Bonnie Honig

Can you post anything about the lawsuit? I got an email this week offering settlement $ to people - and now I am wondering more about why…

No. It is not surprising.

Hard floors, no ceilings?
How about: Purges, Pardons, Pedophiles, and Pogroms: America, 2025.
McCarthyism cheers from the grave; the party in opposition looks on

Sounds awesome Duncan!!

Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries: “Strong floor, no ceiling”

Colombian President Gustavo Petro: “A clan of pedophiles wants to destroy our democracy.”

For now, though, I can recommend wholeheartedly the film The Lavender Scare

Sounds like I should be reading yours! Pls post when it is ready? Thanks!

💕

I’ll be presenting the paper from which this comes in Amsterdam in May, possibly Brown in the fall, possibly Yale in the fall, & certainly Cambridge, UK in the fall. Details when the dates are closer. It is a massive understatement to say I am really excited to share this work (but not yet done!)

The resonances are remarkable.

Worth noting that purges came first, as with the Red Scare and in the name, too, of national security ….

Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address” (NYRB, June 26, 1975)

Arendt on Hegseth: McCarthyism destroyed the “reliable and devoted civil service” built under Roosevelt: “in the aftermath of this period the ‘ugly American’ appeared on the scene of foreign relations” but less so in domestic life, “except in a growing inability to correct errors and repair damages”

:)

:)

Last day of Intro MCM!

And — the segue to the next one I’ve just been realizing…

Absolutely. This is now the last chapter of the book :)

Funny — I see this work on performativity by Brilmyer was presented at U of Amsterdam as a master class. I will be at U of Amsterdam in spring 2026 presenting my performativity project over several weeks… :)

Image of the Phaleric bull. Provenance of image in in the link. Importance of image is it is part of a bull thread central to my argument about Austin AND the Phaleric bull IS mentioned in passing by Arendt in The Human Condition

The illustration/thumbnail of the Concepts essay is not coming up with the link so I add it here because I love it:
www.politicalconcepts.org/wp-content/u...

I am all about revisiting this material now. You could see a prequel (that is already a bit dated) of sorts to my book project n the journal Political Concepts. My concept is Performativity :)
And THANK YOU FOR THE REFERENCE to “Queer Rigidity” which I did not know!

This is the work of the book I am writing now, with its slight relevance to the moment.

Pardons & exec. orders are the speech acts of absolutism & they are the only ones this regime wants to know. These are sovereignty-enhancing, as queer theorists have said all Austin’s performative are. But Austin’s speech acts can be read as relational efforts to make our way together, laughingly. 💪

“Rajabi said the University of Toronto agreed to a student exchange, but Hopkins declined”

💯

“There was, let's just say, a different channel in operation in relations to Ukraine, one that was domestic and political in nature..." Hill said.”

Will no one cover this properly??

November 28, 2025 As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to ...

This from HCR today re 🇺🇦 reminds me of Fiona Hill’s testimony at first Trump impeachment hearing I: “it turned out that the U.S. State Department had had nothing to do with the plan; it appeared to be the work of Witkoff, Kushner, and Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin..”

Lovely serendipity (esp as I’ve been teaching second red scare and watching Welch in a different media setting). Thanks for sharing yours!

My take here: politicsslashletters.org/commentary/a...

Found a fellow fan of this great great film