Check out my conversation from LibCon2025 with @radleybalko.bsky.social and @sykescharlie.bsky.social, in which I argue that Trump 2.0 is a focused attempt to roll back the civil rights movement, both legally and culturally. youtu.be/AGG2vYBE2BE?...
Host of the ReImagining Liberty podcast. Writing about political ethics. Radical liberal. He/him. Podcast: https://pod.link/1614436300 Writing: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AaronRossPowell
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Check out my conversation from LibCon2025 with @radleybalko.bsky.social and @sykescharlie.bsky.social, in which I argue that Trump 2.0 is a focused attempt to roll back the civil rights movement, both legally and culturally. youtu.be/AGG2vYBE2BE?...
bsky.app/profile/aaro...
Some self-described libertarians support Trump. Some self-described libertarians view Trump as the greatest threat to American liberty in our lifetimes. Here's what's causing that split. www.patreon.com/posts/two-ki...
The full review is even dumber than this paragraph makes it seem, because in the next paragraph the reviewer acknowledges that Del Toro's take is more faithful to the novel, but then gripes about how it still clashes with most people's understanding of the characters they got instead from movies.
The War of Southern Aggression has begun
it's very funny that people don't think using the app designed by a remigration fanboy doesn't shape their brains
the latter are objectively correct
this is going to sound stupid but it's entirely because we live in the era of postmodern fascism and because they wanted to post a video about them killing people for the base
The counter to MAGA is unreserved advocacy of pluralism, rights, and mutual respect. Mealy-mouthed MAGA Lite, attempts to appease—or act like they have at least a partial point—misunderstands the movement, misreads the moment, and boosts instead of challenges a Trumpist approach to politics.
We're also very physically fit and so should have no trouble outrunning his cut-rate ICE goons.
Trump's armies, should he send them in, will not be prepared for how irritating our hipsters and hippies can be.
Take a short video and ask ChatGPT.
Some self-described libertarians support Trump. Some self-described libertarians view Trump as the greatest threat to American liberty in our lifetimes. Here's what's causing that split. www.patreon.com/posts/two-ki...
At some point my children will learn to identify when water is boiling all on their own, right?
What percent of novels released in the last 30 years have had a blurb from Stephen King on the cover that's something like "This is the greatest novel I can ever remember reading, and will redefine its genre!" It's gotta be at least in the high sixties.
Trumpists what to inflict abuse on America's cities because America's cities are culturally higher status than Trump country. (Also, they're culturally and ethnically diverse, and Trumpism hates diversity.) www.patreon.com/posts/trumpi...
Denver's a good city. www.erininthemorning.com/p/denver-sch...
Stancil is very active here.
I blocked him a long time ago and it wasn't because I disagreed with the content of his opinions, but rather the caustic way they were almost invariably expressed. Got tired of seeing it in my feed.
A common pattern is someone active on X, and so subsumed by its culture, occasionally pops onto Bluesky, posts something that makes them sound like either a moron or an asshole, gets yelled at or ignored, and decides this place sucks, even though Bluesky's response to their post is appropriate.
Somewhere there's an uncharismatic dude posting ignored updates on his (now Russian owned) LiveJournal he's had for a quarter century about how LiveJournal is still where the action's at, and nowhere else anyone congregates online is as intellectually diverse and vibrant.
If your revealed politics and social preferences are far-right, but you like to say, "No, no, I'm not actually far-right, I'm still of the left," X's community will humor you in that, while culturally feeling like a better fit for you. Their anger is an expression of cognitive and moral dissonance.
Part of the anger these guys direct toward Bluesky is they still like to think of themselves as not being of the political far-right, but, through X, they've indoctrinated themselves into the far-right. Bluesky has people who call them out on that. X lets them feel more comfortably unchallenged.
This discussion isn't just an excellent introduction to the major thinkers of the contemporary far right, it also features a dive into why so many right-leaning self-described libertarians fell—and continue to fall for—their reactionary schtick.
Patreon is about to move hard into Substack's category, and with the same pricing structure. (See announcement at 37:30 here, which was snuck into a stream about podcast features ) And they don't have the ideological baggage. It'll be interesting to see what happens. www.patreon.com/posts/patreo...
This discussion isn't just an excellent introduction to the major thinkers of the contemporary far right, it also features a dive into why so many right-leaning self-described libertarians fell—and continue to fall for—their reactionary schtick.
a very high proportion of centrist punditry now just boils down to "progressives yell at me on the internet and i don't like it." you would think that getting paid millions of dollars per year would give you thicker skin
Honestly, I think a lot of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic got psyoped into viewing salt of the earth bigots as more authentic and worthy than them and thinking therefore they must ritually cleanse their sin of education by rolling in the gutter.
bsky.app/profile/tznk...
The people who are unrelentingly pickling their brains on X have gotten so damn weird.
