Chris Elder

Ah, the sad irony of it…

A year of hate: what I learned when I went undercover with the far right The long read: Working for Hope Not Hate, I infiltrated an extremist organisation, befriended its members and got to work investigating their political connections

Chummy people with abhorrent views - I’ve known people like this. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ap...

They Dreamed of Hitler A newly reissued book documents the dreams of Germans living under the Nazis, charting totalitarianism’s power over the subconscious.

What are your dreams telling you as authoritarianism takes hold in the US? www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

All right, I’m gonna break my no-all-caps rule: LISTEN TO THIS. The journalism we need now.

‘The Interview’: Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World The Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer talks about burnout from covering the pandemic and how bird-watching gave him a new sense of hope.

On the cutting room floor is the bit where the host introduced their interview series, The Interview, and I asked how long it took to come up with the name. Anyway, here’s me talking about birds and science and burnout and moving through the world. The photo’s nice! www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/m...

This kind of hard hitting in-depth reporting is why I'm proud to be a monthly supporter of the @texasobserver.org

Join: texasobserver.org/join

ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X Account The Observer has identified the operator of “GlomarResponder,” an overtly racist social media account, as ICE Assistant Chief Counsel James Rodden, based on an overwhelming number of biographical deta...

Wow. James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor in Dallas, ran an anonymous X account that posted: "America is a White nation."

NC peeps, take note: He graduated from Wake Forest University Law School and worked in the federal public defender's office in Greensboro.
www.texasobserver.org/ice-prosecut...

‘This is a coup’: Trump and Musk’s purge is cutting more than costs, say experts In slashing staff and disabling entire agencies the administration is lacerating the structures of US democracy

‘This is a coup’: Trump and Musk’s purge is cutting more than costs, say experts

One of my favorite all-time movie scenes: youtube.com/watch?v=kCXT...

My appreciation for Snoop Dogg is over.

Indie Bookstores Will Soon Be Able to Sell E-Books to Customers Bookshop, a site that lets independent, bricks-and-mortar bookshops sell their books online, is launching an app that will allow the sales of e-books, too.

Ah good, a way to move away from Amazon’s Kindle! www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/b...

Opinion | If Kennedy Is Blind to Science, Why Entrust Him With Our Health? (Gift Article) When we face some risk of a bird flu pandemic, do we want to entrust our health to a man who has fought lifesaving vaccines?

In the early 2000s, RFK Jr was doing great work as an environmental lawyer taking on industrial hog farms, and we talked about going to NC together to document the problems. Then he started crazy talk about vaccines. My column on the threat he poses: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/o...

Opinion | Trump and Stupidity I define stupidity as ignoring the question: What would happen next? By that definition, the Trump administration has produced volleys of it.

David Brooks, one of the few rational conservatives, on stupidity: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/o...

Trump Blames D.E.I. and Biden for Crash Under His Watch President Trump’s remarks, suggesting that diversity in hiring and other Biden administration policies somehow caused the disaster, reflected his instinct to immediately frame major events through his...

Classy… www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/u...

Starlings swoosh like brushstrokes across the sky in this dazzling short | Aeon Videos A filmmaker collaborates with a murmuration of starlings to create spellbinding visuals at the intersection of science and art

Your morning zen: aeon.co/videos/starl...

NEW: My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night's federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health care from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.

Having transgender soldiers negatively affects combat readiness but sick, unvaccinated COVID spreaders doesn’t?

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence. So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Frank Wilhoit seems very topical today: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

So trump’s trade wars begin. I don’t know about you, but I think I am getting out of the stock market immediately. And stocking up on nonperishable food.

This is becoming absurd—federal employees are now being told to remove pronouns from their email signatures. We will always stand by our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, no matter how many things we’re asked to delete or change. Inclusivity is at the core of who we are.

The US Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has dismissed 11 complaints and six allegations related to book bans, saying it was ending "Biden’s book ban hoax."

PEN America counted over 10,000 instances of school book bans in the 2023-24 school year, nearly 3X the number in the previous year.

Signs You Are a Gen-Xer Who’s About to Turn Sixty 1. You own music in so many formats that your collection could be housed in an audio museum. 2. Back in your day, people feared measles more than t...

Damn, this hits close to home! www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/sig...

So what gives trump the right to keep TikTok on when the Supreme Court says it should be shut down? trump can just overrule SCOTUS? Where are the checks and balances?

Who owns this this guy??

Trump Fires 17 Inspectors General in Late-Night Purge The internal government watchdogs were believed to have been dismissed at several major agencies, though the Justice Department’s was not said to have been among them.

This purge is bone-chilling and unprecedented. It’s straight out of the authoritarian’s playbook. Inspectors General are a vital, independent check on misconduct and abuse within the executive branch. Trump is ousting them so he can break the law with zero oversight.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/u...

Start following news feeds. And reposting my content. :)

Brace yourselves for the coming wave of “pardoned J6er arrested for [insert felon here].”

Getting rid of FEMA would be, well, disastrous. In an emergency you need a central, unified command structure to distribute aid. Making all the localities fend for themselves would be horribly inefficient.

I Have Resigned from The Washington Post, effective today Why I left to help launch a vibrant, new, independent media outlet

Has Jeff Bezos bending the knee to trump mortally wounded WaPo? contrarian.substack.com/p/i-have-res...