Good arguments here from Bacon. To add: Main thing I want to see from candidates is the willingness to build and foster year-round organizing that has a chance of delivering systemic change, like Obama tried with OFA. Pretty sure @aoc.bsky.social would do that despite lots of opposition.

Great piece that matches my view substantively. Articulated from my more pro-rational choice perspective: MVT is a theory with assumptions. The problem isn’t MVT but that people don’t know the assumptions, how uncertain they are, or their implications. It’s like Econ 101 supply and demand.

Exactly. "The entire debate—moderate versus progressive, centrist versus left, abundance versus populism, whatever you’d like to call it—constitutes an elite discourse largely disconnected from how most voters actually reason about politics." www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

This is a long and infuriating read. share.inquirer.com/4Pt2vm [gift link]

Exactly. As historians who study Cold War science and social science have demonstrated time and again, the US system of mass higher education built private funding and private funding priorities into the very structure of higher education.

Remind me again why even democratic administrations have gone out of their way to allow this company to accumulate billions of tax payer dollars and insinuate itself into multiple aspects of governance?

This is literally how white supremacists 50 years ago saw the world. They even set up hobbit campus for indoctrinating you white kids into hate.

If we want people to criticize the government of Israel without attacking all Jews worldwide (and we should want that!), the flip side is that pro-Israel people have to stop cynically claiming that people who were very careful only to criticize the Israeli government were actually attacking "Jews."

By the way, the belief that Israel has committed genocide is a belief held by 4 in 10 American Jews - higher than the percentage of American Jews who identify as Zionists. (Sources: www.timesofisrael.com/poll-nearly-... www.jta.org/2026/02/05/u...)

She didn't accuse Jews as a people of committing genocide, though. She accused the government and the military of the state of Israel of doing so. People reporting it this way are trying to make a conflation that AOC herself was careful not to make.

Basically how the entire US media treats anti Arab and anti Muslim sentiment

Oh wow, YOUR enemies actually really are uncivilized savages incapable of self-rule? You actually didn't even want to take over their country and expropriate all their land? It's for their own good? Wow, I didn't know that. You're telling me for the very first time.

AOC running for President is a better choice for her than Senate because you can run for President and keep your House seat if it doesn't work out.

So, what DID the Mellon Foundation fund with their >$5,000,000 they have given CCNY? Did they force “woke” agendas on a department that had already been facing cut after cut, less classes, lower enrollment, less tenured track professors, therefore worsening the problem? Lol of course they didn't.

I am guessing that Tyler doesn’t have an issue with The Michael and Irene Ross Program in Jewish Studies (and he shouldn't, it is a great program), even though its donors have given double the amount the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave to CCNY’s Humanities department.

Unsurprisingly, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the second largest donor to the City College of New York’s Humanities department. The largest, however, was Michael Ross, who gave $10,000,000 to create the Jewish Studies program at CCNY, and operate it basically in perpetuity.

Beyond that, the biggest recipient of private funding is the Engineering school. Which is also the biggest recipient of federal money (at least until recently but federal cuts are a whole other story) AND state money. So… where does that leave Humanities?

For example, the CCNY's “Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership” receives much more funding than the Humanities department, but even that school’s money ends up funding increasingly flashy programs, while actual Social Science courses and positions are constantly on the cutting block.

I work at the City College of New York, a public college that is part of the City University of New York system. We are very fortunate, that even as a public college, that we receive a lot of private funding. But, private funding is very often restrictive. It is also never enough.

🗃️ Tyler Austin Harper’s insane Andrew Mellon Foundation hit piece, which of course @theatlantic.com was happy to print, has rightfully pissed off everyone in the Humanities. As someone who works in higher education funding, here is a 🧵 on why this article is even more infuriating than you think.

You know how, all throughout the Epstein files, it’s people singing his praises because he “gave” to MIT, or directed someone to donate to a college or philanthropy? Well, yeah, that’s a huge part of the world we have created. It’s not just the Humanities too, it’s everything.

"Elon Musk is a white supremacist" is an objectively 100% true statement that most mainstream outlets wouldn't allow to be said without hedging or qualification even in an opinion piece.

from the perspective of someone who might want to be president, the best time to run for the white house is now, not later. so if AOC is thinking about it — if the white house is her ambition — then her best bet is to throw her hat in the ring

Hungary holds elections in 2 months. And the US Secretary of State is in Hungary campaigning for Viktor Orban. And as you can see, Russian state media loves it.

The Nespresso machine is cool, convenient, and functional and never did Mr. Nespresso declare he was going to make baristas extinct, there’s a lesson there for the current tech people

One of the ironies of the attack on American Studies is that it consolidated as a field during the Cold War, when many of its academic promoters and financial benefactors saw it as an effective soft power weapon in that ideological battle.

