Let's just suppose that an entirely random process identified an individual who a federal prosecutor was told "Secure an indictment of them by any means necessary". How many American citizens could not be indicted regardless of that order? My guess would be close to zero.

Apparently a lot of serving top military officers have been called to Washington DC for an urgent face-to-face meeting. I wonder what Operation Never Heard Of Epstein is going to be about. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Martial law? Greenland invasion? Seizure of all escalators in NYC?

Sherill in NJ is running as if she might get Trump supporters votes as long as she doesn't mention that she's a Democrat or has any opinions at all about national politics, presumably because they'll like her military experience. It's like they think they can sneak past the election.

Holy shit, it's an accusation that Senator Van Hollen had margaritas with an unjustly confined prisoner in a hellhole in El Salvador? I'd give him a humanitarian award if he'd somehow managed to arrange that on purpose.

Everything the American right has complained about since 1992 or so has been the equivalent of producer's notes. They weren't complaints, they were bookmarks on policies and actions that weren't oppressive but COULD BE, if you did them with that intent. As they are doing now.

David Frum and David French and even Tucker Carlson are showing up more on Kimmel and the awfulness of state repression of speech than most of the assholes who signed the Harper's letter about cancel culture. I guess those guys are still more worried about Oberlin undergrads.

Over the borderline into sycophantic. But they haven't used the full toolbox yet! The Times will have to think of new ways to slobber enthusiastically when people get sent to work camps or detention for saying bad things about the President and his friends. "Going all-out!" "The fully monty!"

Is now the time to start cancelling subscriptions and services? Yes it is. You can do without Disney+ even if you've got young kids. Make it conditional, like any boycott should be. Do the right thing, stop knuckling under, defend your freedom and ours? Then we'll be back as your customers.

Well, we are off the map now, folks. It's a long way down once we hit the edge.

I genuinely want to hear the names of public intellectuals you think are "debaters"--who listen patiently and seriously to opposing views, credit them, allow those critiques to affect their own thinking. Charlie Kirk was not one of them, but who are they? I will start with one name: Garry Wills.

It's genuinely amusing reading Kevin Roose trying to claim he has any skepticism at all about generative AI while speaking to Yudkowsky. That's like Colonel Sanders trying to say that he's got some doubts about fried chicken.

I obviously don't have a generally high opinion of Ezra Klein, but my opinion has never been lower of him than when he writes that he and Charlie Kirk believed in the "continuing possibility of American politics". At that moment, Klein is either dumb or complicit. Kirk believed in no such thing.

Self-serving spectacle is hard to coordinate from a distance. There's always the danger of an actual investigation getting in the way.

Because I'm pro-empathy I defy Charlie Kirk's rejection of it and feel for his family and supporters now. But that's the problem: the government is coordinating a one-sided embrace of a martyr, an embrace they have withheld from others rather than show love for all the victims of violence.

I know Charlie Kirk valued debate and free speech because he blocked me for fact-checking his lies on Twitter and then put me on his organization's Professor Watchlist for writing a book he didn't like.

Just for fun, I'm going to give you some clips of the hate mail I got from being placed on Kirk's TPUSA Dangerous Professor list. Buckle up:

You have to care about all assassinations of people who are just speaking their truth and doing their politics if you want everybody to join in caring with gravity and sincerity about a given assassination. That's the point: the baseline is believing that all people should get to speak their truth.

I don't think this qualifies as good news any longer, even though it used to. It used to because Congress could set priorities for spending and it would influence executive action, as the Constitution specifies. Since January, the executive branch has ignored Congressional instruction.

rewatching this episode of the Twilight Zone where a man becomes obsessed with getting advice from a demonic fortune telling machine until he can no longer make any decisions without consulting the machine. for no reason in particular.

It's publication day for UNIVERSITY KEYWORDS. Across 27 sharp essays, the book offers a critical account of the political economy of US higher education, how it came to be structured this way, and how together we might build a better university together.

It's a norm that's been crumbling for a long time but now it's pretty much gone: governments feel free to order the assassination of both state and non-state adversaries without much pretense of deniability or deflection.

If you are teaching in a public university, a private university whose leadership are bending the knee to Trumpism, assume at this point that you will be reported by students or colleagues if what you teach is in any way non-compliant with Trumpism (for some of us, that's our whole discipline).

How do you know when you have a tolerant partner? Flicking around cable because you're bored brings you across Oldman in "Air Force One" and for some reason this triggers you deciding to talk like Malkovitch as Teddy KGB in "Rounders" and you don't stop for ten minutes and yet you get out alive.

Great demonstration of the dangers here. If you've ever had someone try to con you by pretending to know you, you will see in a second that this technology is horrifically dangerous.

Eric Schmitt and J.D. Vance are trying to steal America from the people who made America. Belonging is a many-splendored thing. timothyburke.substack.com/p/a-wrong-th...

Give it a few weeks and it'll be renamed the Department of Kapow and Boom. Half the psychodrama with this administration is Lutnick, Vought and Miller giggling like fuck while they make Trump humiliate all the dummies like Hegseth in the Cabinet by making them defend unbelievably stupid shit.

