Trans people did not "cost us the most important election ever." Trans people didn't do shit. Trans people overwhelmingly voted for Harris. She failed trans people (and the whole country) for refusing to counter that ad! Stop blaming trans people for our own oppression. Jesus Christ.

The "liberals have to learn how to live with people we diagree with" line kinda stops making sense in a world where the central disagreement is whether disagreeing with them should be allowed at all

We need a bigger tent, that’s why we must betray and expel the following types of people:

It seems likely that the us president is being entirely managed by people showing him fake tv clips of whatever they want him to believe is happening, and then suggesting what he should do about it

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

Coates understands something Klein and his ilk absolutely do not, that finding the line to victory is not the job of a writer or public intellectual. That's for the party to do - the writer, as with the rest of us - should be pushing them to do what we believe is right, not kissing their asses

Viewing “How did we let these people back into power?” as a political campaign/elections question and not a governance question really and accidentally reveals the massive and persistent category error of Biden years/DC Democratic operative class (which at this point I would say Ezra fits into)

I’m not a psychologist but I am a storyteller, and let me tell you, the character analysis at the bottom of this is Klein is abjectly terrified of not being in the social majority for even a nanosecond and Coates repeatedly, gently pointing out that many people live their whole lives there.

ezra expressly says, "we should lie about respecting charlie kirk in order to make our ideas more palatable," without realizing that the reactionaries who are nice to him are doing the same thing.

*goose meme* why was Jesus in Egypt

For fuck’s sake Ezra, Kirk wasn’t “trying to persuade people.” He was farming content to serve as red meat to enrage and energize people who were already on his side. How do you still not understand this? Coates points this out and it still goes straight over Klein’s head.

CHOTINER: And you didn’t know this person - what did you call him again? CELEBRIMBOR GREATEST OF THE ELVEN SMITHS: Right, his name was Annatar but CHOTINER: And you taught him to create a ring harnessing all his malice and cruelty? CELEBRIMBOR: Well I mean I was deceived CHOTINER: So you’ve said

I would love to read a Ball Four type expose on how multiracial / multicultural sports locker rooms manage (or don't manage) to function in the Trump era. I guess maybe they're all rich enough that the consequences are imaginary? But as a teammate, it'd be hard to just let stuff like this pass.

This is, as they say in the knowing things disciplines, not great

A thing about authoritarian information environments is that you definitionally no longer can know what is true based on what the authorities say, and everyone eventually adapts to this

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

I think they should have a parallel show called Stupid Andor that's about all the stuff going on at the same time that would have been too stupid to put in Andor and would have ruined the vibe (Jar Jar stuff, Palpatine meetings) but also a smart person could come up with something interesting about

Nearly every campus has a Newman House/Center, a Campus Crusade for Christ, a Fellowship of Christian Athletes, many other denominational outposts, and on and on. Christianity is mainstream on campuses. The thing that is not welcome is White Christian Nationalism, for obvious reasons.

In the 2010s, this country's elites were thrown onto social platforms with everyone else and could finally read what we all think about them and it caused them so much psychic damage that they decided to destroy both the internet and democracy to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.

When someone says one thing to gain power and then a contradictory thing when exercising that power, the most useful lens for understanding it is power, not hypocrisy.

ah, well

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

So is there any media company that *doesn’t* have a merger pending that is an easy button for them to push on to gain instant compliance? Maybe you could try… less media consolidation? Just a thought.

my buddy had a dream about "newport snows" which where like, spearmint, not menthol so i made it for him in photoshop and got carried away

We slidin'

feels like we are alllllmost at the point where red state Republican politicians read about how these shooters are so brain-poisoned by online fascist nihilism that they're assassinating political figures just because they're nearby/prominent, and realize that they themselves are nearby/prominent

I'm seeing some people post this and not realize this is PART of the radicalization. Building an audience from reasonable sounding videos and converting them into the pipeline. Weiss is doing this now as I get The Free Press ads about things like "low tech parenting" and workout fads.

This was common in Iraq too. We once responded to a tip, raided the suspected house, then learned the occupant was guilty only of building a balcony that allowed him to see into his neighbor's back yard. The neighbor had informed on him, hoping American soldiers would arrest him. We left.

During the Spanish Civil War it was common for people to use the war as a convenient excuse to permanently settle grievances or just straight up steal their neighbor's property. Same in Afghanistan. An environment in which someone informs on you because they covet your wife or truck...very very bad

civility is when a white guy calls for minorities to be eliminated in a calm voice while wearing an expensive suit

I've been baffled by this, b/c my experience in politics and influencer culture is that you can't get away with different messages for different audiences, because someone will find it and put it in front of the other audience and ruin you. But maybe not on the Right? Especially if you lack shame?

Cosign. Again: I can think that someone, e.g. Kirk, has abhorrent views without coming within miles of the idea that that person should be killed. This is what believing in free speech means: that even profound disagreement should not be met with violence.

None of the young male mass shooters and now political assassins I've written about in recent years had stayed in higher education and pursued a bachelor's degree. Crazy enough, it's almost like college is a positive socializing force, not a radicalizing one

But what if the owners of that media think their wealth and political power will increase as a result of that civil war, and the political party that tried to lie us into the civil war got favorable coverage from over 80% of the legacy media?

My dad first signed up for Twitter to follow live sports and he’s a freak about U of I. One day he said to me “Twitter is abuzz about Illini golf,” and I was like dude you only follow Illini sports accounts. And that’s how every reporter feels Charlie Kirk was the most important person in the world.

Each alleged mass shooter is even more On the Computer All the Time than the previous one. Probably nothing to worry about there

the corollary to this is that theyre freaking out because the Online world they live in treats both as Content in ways they didnt appreciate until literally just now

consistently lost in navel-gazing about political violence is that, generally speaking, the kinds of people who engage in it individually are generally pretty incoherent and the act is usually more attributable to personal heroic narratives than actual, clear politics attributable to a real ideology

You're going to see a lot of "he's a violent antifascist leftist" and "he's a groyper" but the core of Tyler Robinson's motivation is almost certainly that he's an online-poisoned idiot gamer.

What did we learn, Palmer? 🤷‍♂️

years of lead paint

pretty wild that it so quickly became normalized that immigrants don’t have even basic free speech rights www.axios.com/2025/09/11/c...

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.

In 2014, Anita Sarkeesian canceled an event at Utah State after a credible assassination threat because the school’s response was that Utah allows guns on college campuses. People have warned about this kind of violence for years. But they weren’t the people the powers at be wanted to protect.

Is running a large-scale targeted harassment machine "doing politics the right way"? Asking for a (many) friend(s).

We must stand resolutely against political assassination and political violence of all kinds, and just as resolutely against everyone who exploits acts of violence as the pretext or excuse for political repression of political opponents.

Shut the fuck up friday is in full effect

MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE!