"For my next trick, I shall put my face in the mouth of a leopard!"

I'm up at Liberty Fund with an essay on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. www.libertyfund.org/250th/disagr...

"Post-Duda Poland has confronted a series of “institutional traps,” following a familiar pattern where illiberal movements design systems specifically to force successors into legitimacy crises, creating a situation in which every attempted repair can itself be portrayed as anti-democratic."

When I get cranky about not scaring people — even when things are objectively scary! — this is usually what I’m thinking about: the 2019 public-charge policy. NO ONE WAS ACTUALLY DENIED A GREEN CARD UNDER IT. ~40,000 people were scared out of applying at all. documentedny.com/2026/05/29/u...

You'll need to go for a long walk to calm down after you read how the UK got to here on trans rights. If you're only ever going to read one piece on trans people, this would be the one.

We live in a fallen world. (I'm on TikTok.) If you're also dismayed, you can instead read my essay at @liberalcurrents.com: www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-r...

Can they get in on this slush fund Trump is setting up for people treated so unfairly by law enforcement

"We're this obsequious out of our own volition."

Never 👏🏽trust 👏🏽populists 👏🏽

I am thrilled for this to come out. At @liberalcurrents.com, I work through what I had to understand about how I ended up standing where I was as the postliberal moment emerged, and I try to show the way that I found forward. It's for everyone who is where I was and needs a hand extended.

My friends are killing it today. @adamserwer.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com on the legal-political project of gutting the VRA. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

My friend @janetbufton.ca explains how a lot of right-coded liberals did not recognize—and, in too many cases, still don’t recognize—about the coalition they have been a part of at @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-r...

"We're addressing the affordability crisis and the problem of American men not being able to support families by delivering billions of dollars to salt-of-the earth working white men like him."

Opening a lucrative PR firm where for $100k I will hand my wealthy clients a note that says “stop commenting for stories like this”

"Jews and Black people" is how you say "cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers" in English.

I tried to warn everyone what the Roberts Court was about almost ten years ago www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

I was told educated, latte sipping elites were too out of touch with real America.

I wrote about how parasociality invades our political lives, from Trumpism to the KHive to Will Stancil discourse. I hope you’ll give it a read www.liberalcurrents.com/the-parasoci...

I honestly assumed it would be Bernie, and glad to be wrong about that, but one of my overarching fears with the rise/return of Trump was that the left/opposition would embrace an explicitly white blue collar politics as its guiding light. It wouldn't be the first time in our history.

To sum up: the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed to remedy a century of attempts to disenfranchise and unperson African-Americans by any possible, often through voting-related tricks and tests and barriers. They worked -- for a while. But then..../1

The rules ban all officials from wearing masks. All of them. This framing makes it appear more obviously legally problematic than it is.

I know I’ve already reposted but…Trump I demolished a global refugee resettlement infrastructure in the name of vetting. Biden, somehow, genuinely rebuilt it. Trump II hasn’t just redemolished it but made a farce of it, by building an active recruitment pipeline which is the opposite of vetting.

Just… nothing. Of course it’s reached Vietnam and Iraq levels of unpopularity in mere minutes that took other conflicts years to attain

A lot of this has been spectacular (pejorative) but we have not even begun to unpack and boy have we tried the degree to which this administration didn’t even bother trying to sell the war

It's generally unprofessional to share editorial comments, but this one I made to a younger writer I very much enjoyed making today.

I’ve seen plenty of people doing lol his brain is pudding jokes about this and, well, sure. But the fact that the sitting president is just doing virulent racism on main is pretty damn toxic for the whole country.

I make my debut at @liberalism.org, arguing that liberal principles don't to have to be separated from politics for liberalism to defend itself and thrive. In fact, they shouldn't be. Principled liberal commitments have to be paired with commitment to liberal—persuasive, democratic—politics.

My father was 37 when the VRA was passed, when the federal government finally recognized his right to vote, having already served honorably in the Coast Guard and been a police officer for almost a decade.

I know too many Trump voters and see too many confederate flags when I drive through OHIO to delude myself that my fellow mixed race sister represents the median.

There’s certainly this, but I think he may also genuinely have a rather fuzzy & childish idea of what military victory & defeat look like. He thinks if you’ve successfully blown a lot of stuff up, that means you’ve won.

The "reactionary colorblindess" of the right-wing justices has reached its logical conclusion in finding that it is racist NOT to let Louisiana—and any other state for that matter—discriminate on the basis of race in voting. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

At the end of this piece, I briefly sketch what a law to that effect should say.

There will be lots of chin-stroking columns about political violence and lowering the temperature that will studiously ignore we're still talking about the guy who had a lynch mob sack the Capitol and try to kill the vice president.

TFW you wonder if your criticism literally earned an FBI investigation

A version of this thought has been haunting me since Trump’s second inauguration

This is culturally really dangerous. Functioning societies depend on most people mostly following the rules even when they could probably get away with not doing so. That breaks down very fast once a critical mass decide that makes them saps and suckers.

"You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?"

If you don’t know about this, you need to read up. It’s the single bloodiest massacre in the history of Reconstruction, and it was perpetrated to overthrow the results of an election. It was emblematic of the sabotage of Reconstruction. And SCOTUS nullified the prosecution of those responsible.

Yep. The fact that our military occupiers are just standing around bored all day does not make them any less military occupiers of our national capital.

Wrote about how Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the upper ranks of the US military ties into the larger MAGA project to restore hierarchies of race and gender: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Living thru the worst Model UN ever

HE WENT TO YALE!

Trump was elected to wipe the trauma of the first black president from American history, a task which included scrapping the nuclear deal that had the US in a much better strategic position than before this needless, unconstitutional war of choice against Iran

Under the DOJ advisory, Trump underlings can destroy papers and records documenting executive misconduct without committing obstruction of justice, provided the generating of records is routed through White House offices. That's a temptation to election interference and other forms of misconduct.

so, he should still be removed from office as soon as humanly possible

Coming up on MSNOW at 6pm ET to talk about Trump's genocidal threats: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

A: how does racism get normalized? B: Man, I dunno. A: Oh hey look, this racist guy just made a great point! B: what else does he have to say?

Whenever someone says "there are no civilians in [country]," they are making an argument for genocide.

A terrible person being against something all decent people should be against does not make them a decent person. Correlation ≠ causation. Thank you for coming to my “Don’t Be an Idiot: for Pundits” talk

hmm, what if i told you that it wasn’t