If you want a clear picture of how journalists are being told by editors to conform to a party line, watch Kaitlin Collins on "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" squirm and evade when there's a pretty easy answer that requires saying that a piece of art represents America as a golden toilet.

As has frequently been the case with GOP-aligned American public figures in the last 30 years, Barrett poses the question, "Lying or deluded?" Alito lies: he knows exactly what he's doing. Gorsuch too. And Thomas is doing something different anyway, which is "spit on your grave". Barrett? I dunno.

In a just universe, I could turn to all the people who whined about "slippery slope" arguments on the empowerment of the executive branch and the national security establishment as fallacious exaggerations and say "well, here we are, covered in grease and at the bottom of the slide, motherfucker".

WTF, Jalen Carter. What on earth was going through your head?

The Constitution, the law, are not self-enforcing. They require human agency to work, and the most important choice is accept and live within the spirit of the law. (There's a reason that's a title of Montesquieu's influential work.) Lose that and you can't force your way back to legality.

What's this, about the fortieth article by journalists saying that Trump can't do a thing Constitutionally or against existing statute that he then goes ahead and does? At which point the journalists usually slink away quietly and come back with "Trump policies may work, but experts are concerned."

One way that the NYT produces a constant stream of partial falsehoods: watch for the stories that are framed as "experts say" versus the stories that make direct statements of fact. "Experts" voice all criticism of Trump; direct substantive descriptions reproduce Trumpism's own framing favorably.

Seeing Charles Blow describe his experience writing for the NYT in similar terms to Paul Krugman really brings home how much the entire NYT is a heavily curated monoculture focused on manipulating, directing & controlling upper middle-class public culture in the US. It's why it's such a bore, too.

My favorite sentence in the New York Times explainer on Mamdani and socialism.

The panicked noise among far-right influencers and politicians for some weeks after January 6 2021 was pretty interesting. They couldn't make up their minds: a false-flag operation staged by antifa insurgents? An inside job by the FBI? Or their own revolutionaries, doing a revolution? 1/

My first words aren't very nice ones, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort to come up with more patient and polite words to say roughly the same thing. It just tires me out more than anything else.

RFK Jr. is a contemptible person all on his own; that he has Trump's backing amplifies his awfulness. Nobody, and I mean nobody, should be able to claim even the remotest devotion to "science" who cannot stand the presence in their staff of someone contesting their interpretation of research.

Can anybody think of any previous American President who would have sat still while a Cabinet secretary told them to come by that department's office building and see the President's big beautiful face up on a banner? Nixon would have puked his guts out. W would have been kind of uncomfortable.

A simple, horrible example of how the New York Times is fucking up at their basic job, check the subject-verb-object in this phrase from today on India and tariffs: "Brazil--led by a leftist president who has antagonized Mr. Trump directly". It's exactly the opposite of what really happened.

I'm tempted to just go the low-road of sarcasm, but there's something important lurking inside this finding, which is that dumping a lot of energy into efficiency is itself inefficient. A lot of natural systems achieve effective efficiency through redundancy and emergence, not command and control.

Most countries on the planet have stopped allowing their postal services to ship items to the United States, and services like DHL have done the same, because our government can't even tell them what the import duties would be. Mainstream press isn't reporting this and innumerable other shitshows.

What the fuck. Why not just go further? "For the first time in their lives, they are riding unicorns in elven meadows, having their houses pressure-washed free of charge, seeing no traffic jams at all, getting reservations easily at the best restaurants, and drinking from clean stream waters."

Trying and failing to imagine the tame, contradictory, often-compromised leadership of many American cities showing even a tenth of the imagination involved in Zohran Mamdani's "scavenger hunt" event. Including most importantly the way that he reconnected with New York City's political history.

If you were seriously going to argue that some form of federal assistance with law enforcement was necessary to deal with violent crime, you'd be talking to Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina before you were talking with Illinois, Washington DC, Michigan.

Here’s what I see: A) The vast majority of Dems have coalesced around a morally clear platform. B) The vast majority of elected Dems have coalesced around protecting and pleasing their donors. C) Those two encampments are miles apart.

Andrew Cuomo's platform at this point seems to be: no free pizza for seniors, rent for the super-poor if they beg enough maybe and agree to live in asewer, maybe free bus but man that's radical crazy shit, no scavenger hunts, I hate NYC but I was born for power so vote for me you peons.

Pennsylvania's a pretty good example of what the next stage of this just-short-of-shooting civil war in the US looks like. The rural parts of the state need the $$$ the urban/ suburban areas generate but they also hate those areas. So now they hurt them, right now by cutting off transit money. 1/

Another day, another lickspittle authoritarian-enabling lie-adjacent New York Times framing. Today it's pretending that Trump demanding tithes from US companies is something akin to state capitalism or social-democratic public-private partnership. It's plainly not: it's patrimonial corruption.

One thing we all have to hope is that National Guard and other military deployed in DC, in LA or elsewhere for transparently bullshit authoritarian theater are themselves unhappy and annoyed by being used in this way. Because that's one way this whole moment might turn back on Trump & Co.