well I for one am shocked that "every aspect of your life gets worse forever and also look at my marble bathroom" did not turn out to be a winning election strategy

LOL.

really important element of this basically total victory is that it puts the fear of god in republican incumbents and may bring the redistricting push to a total halt

Virginia Republicans leaned hard into anti-trans propaganda as part of their main messaging in the final months of this campaign. It fell completely flat with voters. It did not resonate. Virginia Republicans came across as bizarre and detached from working class families.

Ah. So it's not just that particular Dems have to run as moderates, it's that *no Dem anywhere can do anything overtly progressive*, lest it affect the party's reputation and make it more difficult for those moderates to win. Little bit clearer what the larger project is, eh?

the actual contrast is between spanberger/mamdani (focused message, vigorous campaigns) and sherrill (unfocused, half-hearted)

Matt have you considered that what you’re doing is essentially political alchemy: hunting for a policy platform that will transform iron into gold, without considering that this platform simply doesn’t exist because that’s just not how the world works?

Mike Johnson lives in eternal innocence, a spotless mind

New awareness campaign

This is obviously frustrating and a serious problem for communicating the stakes of things, but it also really underscores how much Merrick Garland failed the country. "If Trump had tried to rig the election, he'd be in jail and unable to run again" is reasonable to think and legally correct!

Genuinely interesting conversation here with someone very level headed about migration.

Evidence keeps piling up that the incredible progress in the field of ubiquitous hyper-compelling short-form video delivery has been bad for society and deleterious to most people’s interests. www.slowboring.com/p/more-strea...

Oh it’s not appropriate for your program to air the president wearing a crown and shitting on American citizens? You’ll talk about it in euphemisms? Maybe call it the “crown video” and ignore the shitting part? Because that’s appropriate? Tell me, was it appropriate for the president to do it?

Mobilizing 7 million people is a hell of a performance and makes me feel good, I agree completely

A terf breaks through the wall like the kool aid man "I DEMAND TO KNOW HOW ALL THE POKEMAN FUCK"

North Plainfield NJ says No Kings, at least 500 people

Wisdom from Schoolhouse Rock.

Wow. Sidney Reid, the DC woman just found not guilty of assaulting an FBI agent, issues a withering and gutsy statement on Trump through her attorneys. "I feel sorry for the prosecutors really, who must be burdened by Trump's irrational and unfounded hatred for his fellow man." It's a must-read:

Look at the etiquette ppl are taught in Biz School. Punchiness, confidence, and persistent attention-grabbing are prioritized far above any sort of epistemic thoroughness, careful structuring of complex arguments, or polite but firm dissent. The lingua franca of biz has been slop long before GPT3.

White centrist Americans will never defund the police, because the police are staffed with their friends and family and also the eager Brownshirts willing to violently oppress the "others" that white America disagrees with or finds uncomfortable. They won't give that privilege up without a fight.

“No Kings” is great , but we really don't get a functioning democracy back until we internalize, bone deep, the instinctive response to this and every other statement like it: “I don’t care what that rich guy thinks.” Make it your morning affirmation. Say it ten times at the top of every hour.

It's pretty wild to me that investigators have uncovered that anti-trans campaigns are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry, and that the presumed motivations are pretty directly to redirect the public conversation away from climate change... and that this isn't bigger news.

Mamdani talking lucidly and passionately about trans rights and history in a video that should frankly shame every politician who has hemmed and hawed and triangulated and said, "Well, but sports..." It's not that hard to tell the truth and stand for what's right. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEvV...

It cannot be made clearer. If you continue to support the Harry Potter franchise in any way, you are directly funding the removal of trans people's human rights in the UK.

It really can't be said enough: the goal of the "anti-woke" movement was always to destroy social norms against bigotry. And it worked. And there's a whole lot of purportedly "left" thinkers & commentators who helped it -- indeed, it couldn't have been done without them. They should feel bad.

the sheer fucking gall of Dem politicians who now – in September 2025, as the Trump admin is taking away trans ppl's healthcare & passports & baselessly labeling us as "terrorists" – express their "concerns" about trans ppl & sports. they are trying to eradicate us! maybe be "concerned" about that!

A good one for this crowd

this from my piece on charlie kirk is probably the most important takeaway if you want to know why bad faith, right-wing voices in media are treated as just another set of peers

"To a supremacist society, most of us are acceptable losses. Charlie Kirk is not. To a supremacist society, guns are allowed to kill most of us, and the pundits can debate later how sad our deaths were. But guns were not supposed to kill Charlie Kirk." www.the-reframe.com/acceptable-l...

As others have pointed out, the idea that we can control their behavior by modeling respectability (cooperating with the compulsory grief around Kirk, for example, and not saying truthful/angry things about him) is akin to an abused person's belief that they can control the abuse by being perfect.

Hell of a piece to have written Tuesday night. My newest piece in @slate.com follows up on my August piece, looking at the right-wing anti-trans ideology and how that leads us into a rapid descent towards out and out fascism.

Thinking today of how George W. Bush went to New York shortly after 9/11 and said "the nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens," rather than something like "well, it's blue state, they didn't vote for me."

for efficiency reasons we have replaced the detectives responsible for investigating this crime with a public poll where people can vote on who they think feels the most guilty

@americanfric.bsky.social www.organicvalley.coop/blog/why-doe...

The U.S.’s largest estuary is showing signs of revival. Once written off as a dead zone, water clarity in Chesapeake Bay has improved, underwater grasses are expanding, and crab populations are steadier thanks to decades of pollution controls. Nature buff.ly/morNFth #ShareGoodNewsToo

🧵 Today, a student in office hours asked me about history he sees online and revision to historical figures. The way he phrased it, my spidey senses went off, and sure enough, he was encountering Holocaust denial Here's the article on @askhistorians.bsky.social I gave him slate.com/technology/2...

When people say "We used to drink raw milk from our own cow and it was fine," That's... usually not the case! In families w their own cow, the mom usually boiled it before using. We just forgot bc that's a boring chore that mom did. And who pays attention to that? youtu.be/vKDPast9WFk

A lesson for us all on why you should not promise the impossible to the terminally insane

This week on Amicus: Fighting Back 101 with New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who keeps beating the Trump administration in court. He has some words for the capitulating cowards, too. slate.com/podcasts/ami...

This is truly fascinating -- a quick read, too.

i honestly regard the republican party in the united states as a type of barbarian invasion. the illiterate steppe people come to knock down our temples and use our scrolls for firewood.

🌱

Today's flower is the wax begonia 'Cocktail Tequila'. Very unique foliage with a rubbery texture. They're a pain in the neck, but begonias sure do know how to do it.

It's dahlia day! These grew too fast and flopped sideways , so these blooms are coming up at ground level among the weeds. Gotta be a metaphor there somewhere.

#bloomscrolling today makes me as happy as this bee on a flower 🌱💚

These 'Hilo Beauty' took some damage from a heat wave and a hail storm, and I'm starting to think they're better off coming inside. 💚🌱

I've taken down the paywall on the Striking 13 podcast, so it now goes out to all subscribers - paid and unpaid. You can listen here. It's a feast of editorial inadequacy iandunt.substack.com/p/seven-unre...

There's a lot going on here, but I'm pretty sure it's coreopsis blooming in the middle! I scattered seeds from a wildflower packet here years ago, so I've totally forgotten whatever was in it and it's a surprise each year.