Ross Douthat right now:

Oh my god, they were roommates.

[P] Found a higher-quality photo; IT *IS* TAPED UP SHEETS OF PAPER!

Inbox— next cover of the New Yorker: “Mayor Mamdani,” by Edel Rodriguez

good morning patriots

virginia democrats winning the three big offices with a cia agent, an indian muslim immigrant, and a black lawyer who loves committing terms of service violations is real 2025 democratic party moment

Bluesky rn

2026 Primary Woke Wave

Politicians should probably get on Bluesky to get better in touch with the American electorate.

Yeah, I've been following them since the site launched, and haven't regretted it. Folks, if you want to check the most accurate aggregator in town, fiftyplusone.news is the place to go.

I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats did not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn.

Well, well, well, how the turntables...

T minus 10 minutes.

mine eyes? seeing the glory. the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored? trampled. the faithful lighting of his terrible swift sword? buddy, you better believe that's loosed.

At this rate the 2026 Dem meta will be running dead-eyed CIA officers whose campaign ads are just them graphically describing what war crimes they will do to Republicans

ahh yeah here he comes, big a d, alan dershowitz himself, looks like he brought a bag lunch, smart

jay jones said "gilbert gets the wall" and virginians went "that's right" lol

The lads yearn for a CIA girlboss.

NEW JERSEY IS UP, FOLKS!

(Cornel West beginning eulogy) Brother Dick

I think the key difference here is resentment. MAGA is, at its core, mainly about resentment: towards the world, towards libs, towards women, towards immigrants, towards the passage of time and a thousand other things. And Sliwa, whatever his faults, doesn't strike me as a resentful guy.

You know that Andrew Cuomo is now a Republican in all but name because the media has reached the point where they're trying to present him eating shit electorally as some kind of show of force. "Andrew Cuomo won 43% of votes in the Dem primary" sounds a lot better than "He lost by 13 points".

[middle-aged white pundit begins writing another column about how there's been a culture-wide 'vibe-shift' and everyone is into nazi tradwives now and anyone who doesn't see this is stuck in an echo chamber]

It looked like another case of the Democrats saving the GOP from themselves by throwing them a lifeline, yet Dem critics on Bsky (including myself) failed to account for the fact that the GOP is now ideologically committed to the idea that lifelines are soy and gay.

You know things are going great when articles like this start popping up.

Trump is the first truly postmodern president.

Heartened by the return of one of the classic Trump bits, which is when he sways faintly and says "I'd like to see low IQ [person of color he saw on TV] try to pass the test that's regularly administered to me by medical professionals, the famous unbeatable Test To Determine Extent Of Brain Trauma,"

Gamers™-Occupied Government.

Doomers making comparison between Russia and the US really don't understand how bad things were in Russia after the fall of the USSR, and how Putin's Russia remains a vast improvement over the the state of economic armageddon Russians experienced during those days.

A lot of ppl see capitalism as the problem here, but a big part of what's going on is that the basic institutional underpinnings of real deal capitalism have come loose because the richest capitalists don't actually want to be capitalists, because that's a lot of work and a lot of risk.

Oh sweet, new man-made horrors beyond my comprehension!

As bad as things are in the US, I do think the UK has the bleakest prospects of all western democracies, as the supposedly center-left party is governing like a conservative party and the conservative has decided to adopt the immigration policy of Idi Amin (I wish I was exaggerating).

Tapping the sign once again.

I do not like the fact that even without them naming the song, I knew they were talking about Little Dark Age.

Ed Luce watching democracy die in the United States of America

Old Soviet joke: Why do ICE agents travel in groups of three? One can read, one can write, and the third keeps an eye on the two intellectuals

First Hasan, now Platner... why does the left keep falling in love with shitty nepobabies?

-Lady Æthelflæd getting to know the landed aristocracy of her holdings, 911 AD

Can we *really* be sure that Justinian wasn't actually a demon lord, though?

Those who'd sneer at outrage over the White House fancy themselves slick. Ears to the ground. They don't concern themselves with frippery when there's a war to be won. Well they don't know a goddamn thing. Symbols are powerful, and politics is a game of using them to your advantage.

Online leftists and centrist pundits fundamentally share the same view of the world, though neither side will ever admit it.

An aspect of this issue that I never see discussed is the fact that video games are the most time-consuming form of media around. You could watch all 5 seasons of Breaking Bad in the time it takes to complete a "basic" playthrough of Elden Ring.

Games are underpriced, it's true, but to me it's simply a second order consequence of a more fundamental problem plaguing the video game industry: the complete oversaturation of the market, which causes some very basic supply and demand issues.