I underestimated how easy it would be for fascism to take over the United States of America.

Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a "battle" rather than what it truly was: a massacre of over 250 Lakotas, mainly women, children, and the elderly. 1/

American democracy died on January 20, 2025 at precisely noon. The question is: can we ever get it back.

Out of This Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Equal Rights in the Civil War Era is now available for preorder. Preordering is a great way to support the book's success. Many thanks in advance. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/out-of-thi...

It’s sad I’m having to hope for option one. But I think @timothysnyder.bsky.social is right. And I fear it’s option 3 and/or 4.

At no point did Hodges say this was what was occurring or even mention current events. Hegseth and others who started yelling “this is different” assumed he was making a parallel because they also see the parallels between Nazis and themselves.

A reminder that asking American soldiers to take an oath to an individual is rather unAmerican, authoritarian, and antidemocratic. And any such oath taken doesn’t replace or supplant any oath taken to the Constitution. Just thought I’d throw that out there for no particular reason today.

Apropos of nothing : I’d like to remind folks that Wounded Knee was a massacre and not a battle.

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

The new John Roberts portrait just dropped

The targets were litterally the team tasked with negotiating a cease fire. Israel’s leadership doesn’t want to end the conflict. They want it to continue.