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.

“Before we had memes, we memorized movie lines,” the lonely old Gen X man told his AI companion sitting on the porch he can only afford in virtual reality.

"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.

The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it. Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal. On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.

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

Did Trump Just Threaten to Use Nuclear Weapons in Iran? If such an order comes to pass, the military can and must refuse.

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?

Not really beating that ‘always been fascists’ rap, huh?

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

Calling my congressman and leaving a message saying “I think that you should try to stop the president from committing nuclear genocide this evening” is now how I wanted to start my day.

Trump is and has been the loud, intoxicated guy at the party who has been threatening everyone on and off all night. Now he's pulled a weapon.

He's got a lot of his people around him, but no one says anything. They could stop him, but they won't, because they are fundamentally gutless.

In a functional system, he would already have been removed

Despicable.

The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics held that you can do anything, it’s just a matter of willpower. This administration runs on the Red Lantern Theory: Any failure to achieve a geopolitical goal can be ascribed to insufficient cruelty & brutality.

Constitutional lawyer here. I don't think it would violate the Constitution for the VP/Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, but the intended constitutional remedy for this behavior is impeachment & removal. The fact that that remedy is politically impossible is a scandal and a crisis.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but usurping the power of the purse isn't just one constitutional violation among all the many others. It is, uniquely and singularly, the death of constitutional government altogether. Game over, end of story, you now live in an autocracy.

A ditch in Roseland, Louisiana, seven months after an oil facility exploded here.

JPEG of my notes app “Barnett repugnant to liberty” Wednesday No additional text

Reviewing my notes app from this week. Yep, that about sums it up.

Hegseth is certainly finding new and exciting ways to alienate his subordinates.

this is the chaplain btw. wonder why he was fired.

The Justices Don’t Buy Trump’s Citizenship Arguments The scandal is that the case got this far.

It's a relief that the Supreme Court appeared so skeptical of Trump's arguments on birthright citizenship. But it's still a scandal that the case got this far to begin with.