That's odd. When I run the search with a lowercase "i" it shows up first thing. Was your search on an iPhone? (I don't have one, so I can't test that.)
If you want to understand the far-right ideologies exercising power over us, and the thinkers behind this fascist movement, today's ReImagining Liberty episode, with @mattpolprof.bsky.social, is the perfect introduction. We dig into the MAGA's primarily intellectual influences. It's grim stuff.
This was quite a good listen, including in particular @mattpolprof.bsky.social discussing the intellectual history of a lot of the far-right’s ideas. Yarvin, BAP, etc didn’t come from nowhere!
We are just (it goes to) eleven days away from the release of Spinal Tap 2.
If you want to understand the far-right ideologies exercising power over us, and the thinkers behind this fascist movement, today's ReImagining Liberty episode, with @mattpolprof.bsky.social, is the perfect introduction. We dig into the MAGA's primarily intellectual influences. It's grim stuff.
My discussion of far right ideologies for Reimagining Liberty with @aaronrosspowell.com open.spotify.com/episode/4E3r...
This with a handy QR code would be excellent.
My 12 year old son will speak of skateboarding stuff as "known in the skateboarding community," as if he is their spokesman. "It's a *culture*, dad," he'll say by way of telling me why I should let him skate in places his mom would definitely object to.
Finally reading all of 100 Bullets after reading just the first dozen or so issues back when they first came came out and it's just so damn good. Plus it's reconfirming that, yeah, Eduardo Risso is probably my favorite comics artist.
Break the police unions, put departments more fully under civilian control, make it easier to fire cops who misbehave, both to get the worst out and the provide an incentive to act better, and then perhaps require cops to have college degrees like we do with other professions, like teachers.
Come back. There are dozens of us.
For your Labor Day weekend listening, my conversation with @mattpolprof.bsky.social about how conservatism isn't so much a philosophy aimed at seeking truth, but instead at giving its adherents a false but comforting feeling of certainty. pod.link/1614436300/e...
Sorry
Even when you break it out more in line with standard generational cohorts, the pattern persists. www.aei.org/op-eds/trump...
I mean, I'm Gen X too, so I get it. And it's worth trying to figure out why Gen X went for Trump so lopsidedly. (The other explanation, at it sounds silly, but I suspect it plays at least some role, is Gen X grew up in the era of both extremely high car density and the use of leaded gas.)
Gen X supported Trump by the widest margin of any generation in both 2020 and 2024. And in 2024 it wasn't even close.
It's okay, they've got a lot of growing up left to do!
If you're of an age where what happens in Revenge of the Nerds feels perfectly fine and unremarkable to you, you're going to feel some friction with contemporary progressive social and value norms.
That Gen X is the most Trumpy and reactionary generation I suspect has something to do when being particularly invested in the cancel culture panic because Gen X grew up during the height of what we now would call problematic humor, and so they feel greater cultural alienation.
Trump is probably not on his way out right this moment. But it also seems somewhat unlikely, given his clearly declining health, he makes it the full four years.
No, I didn't mean little league
Just five days 'til football starts.
Guy who wrote a book saying his mom is a junkie slag and his people are lazy trash thinks that everyone else should be more grateful
The concept of “gratitude” in American politics is an insidious one that implies a caste system where betters confer largess upon lessers and where those lessers must consistently pay homage to their betters. And there is always an implied threat that without proper homage the largess will stop.
My cat has a strong rise and grind ethic, which is fine, and he certainly has managed to retire early and all that, but it's rather disruptive of everyone else's sleep schedule.
So the answer is still "Yes," because the question is *ever* and *a family member,* which would include a fair number of non-children.
one of the great conservative moves over the past decade has been to make themselves so unpleasant that their own family members are forced to cut them off, and then use that fact to argue that *liberals* are too uncivil
E.g., if a family member is a honest to god nazi, you shouldn't have anything to do with him.
The answer is clearly "Yes." Every one of us ought to have a line where a set of political views are sufficiently depraved that they end up on the wrong side of it. Maybe that's a line we can't imagine a family member approaching, but there clearly is one for pretty much everyone.
Our younger cat is like the sweetest guy ever and happily puts up with basically anything. Except if you follow him down the hallway, in which case he'll turn around and hiss at you every time.
Yeah, but they're getting hot meals
Is it the lighting? Or the video compression? There's a strong what looks like smoothing effect on the video. Like turning on the "touch up appearance" option in Zoom or Google Meet.
I'm legitimately curious about the use of the visual filter on this? Is it a common thing on, say, TikTok I'm unaware of?
You have to remember that Polis grew up in Boulder, and while there are plenty of people in Boulder who have genuinely health knowledge, it is also Colorado's ground zero for wellness cranks.
All my professor friends moving here has been an awfully nice perk.
If you’re a parent in North America, when would you give your child their first smartphone if you were basing your decision just on this study about cellphone initiation and mental health?
