Just my luck that all the progressive DSA-backed candidates I found most annoying or wrongheaded seem to have won their primary campaigns this cycle; whereas I was finally starting to warm to Francesca Hong in Wisconsin—and now she's the only one that's lost.
Hong was an interesting case since she seemed to get backlash from all sides.
"Moderates" and party establishment types predictably warned that her views were too far left to win a general election—and perhaps they're right about that.
The New York Times's new reporting today on the administration's lawless renditions to Eswatini has to be seen to be believed.
I have known for at least a year that the administration is kidnapping and deporting people to secret prisons in war-torn autocracies in Africa—effectively a form of enforced disappearance.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night after a particularly vivid dream—probably the result of eating too much pizza at dinner (melted cheese being understood since Victorian times to be a source of intense dreaming—most likely for lactose intolerance reasons).
In the dream, Donald Trump had just taken over the organization where I work, and was now serving as CEO. I guess he was paying an in-person visit for some sort of team-building exercise, because we were all seated outside around a conference table. Trump had a personal calendar open before him, and was trying to rally the troops.
He seemed to be confused about why team morale had been so low since his takeover.
You'd think just reading a mainstream newspaper would be enough on its own to make one acquainted with the depths of depravity in the Trump administration. But sometimes, one catches a glimpse of the alternative media ecosystem in which the American MAGA right lives, and one sees that the abyss is even deeper than one could have imagined.
Today, for instance, I was trying to look up news reports about the TPS designation for Somalia, when I stumbled upon a press release from some evangelical group. They were applauding a MAGA representative for drawing up articles of impeachment against Judge Allison Burroughs for daring to pause Trump's termination of Somali refugees' legal status under the TPS program.
A recent article in the Intercept reports that the Pentagon has begun to use overt references to scripture in its online recruiting. One recent ad from the U.S. military prominently features the phrase "Send Me" over images of soldiers gearing up for battle.
And if this sounds ambiguous to most of us, a Pentagon spokesperson went on to quote a full passage from Isaiah that uses the phrase; and the official "Department of War" accounts reportedly re-shared that post in turn.
Leave it to the Trump administration to eliminate any shade of subtlety.
Ross Douthat published his swan song at the New York Times yesterday—his final column for the paper before heading off into the sunset of Bari Weiss–controlled media. It was a fitting capstone to his career at the Times, in that it summed up a central motif of much of his writing there: namely: I'm not sure who's right, but I know I'm mad about it.
For years, Douthat has been telling us that, as a conservative Catholic intellectual, he is against liberalism.
But he also knows that most of the illiberal alternatives on offer are not rationally or morally defensible.
In a podcast interview earlier this week about the current populist backlash against AI data centers, Jasmine Sun and Ezra Klein started off by trying to explain what it is like to actually live in the vicinity of one of these facilities. "What do they sound like?" Klein asked. Sun replied: "they sound like humming, buzzing, whirring."
B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R!
What are the machines saying, a hundred of them in one long room?
They must be talking to themselves, for I see no one else for them to talk to.
