JD Vance is doing the Reichstag Fire the right way. by Ezra Klein
JD Vance is doing the Reichstag Fire the right way. by Ezra Klein
In all seriousness, Vance’s unhinged diatribe really reminds me that this country is in dire straits. I can’t even wrap my mind around how bad things are and how impossible everything feels. How are we supposed to stay here and write and stay like… alive?
I think the think about the propaganda push around Charlie Kirk that I find most unsettling is that the whole strategy of raising the salience of this guy's death kind of depends either on hoping no one finds out about his life or assuming the ideological gloss will hold up under that scrutiny
It’s really funny that you can amass hundreds of billions of dollars, and still Be desperately uncool and dull. I know that’s gotta hurt.
The New Athiest dudes in my circle turned out to be much worse anti-feminist and bigots than the liberal leaning Lutherans in my family.
"sorry about the whole concentration camp thing. if you come back we pinky swear we'll be normal"
My Fox news watching Grandma born in Nazi Germany has said things like this many times. Their viewers are unfortunately of the same belief.
I am pretty certain Cheneworth is MAGA.
Trump has made this far worse, but it goes back before Trump, as I wrote in 2019. foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/21/a...
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
I have written and deleted a lot of posts but I keep thinking about how the brutal assassination of Minnesota State senator Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark, and their beloved dog Gilbert in June did not prompt this same level of calls for empathy, sympathy, and flags at half-mast.
"We are all afraid for our lives ... We urgently need help."
For my theory money: Credentialing of bodies, credentials as bureaucratic proof of state’s power to kill, himpathy, and class solidarity.
After Paris, the IPCC justified the expansion of the fossil-fuel system by implicitly promising that we could "overshoot” 1.5C yet ultimately meet the target anyway. What does this mean? Read my deep dive into Andreas Malm & @wimcarton.bsky.social's *Overshoot* lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...
I feel like the epitome of Good Feminist Criticism was probably bell hooks nailing J.K. Rowling to the wall in 2004
civility is when a white guy calls for minorities to be eliminated in a calm voice while wearing an expensive suit
people always say "don't give them an excuse" and i always say "they'll just make one up"
a question I often find myself asking these days: "are these the moves of a movement that feels that it's winning or one desperately afraid that it's about to lose everything?"
The fact that Matthew Dowd lost his job for pointing out Charlie Kirk’s hate speech, while Brian Kilmeade openly suggests we should euthanize the homeless and there is zero outrage, shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.
This is the apotheosis of what I've called "the concentration camp tendency": the politically generated drive to remove from society and even murder whole groups deemed undesirable.
I wrote about Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
"Would it really threaten the global ruling class if the world phased out fossil fuels? The answer to this question—Malm and Carton’s exegesis of the wealth lost if we stopped using coal, oil, and gas—lies at the core of Overshoot." lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...
every time I see a notable media person say something odd about the notable person who was killed this week, I remember how working at CJR taught me many white journalists find it easier to sympathize and empathize with right wing individuals than non-white journalists they actually work with
Reactions like this are why I wrote my article. I presented his comments IN CONTEXT, and provided tons of receipts. Charlie Kirk was not a civil person. www.erininthemorning.com/p/we-must-no...
People are marching from Philadelphia to Washington, DC to demand an end to corruption & authoritarianism, and to ensure liberty and justice apply to all—not just the wealthy, white or well-connected. Follow them at @weareamericamarch.bsky.social and learn how you can join at weareamericamarch.com.
I learned a lot about some folks this week. Whew.
Without question. Shout out to the women this week. Just…shout out to yall.
Watching all these centrist pundits stress the “civility” of Charlie Kirk’s style without addressing the ugliness of his substance is giving me a renewed appreciation of how the civil, polite White Citizens’ Councils conned the same crowd into thinking they were distinct from the cruder Klan.
New, from me: It was a terrible week, one that inspired some truly awful takes. The worst was the effort by Bari Weiss and The Free Press to smear universities as "the biggest culprits" to blame American political violence, with faculty training "jihadis." donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-worst-...
At dinner, my dad and I sat next to a couple on a date and truly, straight women are soldiers. This man never stopped talking. Just monologuing, saying factually incorrect things, and complaining about lawn mowing even though he works out daily. It was so bad my dad remarked on it!
It's bleak, but so necessary.
