I'd say erased but anyway a reminder that Memorial Day started because African American Charlestonians took it upon themselves to give a proper burial to the union soldiers

Irony is dead

When your community removes a racist statue, do like Charlottesville and melt that fucker down. Because if you just stash it in storage, it becomes what @artcrimeprof.bsky.social calls “America’s strategic racism reserve” — ready for redeployment. www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/s...

its funny both left wing reporters like chad loder and far right terrorists like tarrio agree that the slush fund is designed to buy arms for right wing terror orgs. the media is still framing the objections as "rewarding people who assaulted our beloved cops." like its actually much worse!

Judge Amit Mehta when he sentenced the remorseless Rhodes to 18 years in prison: “I dare say, Mr. Rhodes—and I never have said this to anyone I have sentenced—you pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country.” www.americaamerica.news/p/the-ongoin...

Our government is paying our tax money to criminal sociopaths. This is malignant normality — coined by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton to describe a societal state where destructive, unethical, or fundamentally abnormal behaviors are normalized and ultimately accepted as standard practice.

We let the Confederates off the hook after the Civil War and that didn't go well either.

the version of the Confederacy i internalized growing up (mostly unbiased school, lib-leaning media, etc) was *still* a watered down sanitized version despite not even trying to be sympathetic because the actual crimes of the South were so horrifying it becomes self-censoring

a lot of the pundit class is constantly saying "what is the one liberal tenant that democrats must vigorously denounce in order to win the next election???" and the answer at the moment is "mercy"

I genuinely struggle to understand what these people think is going on

The Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of the Civil War, says in Section 4 that this is blatantly illegal: “[N]either the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

"Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly." paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-lootin...

“1.776 Billion” is a nice touch — Trolling us with fake patriotism as he steals our money and gives it to people who attacked the Capitol to end democracy for him How much will Rep. Andy Ogles get? @MarshaBlackburn?

I simply could not imagine being in congress and staying silent as Trump builds a slush fund of $1.776 (cute right… 1776) billion dollar slush fund for insurrrectionists. What are these people even there for? History will be brutal to them. And their kids will be embarrassed

shout out to joe biden and merrick garland for turning the page on january 6 instead of throwing the motherfuckers in prison like you were supposed to.

Yep. This is the best way to understand the events of the past couple weeks. They have to dispense with the artifice of principle, because the risks of Dems winning and coming to power bent on accountability are simply too great. www.offmessage.net/p/republican...

it *is* nasty work, but it’s also why the conservative senate dem position by 2028 is going to be moderate reform, and the progressive dem demand is going to be much more radical

trying not to be too screaming fire in theater-y but Louisiana v. Callais feels as consequential as Citizens United and a line in the sand

This excellent analysis lays bare that they realize they're wildly unpopular (popular agendas can achieve success through democratic means). And of course the more of this they do the more unpopular they become, so it's a treadmill and feedback loop.

"We do not really need more Democratic politicians chastising each other about the best way to massage slogans and flip maybe a handful of Trump voters. What we need, as messaging is absolutely unrelenting demands that Democratic elites use their power in office to crush fascism."

Some of you know I have a big thing about Terminator 2: "no fate but what we make." So here's the commando madonna from that epic.

WE ARE NOT DESCENDED FROM FEARFUL MEN

A thing Magyar is very good at is that civic shame is most effectively doled out through cold but blunt shows of unrestrained contempt.

Ukraine offers an interesting hypothetical for countries like America to consider: What if the government was run by people who give a shit about the country's future instead of stupid and corrupt assholes with weird racist and sexist obsessions?

Hungarian PM Péter Magyar, sworn in today and ending the Orban era: “Today, every freedom-loving person in the world wants to be a little bit Hungarian.”

Happy John Brown’s Birthday to all who celebrate.

Not a lot of fun stuff in politics but watching Orban’s defeat is fun.

Hungary’s parliament sings “Ode to Joy” — the anthem of Europe — after Péter Magyar is sworn in as prime minister. Hungary is once again a proud member of the European Union.

How it’s going How it’s going to go

Do it. You’ll be legends.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a democratizing movement in the US that *didn’t* play constitutional hardball & *didn’t* break unjust laws. That’s literally what democratization is, though it makes some people uncomfortable. If you want a democracy, you have to break the undemocratic system.

We would be a lot better off as a country at the moment if more of our institutions had said, "Fuck you, make me" over the past year and a half

My mind boggles at the people who are still saying, "But, but, the rules say...but but but...the process is..." Listen, Republicans don't care. They make shit up, bend the rules, ignore them, change them at will. Democrats have the majority in VA. Use your powers, be creative, & implement the map.

Exactly this. Supreme Courts don’t get the final word on legislation any more.

The big divide in today’s Democratic Party is not liberal-progressive or centrist-leftist. It’s fight-acquiesce.

@abigailspanberger.com now faces a career-defining moment. Is she a fighter or is she a folder? Does she have what it takes to do the right thing or is she going to retreat behind process and conservative legalism and give up?

Once when I was a kid at camp, a boy who had been bothering me pushed me into a swimming pool with all my clothes on. I got out of the pool and slapped him. He seemed incredibly surprised by this. Anyhow just thinking about that dynamic recently

"Something important is happening on the battlefields of Eastern Europe. Quietly and steadily, without much fanfare, Ukraine is beginning to reverse the strategic geometry of its war against Russian aggression." open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

It seems like a lot of news media and the financial world cant come to grips with this either. Just a fundamental inability to understand that ppl other than Donald Trump exist and have agency in situations like these.

Meanwhile Europe apparently has 3 weeks of jet fuel left.

Worth noting that historically, the Klan was strongly anti-Catholic in addition to their racism and antisemitism. Given that modern Christian nationalism has antecedents in Klan ideology, this is completely unsurprising.

The mood on the ground in Tennessee today.

Dear Corporate media: when covering Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana now drawing new congressional maps so their congressional districts are whites only please note these were all former slave states that were part of the Confederacy who waged war on the USA.

interesting, I was told that things have changed dramatically in the south

Microcosm of the horror of this post-Callais moment: the Mississippi House plans to hold its redistricting session in the Old Capitol where they seceded & instituted Jim Crow. They'll meet there aiming to erase Bennie Thompson's district — the one majority-Black district in a state that's ~40% Black

Hell yeah

conveniently those unpopular decision all seem to directly benefit the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party, as was clearly written into the text of the constitution despite the Republican Party not existing at the time