The biggest problem with "popularism" is that its advocates don't fully internalize how much poll question framing can distort measurement. They also don't get that if having unpopular views stopped you from winning, Republicans would never win elections. Many people do not vote based on policy.

My theory of the moment: The extraordinary courage of ordinary people in places like Minneapolis is reawakening us to our social and economic ties to immigrants. It's making "love thy neighbor" cool again. That's the ultimate antidote to MAGA hate. Thoughts on this: newrepublic.com/article/2059...

For my newsletter, I wrote about "heritage Americans" and the real meaning of nationhood. publiccomment.blog/p/the-great-...

If I had to bet on the main thing that has radicalized people against "ai," and I am talking about the way that branding is CURRENTLY BEING USED, not whatever specialized ML utility you may have found for it, it would be in apps and tech they already use being made worse and/or inoperable by it

average european conflict over the past 1000 years is like “[french king] declares war on [french king] over claim to [italian speaking territory] based on their shared great great grandparents. both raise army of peasants consisting of 30 mutually unintelligible dialects

The lesson here is to have a communications strategy that simply ignores pushback from bad faith actors and doesn’t come up with messaging that attempts to preempt these clowns unhinged accusations.

Look I have thick skin, and I know we are hated, and yet this statement still makes my breath catch. What kind of society allows for this sort of thing to be said

(there is something very funny also about Rubio adopting a late 18th century european chauvinist’s contempt for ‘creole’ peoples. like, dude, you’re *cuban*)

(put another way, weird to say, as Rubio does, that Europe produced “the genius…of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” who were self-consciously playing music rooted in the traditions of the African diaspora.)

interesting to think that revolutionary era americans understood themselves as making a break with the “old world” and establishing a new civilization. and crucially, this new civilization rested on republican self-government, not “sovereignty.”

This is your regular reminder that the idea that Christianity is a thing uniform beliefs that everyone within “Western Civilization” believed and agreed on is a fiction that just ignores centuries of Christians killing each other and fighting literal wars over their different beliefs.

i think you can judge how free - or not - our political media is by the fact that elon musk literally did a sieg heil (twice) at a rally and it’s still seen as uncouth and overly partisan (in legacy media) to describe his politics as straightforwardly white supremacist.

"When Musk & Hegseth argue that a racially diverse nation is inherently weak, they're not returning us to some long-established American tradition from which we've recently strayed. They are, instead, parroting the exact same propaganda that Nazi Germany promoted against America during WW II."

We must speak plainly about the agenda Elon Musk & other MAGA leaders are pushing. It’s white nationalism. There’s no room for Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, Native, Jewish or all other Americans in Musk’s monocultural vision. Multiculturalism is superior. We can’t allow Musk & others to end it.

New fusionism: “Citing their work, Brockman predicted in 2005 that the “dangerous idea of the next decade” would be that “groups of people differ genetically in their average talents”.” ht @libankerdc.bsky.social www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

The ‘Black people don’t tip’ thing isn’t even true. What’s happening is that you’re getting Read. We see you. Our inklings are survival mechanisms. Why the fuck would I throw an extra bone to a racist? It’s like how if everybody you meet is an asshole eventually you gotta start doing the math.

This message from the US State Department about "not wanting allies to be shackled by guilt and shame" is a pretty direct call-out to the German far-right argument that Germany has spent too long feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and needs to move on and stop doing remembrance.

I hadn't heard this shit until now and finding out Platner was all in on "black people don't tip" makes way too much sense. And it's a huge red flag for anyone who works in hospitality because it's not true. Everyone who's worked behind the stick knows who undertips and it's not the black community

She is so insistent on Heathcliff being white bc she clearly can't imagine fancying a brown man. And even adds a scene to confirm he just has a tan 🫠 She erases all mention of him as a "gypsy". Meanwhile the villain is an East Asian woman & the cuckold, undesirable husband is a brown man...

I imagine Musk is trying to say “Scots-Irish” (i.e. Ulster Protestant planters, not Irish Catholics), but who knows what really goes on in his ketamine-soaked cream cheese brain except straight-up racist nonsense motivated by whatever desperate, howling need propels his stupid maunderings.

Where are the Daughters of the Confederacy, with their multi-generational family trees, to stand up to that interloper?!? Where are the White Diaspora wars when you need them?? 💀 💀

Honestly. It don't get no fresher than this.

another guy who never protested before radicalized to the point of tears by watching masked ICE agents terrify children in his neighborhood the Republicans are not ready or mentally capable of comprehending the backlash they have generated