Underpaid prof says ordinary prof things (w/ nuance, attention to context, appropriate caveats, etc), gets recorded w/out consent, gets "outed," and maybe threatened and/or fired. Meanwhile, talking head influencer dudes spout endless incendiary falsehoods and get cabinet positions. Fun times.
I wrote about how the assassination at Utah Valley wasn’t treated like a campus story … until it was. And what that tells us about how the Trumpist right uses campus stories. open.substack.com/pub/adrianda...
waco, ruby ridge, and countless abortion clinic bombings and shootings notwithstanding.......
Gay mediocrity.
How it started. How it’s going
Watching the cable news commentary on the bullet engravings is wild because none of these people seem to realize that the content of the engravings are indicative of extremely online meme brain rot
one of the things that was most jarring about being undercover in nazi chatrooms for my book was how often violent videos were posted in the channels. executions, murders, blood. purposeful desensitization to violence can be detached from ideology and just entail inurement to the sight of death
Bari Weiss’s Free Press is blaming universities for a shooting that was done by someone who attended one semester at the university. Weiss is making campuses across the country less safe. And will do so with the weight of CBS behind her.
SUVs and overly large trucks are deadly vehicles and their insurance rates should reflect that.
the person behind this unhinged, anti-factual editorial is set to decide coverage at one of the nation’s major news networks
Must read www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...
New Mexico's economy is a fraction of the size of New York City's. If they can enact universal childcare — and relieve working families of a crushing cost burden — surely we can too. It's just a question of political will.
Well—AGAIN—what you are seeing is White supremacy at its finest. They can say any dehumanizing thing to you that they want but you are required to love them & to be frightened to speak out. & then the so-called progressives leave the progressive fold, join the White supremacists & shun you.
luigi mangione murdered a healthcare executive and opposed "wokeism." i don't know why people insist that killers need some coherent ideology. most people don't even have coherent wardrobes, let alone a coherent worldview.
"In a sane nation, our most visible figures and venerable institutions wouldn’t be attempting to canonize a man who made his name spewing hate and laundering fascist talking points."
From ‘The Onion’ Editorial Board:
This is class solidarity. In case you’re at all confused.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Which is the most sinister arrow you can use to indicate your connection to The Transgender Community? I think the most transgender arrow is "Detour" but I'm not sure
Sat alongside a former neighbor as we each awaited prescriptions at CVS. She wanted to know what I thought of the assassination and if I thought he was really a racist. I was saved when my name was called before I could muster a response. I thought then of something I learned from Keguro Macharia 1/
This also counts as political violence.
Everything is bleak but a dear communist I love just saw Hamilton for the first time and the commentary is legendary.
Worldwide, about 140 women are murdered each day for their belief that they should not be subjugated to violent domination by the men in their lives. That’s about one murder every 10 minutes. Do these murders of women by men count as “political violence”?
Empathy is an Ideology: Or, Who is culturally pathologized by the ideology we call empathy? by Jade E. Davis, PhD is something I think about every time the topic of empathy comes up jadedid.com/blog/2019/11...
Don't sleep on the chance that the Ellisons could, in a year or two, own CBS, CNN, HBO, *and* TikTok. That'd be *literally* unprecedented media concentration in U.S. history — and all that's needed is enough Trump ass-kissing to ensure he doesn't get mad and sic Brendan Carr on him.
also weird: widespread tendency to apply the term “political violence” only to acts of violence committed by non state actors.
The evil that men do lives after them
Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah raises new questions about Zohran Mamdani’s approach to law enforcement.
Witnesses Assumed Charlie Kirk Shooter Was Just Ordinary Gunman On School Campus
Mainstream media ought to be ashamed of itself today.
I guess this is just "practicing politics the right way"
I ignored the murder of Melissa Hortman. Here’s why I’ll be talking about the murder of Charlie Kirk all day today. by most liberal pundits
Questioner: “So, if you had a daughter and she was 10 and she got raped, and she was gonna give birth, and she would gonna give birth, would you want her to go through that and carry her baby?" Kirk: “The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.” www.news18.com/world/charli...
For example, when men demand empathy but only women are socialized to have empathy, it becomes a demand for accommodation.
I said something last week that is more broadly applicable today: Calling for empathy is not neutral or apolitical when only one group of people have been socialized and brutalized into having empathy.
