Matt Seden

People should pay close attention to this. Including the language around 'activist judges' that is deliberately designed to undermine rule of law. What's happening in the US is coming to the UK. It may not look identical in the details but the thrust of it will be the same.

I listened to a BBC radio report this morning where they literally laughed about it at the end. "He's incorrigible lol" kind of thing. Incredible levels of complacency and ignorance

Have been forwarding this to anyone who'll listen for a while now. Well worth a read.

The Economist has fallen off a cliff lately. Somewhere between 'we can keep the old world order if we just believe hard enough' and 'deep down we're somewhat sympathetic to the MAGA agenda'. Not perceptive enough to see the former is folly and too self-conscious to say the latter out loud

As well as being factually inaccurate, their analysis is based on a mental model that we see absolutely everywhere, whereby the left/Democrats are the only ones with agency and when the right does something bad it's because the left provoked it somehow. This has to stop

In confusing and distressing times, there's some small relief in being able to call a spade a spade. Thanks Jill for being one of the few out there with both the capacity and platform to do so.

The White Supremacist Regime The Trump administration is using racist and Nazi propaganda to recruit ICE agents. They're laying out their vision of America as a racial autocracy. The world's richest man is joining in.

This is an unabashedly white supremacist regime, and ICE is the regime's racist militia:
www.throughline.news/p/the-white-...

The problem *today* is not that investigations take a long time.

It's that the President has a paramilitary goon squad at his beck and call who are rounding up people of the wrong colour and threatening or outright executing anyone who stands in their way.

Maybe talk about that...

I get that someone did 4 years of diligent research into ICE with good intentions and it's a bummer that it's no longer relevant to what's happening.

But to treat the issue as a continuous one over a decade simply distracts from the unique reality of what's going on at the present moment.

Anything changed in the last, I don't know, 12 months or so that might be worth highlighting in this article?

Honestly one of the worst, most brain-rotten headlines I've ever seen in my life. Not only making a false and dangerous claim, but doing it extremely clumsily and with utterly cowardice.

If you support Trump and MAGA just say so, instead of performing this 'both sides' charade.

I mean, the people putting focus on the stuff he did at Dulwich College know full well who he is. They're trying to convince others to see him for who he is. Is that weird/bad/confusing? What else are they supposed to do? It's self-evident to them and to you, but not to others. So then what?

I agree with the spirit of this, but I also don't think it's surprising that in an environment where racism is systematically explained away, being able to (potentially) pin him to harder-to-explain-away racist things in his past has some currency.

We gotta have a clear term for people so cynical they become gullible.

Honestly hoping Democrats drop the other shoe and start expressing absolute contempt for reporters who want to play makebelieve with the Republicans.

The bigger threat to Trump is arguably to his right not to his left. Given how far right he is, that's a bold statement. But this tech-driven 'ratchet of radicalisation' is, I agree, essentially unstoppable. And international.

Very much not the point but on 'Would I Lie to You' Henning Wehn shared that he has zero mirrors in his house (spoiler alert - it was true) and I've not stopped thinking about it since

Famously high but depending on where you look NYC rent is 30-40-50% more. Same on salaries. People's mental models are slow to update. Up until the late 90s the UK and US were a lot more even economically. Just not the case any more, and people are disinclined to notice it / believe it

I think New Yorkers would be shocked at what many highly-qualified people in London think of as a good salary. And I think if many Londoners knew what they could get paid in NYC they'd be equally shocked. For many industries it's a 30-40-50% cut from there to here (have experienced this first hand)

To your point, a New Yorker thinks of $3-4k rent as normal, and I just think that scans very differently here. There are whole sections of youngish urban society in the US on $200-300-400k salaries, it exists here too of course but it's nowhere near as common

Didn't mean to suggest anything about you personally (apologies if it came off that way), but lived in NYC myself for 6 yrs before coming back to the UK and there's a big difference in salaries and lifestyle - bigger than most people on both sides think, in my experience

We've seen this movie before and it doesn't end well. Suspect part of the psychology of this is unwillingness to confront one's own impotence. By being the angel in the US President's ear UK PMs can maintain illusion of global power/influence

One of my small hobby horses is that I don't think Brits realise how much richer Americans are than them. There's a whole section of the urban upper middle class in America, people who don't think of themselves as particularly wealthy, who look at £4k/month rent and think "yeah that's reasonable"

Can you tap it a little louder so the UK govt can hear?

The steely desire to represent the far-right's campus speech critique as a good faith, principled argument is almost impressive in its determined, almost willful wrong-headedness. Fascinated/horrified by the collective psychology of this

Yeah fair enough

Saw that and thought they were well-meaning. Trying to have your back by saying if you leave a permanent paper trail it's worse for you. Don't think they at all meant don't do it, the opposite in fact. Overly cautious maybe but I thought on your team

If you think all these people are united only by Trump at this stage I think you're massively missing the point

It doesn't have to be coherent

Exactly. Vance might fall apart in days, weeks, months, whatever. There will be ugly infighting. But at some point someone will pop up and move the thing forward. At this point it's more a movement looking for a leader than a leader cultivating a movement. That's the bit some don't seem to get.