My contribution to the Bluesky discourse is that even if Bluesky never adds another active user, it's already pretty great and a fun and often rewarding place and communities don't need infinite growth to be worthwhile, and probably in fact infinite growth is bad for online communities.
We're going to have a hard time taking the institutional steps needed to move on from MAGA, and inoculate against its return, so long as centrist and center-right elites refuse to acknowledge their role in its rise. And so far they're instead largely persisting in those same behaviors.
This article draws on just one source, Rick Wilson, so maybe take the internal dynamics stuff with a grain of salt.
I have more kids than Charlie Kirk.
It's awfully nice when your podcast has a streak of every new episode getting a good deal more downloads than the one that came before it.
Listening to Good Riddance's (awesome) album "A Comprehensive Guide to Moderne Rebellion" for the first time in a long time and, man, "Last Believer" hits different today than it did in 1996. www.youtube.com/watch?v=awnt...
Hey, if you want to get notified when I publish a new essay or post a new podcast episode, go here and click "Join for free." patreon.com/AaronRossPow...
My dog refuses to walk on wet ground after it's rained. And he refuses to walk on dry ground 12 hours after it's rained, because there's always the risk it might still be wet.
Reminds me of that Woody Allen bit about immortality.
Has anyone who argues that Democrats lose when they use too much woke jargon and win when they use less woke jargon explained how Democrats won in 2020, the Year of Woke Jargon, but lost in 2024 when they used less woke jargon?
That's little league football, though
The only term (on either list) I hear my kids use is "bro," and that's from my son, and his sisters make fun of him when he says it too much.
The fertility freaks are so bad at their stated goals. If marriage is associated with MAGA and the creepiest weirdos you've ever seen, it's going to seem less attractive to young women.
Football starts just one week from today.
LinkedIn is the world’s greatest social network where it’s impossible to tell satire from earnest posts. This is a classic of the genre.
YOU - (Look at your wrist.) “It's apocalypse o' clock. Time to commence the Gloaming.”
Frank Portman of The Mr. T Experience got me into a sold out MTX show at a small bar, he played two songs at my request, and we chatted for drinks for a while before they went on. It was pretty rad.
Not to get too self-promotional, but the most recent episode of my ReImagining Liberty show is basically all about that. Both the "what's the value?" question and the "why did so many betray those values?" one. bsky.app/profile/aaro...
I mean, he was a member of Steve Sailer's Human Biodiversity Institute. And Steve Sailer's never been, shall we say, circumspect about his racism.
Being a political libertarian entails supporting the right of transgender people to openly live their chosen gender identity in peace. Self-described libertarians who believe differently are failing to adhere to their own professed philosophical beliefs.
Even there, based on my experience giving talks, attending conferences of young libertarians, etc. You get pro-Confederacy types in, say, the Mises Caucus, and they took over the LP, so they have a platform that makes them seem more widespread than they really are.
In a symposium at Liberty Fund's "Liberty Matters," I contributed this about libertarianism and trans identities and rights, in the context of a discussion about the legacy of David Boaz, one of the most important voices of libertarianism of the last 50 years. oll.libertyfund.org/publications...
I can confidently say I am quite a bit more libertarian than Charles Murray, and yes, one's gender identity is a personal choice we should respect, and libertarian first principles demand that.
My friend @aaronrosspowell.com put it well. Some people become libertarians because they saw the state as the biggest barrier to equality by enforcing artificial hierarchies. Other people became "libertarians" because they thought the state was clamping down on "natural" hierarchies.
Most libertarians, in fact, trace the birth of the American libertarian movement to the abolitionist movement. You might argue with that intellectual history, but the fact that they do cuts against characterizing them as seeing "liberty and the existence of slavery" as compatible.
As a guy who's spent 16 years in professional libertarian circles, to pin that belief on "most libertarians" is not even remotely accurate. The number of people who would self-describe as libertarian and think, e.g., "Actually the Confederacy was okay" vanishingly small.
I don't think it's about saying, "You don't need to be successful." It's about acknowledging that "success" needn't look like what a lot of men are being told are the only sorts of "success" that matter, or are worthy for men to pursue.
A big part of the story of "How did we get here?" is that, for years, quite a lot of men, both powerful and not, pounded the table demanding "meritocracy" because they imagined they'd be at the top of it, and then discovered that, to their horror, that actual meritocracy doesn't privilege them.
This is a very important important point. These are the window dressings of authoritarianism. They can't command your respect. You should take what they're doing seriously, but you should never treat them as serious people. Mockery is fatal to this sort of project.
Remember that @mattpolprof.bsky.social is the fucking man when it comes to unpacking the deep roots and manifestations of illiberal ideologies. If you are scared or afraid listen to this man and read his work to discover how to combat oppression with a sharp mind and heart and not just anger.