Everyone rage posting responses to this speech are still (after 10 years... still!) missing the point: this is the winning posture for him. He doesn't care who he's talking to here; he really only cares about the masses who will spend 30 seconds looking at the soundbites for entertainment.

So the rapture DID happen and IS STILL going. As always, it’s in the form of $$$$$$ departing gullible evangelical wallets and ascending onto financial/crypto clouds.

💯 this. Yes, gerrymandering accounts for some of the hopelessness in red states, but the biggest issue by far for Dems - speaking as a 10-yr resident in INDIANA - is really weak pools of candidates and underinvestment in recruiting by the DNC in those states.

This would be a good time for the @billgates.bsky.social @gatesfoundation.bsky.social to step in and actually fund some vital local institutions

A great human. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/m...

As we discuss Westphalia, sovereignty, & international & global orders within & beyond the West this week in #IIRLeiden2025 I highly recommend this ISR podcast w @aysezarakol.bsky.social (interview by @hbanai.bsky.social ) on her excellent "Before the West" book isrb.podbean.com/e/in-convers...

If you're in the Claremont area on Tuesday... www.cmc.edu/athenaeum/ir...

I’ve lost the will to comment on anything having to do with Trump, Vance, and the rest of their regime. There has to be a better way of testifying to these bleak times.

This tactic - pressuring corporations financially until they put a regime friendly voice in charge - is exactly how Orbán took over the free press in Hungary

A useful lens for thinking about how growing inequality has affected American life. A dozen other essays could easily be written as variations on this theme (e.g., how baseball parks used to accommodate many more fans at cheaper prices with fewer frills, etc.).

The civility/discourse case against polarization has always been silly. The posited society-wide discussion has always been imaginary. The more serious claim, common among scholars of backsliding, is that hyper-polarization harms *democratic competition* by eroding willingness to cede power.

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW! Today’s epic political trial is the one that should have been the end of Adolf Hitler but ended up being the making of him: his treason trial in 1924 for the Beer Hall Putsch. What were the missed opportunities to silence him once and for all? Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.

A masterclass on how to abuse analogies with smugness and cant. on.ft.com/45WSHAd Manchester United: lessons from the fall

Couldn't agree more with this from @brianbeutler.bsky.social er.bsky.social. Intra-left factional debates are, for the most part, a political luxury good. A lot of these arguments feel like passengers on the Titanic discussing the best way to build a ship.

Friends, please notice what a little redistricting/ voter suppression can do to election results.

Just pause and contemplate this audiovisual. How utterly unconcerned with any checks to your agency must be to wear a hat like that, utter those words without any hint of caution, and to generally genuflect disregard for anyone but yourself.

For many of us working at IU the start of the new academic year next week will be like working at a new institution, one transformed, weakened, and disfigured by right wing agendas at multiple levels. My friend and colleague Jeff Isaac explains www.indystar.com/story/opinio...

Bill Burns: "If intelligence analysts at the CIA saw our rivals engage in this kind of great-power suicide, we would break out the bourbon. Instead, the sound we hear is of champagne glasses clinking in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Every time I see Vance bullshitting with such ease on TV my mind instinctively goes back to Tim Walz’s disastrous debate with him and how the election probably got decided right then and there

With every new video out of the Oval Office now comes a new gold-colored piece that wasn't there before

As someone who worked press for dozens (hundreds?) of high-stakes diplomatic summits & meetings, rule #1 is that you don't do a press conference before you have something (ANYTHING!) to announce. It is insane that POTUS didn't even announce another meeting. Putin got his summit, we got nothing.

We will never hear the truth about the one on one conversation between Trump and Putin.

You need Mamdanis at the local level and Newsomes at the national level tonget the blood flowing again. I frankly don’t care much for any nitpickers at this stage.

This is no great insight, but actually one of the cardinal flaws in the Marxian tradition

A president and political party that intended to abide by future election results might ask “But if the other side wins and uses these powers against us and our supporters one day?” They don’t worry about the flip side because they don’t intend to give power up ever again.

Incredible that so much damage is being done on the basis solely of “a kind of libertarianism that abhors political correctness.” The unexamined life is worth a living for these people. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/u...

The normalization of these images is the point.

Chapter and verse 👇🏽

might as well get it over with and appoint Amy Wax dean of the law school

Yet another NYT piece on this glad people are realizing that deep suspicion and misunderstandings about SFA v Harvard (affirmative action) are a huge driver of the attack on universities www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/u...

In substance and style, the regime change underway in Washington is the ultimate consequence of that war of choice in 2003

Got a book you all are going to love, just a few weeks now until it's available press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

I wrote about just war theory and how it applies to the ongoing devastation in the war in Gaza: www.forkingpaths.co/p/just-war-t...

Always read @arashtehran.bsky.social

Brown's liberal, open curriculum taught me higher ed wasn't just career prep but reading the great books and learning to be a good citizen My alma mater's heartbreaking capitulation to the Trump regime makes me wonder if my dream was a mirage A personal new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

A very detailed investigation into Iran's nuclear procurement network on.ft.com/4mOa3WX

Indiana news. Not of the good variety

Some words of inspiration for those of you prepping to teach at the end of the world: “What is your excuse to lay down tools? If the work matters, it matters most when it is hardest.” musgrave.substack.com/p/prepping?u...

“I think we’re looking at 10-15% of stations — that’s a speculative number — might fall out of FCC compliance, meaning they can not afford to maintain their license. So we’ll see shutdowns. It will disproportionately affect Indigenous communities…”

You know, he just has a volatile side is all…

Doing this by rescission is really rubbing salt in the wound - Congress had already approved two more years of funding! And then they took back money that had already been appropriated just because Trump asked them too. Shameful.

Terry Moran: "I wish all my former colleagues in the legacy media all the best in the coming years. And I wish all of us, here in these newer, freer, untamable media spaces strength and good cheer. There is so much work to do." terrymoran.substack.com/p/rip-cbs?ut...

Really ashamed of my doctoral alma mater

Sure; but I think he’d be surprised that in 2025 he’s be able to use dead and dying Palestinians as pawns in advancing his antisemitic white nationalist agenda.

Happy 90th birthday to the publisher that gave us the paperback and the best darn logo in publishing! @penguinbooksusa.bsky.social @penguinrandomhouse.bsky.social

"Howell wrote, 'If a professor is too much of a wimp to let me read his syllabus then he’s in the wrong business.' When asked to provide a list of donors to the Oversight Project, Howell responded, 'And no of course I’m not sending you a list of donors but please do send donors to our website.'”

Grim subject but wonderful to talk to my former student about IU and more.

‘Power is surely the greatest moral problem that human beings face, and is important above all in monarchical, courtly, political tragedies like “Hamlet”: this of course gives the play its mysterious third line, “Long live the king!”’ Barbara Everett on ‘Hamlet’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Straight out of your run of the mill Hollywood cartoon villain script