Truly bizarre to see people attacked, shamed, and disciplined for saying things about Charlie Kirk that are 1000x less offensive than what Charlie Kirk said about people
It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker- Martin for exercising free speech and then @bsky.app suspended her account. Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.
There has been a rush among centrists like Gavin Newsom and Ezra Klein to brush over the hateful life of Charlie Kirk and valorize the man. Let me be clear, killing Charlie Kirk was wrong and abhorrent. We must condemn murder without sanitizing a man who built his empire on hate. My latest piece.
The film cites several male documentarians and it's just so weird to not cite two women (see also Sontag) who have had such a huge influence on the destroying of the myth of Riefenstahl as innocent.
I tried asking him about the film's relation to Nina Gladitz's initially banned 1981 documentary, which also addressed Riefenstahl's presence at the massacre in Poland and the Roma extras, and he just totally ignored the question.
Being nice to the people who want to hurt us won’t stop them from hurting us, people know this, right?
to my mind the woman who dies of sepsis because of antiabortion laws, or the person who dies because they can't afford insulin -- these are just as much victims of political violence as the man shot through the throat while making a racist speech
Some people really in they feelings about Great Value Bill Buckley huh
I knew the punditry would be embarrassing today but my goodness. It's way worse than I expected.
It would be pretty awesome for every professor in Texas to talk about how there are more than two sexes in class today. They can pick you off one by one. But they can’t fire all of you at once. Solidarity is the only way through this.
Political violence like stripping half the country of bodily autonomy and full citizenship and letting us bleed out to secure white patriarchal power or like something else
anyone offering up hagiographies of kirk is a poltroon of the first water. mouthing pieties about that hatemonger is just absolutely vile
Wow, my largely anecdotal impression is that there's sadly been a Keith revival with Gen Z.
also on the subject of political violence
found something more annoying than people who play loud videos on their phones in public: people who play two seconds each of hundreds of loud videos in public
A domestic abuser, groomer, and misogynist creep all in one photo.
The excuse of "well, it's difficult to fire a tenured prof" is also bs. I knew of NTT creeps being renewed yearly. There was even a parttime language assistant at my first job who spent months masturbating in front of undergrads in the SLAC library, and they didn't get rid of him.
Being a feminist can get you fired; being a sex pest will get you preserved in perpetuity.
One of the things that I learned while researching On the Wrong Side is how campus gun violence is a much bigger problem than mass shootings—especially in red states where a lot of students keep guns in the dorms or bring them to class. The victims are primarily women in abusive relationships.
Coming soon to your favorite podcast: @inbedwiththeright.bsky.social
Q: What has more than doubled since 2017? A: U.S. subsidies to the fossil fuel industry (tax breaks, lower rates to acquire land, direct appropriations, and other financial support from the US) that all together allow the sector to receive stunning 30,000% ROIs www.theguardian.com/environment/...
i guess the real message is don't fuck around with etsy witches www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some...
Apropos of nothing, here's a thread of some Charlie Kirk highlights
Which work? Calling for gay people to be stoned to death? Blaming airplane crashes on black pilots? Anti-vax bullshit? Election denialism? Pushing Great Replacement Theory? Kirk’s murder is awful and ominous for this country. But no, we don’t need to honor him or “continue his work.”
Charlie Kirk called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake.”
Like all conservatives, Charlie Kirk thought random politically-motivated violence was hilarious and awesome as long as it was against people he hated. We are simply commemorating him in a manner he would appreciate, in accordance with his beliefs and values.
Charlie Kirk, one of the leading proponents of anti-LGBTQ and nationalist policies in the United States, has reportedly been shot in Utah.
Remarkable last words: Audience member: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years? Kirk: Too many Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years? Kirk: Counting or not counting gang members?
"This tech isn't going away!" "This is inevitable!" "Adapt or get left in the dust!" are all things we're being told by the same people who were telling us you're going to need a blockchain dingus to unlock your front door two years ago.
that man reaped the whirlwind
I think of all the professors whose lives his watchlist ruined; who felt targeted, surveilled, and unsafe; whose love of the job of teaching was hampered because of this ideological war against higher education.
One of the many bitter pills to swallow is that there will be not one single consequence for Jerry Seinfeld basically complimenting the KKK and equating them to the phrase Free Palestine. There will be little, if any, media pushback. It’s terrible.
I find it sad. What a flat, boring world without language learning. (If it actually works.)