Sam Levey

There is no adult in the room, no one in charge. Turns out a semi-rationalistic elite was, maximum, a 50 year conscious project that was abandoned and can't be taken as an "ideal type" for a ruling class under capitalism.

1/Kevin Hassett had long ago discredited himself as a scholar by parroting claims about the economy he knew to be false. Even so, parroting the lie about rigged statistics, is a new low. The academy should ostracize him the same way a fabricator of research should be ostracized.

Remember: Almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.

Politicians who stoke fear and hatred over immigration want you to forget this.

Do not.

Things That Sound Like Hyperbole But Aren't: the world's dominant communications systems now principally reward the production and sharing of information that is directly harmful not only to democracy but to life on Earth.

The Trump Administration's war on the academy is leaving the entire nation poorer. Colleges and universities have the right to choose their faculty, determine what is to be taught, and admit students as they please. This independence is what makes institutions of higher education worth having.

the thing about competition is that it only produces losers. people wonder why everyone seems like a loser now and it’s because so many things are competitions.

plus, whenever you see someone who has apparently won something, you can tell that spiritually, they have lost

Daily Planet reports new plot by Lex…Back on earth one.

www.wired.com/story/enshit...

Probably democracy unavoidably requires periodic “touch the stove” moments. If people start to think nothing matters (which they will if things go too well for too long), then they’re going to take actions which cause them to re-learn why we have the institutions that we do.

I know NYT headline outrage has become something of a trope, but honestly, this unwillingness to even say out loud basic things like "agents of the state authorised to arrest and detain people need to identify themselves and prove who they are" is deeply depressing.

I've had this headline rattling around in my brain since January and I finally wrote it. Been hearing too many people in the startup world buying into the neoractionary nonsense that maybe a little light fascism is good for silicon valley. It's not. It's very, very bad.

May the Beast You Rode in on Eat You Alive On Trump, Epstein, and TV

I wrote about Trump, Epstein, TV, and why this scandal feels different johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/may-the-be...

anyone remember skill-biased technical change?

America's Clean Energy Transition Will Continue Despite the One Big Beautiful Bill Act | Columbia Business School While the OBBBA (One Big Beautiful Bill Act) guts renewable energy incentives, undercuts US manufacturing, and hands a long-term advantage to China, economics will continue to drive clean energy growt...

Columbia Business School reports that the clean energy transition is unstoppable even with OBBBA, solar and wind are just too cheap. US advanced manufacturing, however, is going in the toilet business.columbia.edu/insights/cli...

This is not the act of a legitimate government.

I think a lot about the widespread cynicism around politicians, and how a pervasive attitude of “they’re all crooks” doesn’t actually make anything better, it just allows for people like Bessent to lie to everyone’s faces. We gotta go back to getting mad at blatant lies like this.

Reminder that when SCOTUS wanted to nuke Biden's eviction moratorium and student loan forgiveness, they gleefully grabbed the cases before appellate courts could decide.

But "the President has declared the Constitution invalid so he can kidnap citizens and send them to foreign gulags" can wait.

How the reconciliation bill would change America An assault on the poor, on freedom and the future

New, from me:
They are trying to shove through the massive reconciliation bill as quickly as possible.

Stepping back, the bill is:
*an assault on the poor to benefit the richest
*an assault on freedom
*an assault on the future
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-re...

If you have a R senator, seriously call their office tomorrow & say vote against this bill. Say you don’t wan’t three times the budget of NASA going into a sprawling immigrant detention infrastructure. That you don’t want to kick folks you know off Medicaid. That you don’t want solar taxed. reps.fyi

$1 spent on health care is not just $1 of benefits delivered. It’s also $1 of income to an industry that is labor intensive and leveraged. This is going to have significant impacts on employment and aggregate output.

This 15-fold increase of the ICE budget when $ is being ripped from Medicaid and clean energy initiatives is a clear sign of warped, fascist priorities and should be a clear warning to all that this bill must not pass.

Just as a practical matter, consider how unheard of it is to expand an already significant federal agency by 1,000% in two or three years. WW2 mobilization or the early 60s Moon race are the right sort of analogies

this is the level of funding where all the possibilities for American politics that have been described as hyperbolic over the past decades - the comparisons to Nazi Germany and other nightmares of the 20th century - become logistically possible and politically likely

The point of something like that isn’t to win the policy, it’s to force the court’s response, to delegitimize them, to make reform more likely.

Feels like the country is undergoing a process of de-integration, suggesting that our previous level of integration was above what you might call an equilibrium level given our external circumstances.

Great point from @amandamarcotte.bsky.social: If Dems want to win back young men, one approach might be to stand up for what you believe. Even when, or especially when, they disagree with you.

On the pod, Amanda is excellent on Dems and authenticity. Transcript:

newrepublic.com/article/1971...

The depth of moral depravity in our times from RFK Jr. to Russell Vought, from JD Vance to John Roberts, is astounding. We shrink from talking in moral terms at our own peril. This is evil in our midst. Not just policy disagreements, poltics as usual.

Mamdani should win but he's the latest example of the Democratic Party closing ranks to keep anyone young and exciting and full of energy out of the party - and then they spend countless millions on consultants trying to figure out why they're struggling with young voters

imagine a world where the national press gives these stories 1/10 the coverage they gave to right wingers getting booed on college campuses

And these are the same snowflakes who couldn’t handle wearing a mask during the pandemic.

The US stockmarket is being driven by a divided economy: tech and communications are robust whilst consumer discretionary and staples slump.