Gady Epstein

Williams’s book is impaired by slapdash prose. His writing abounds with interminable, convoluted sentences that teem with digressions and then awkwardly limp toward disorienting conclusions. Here is one from the prologue: For non-whites, even though the mixed-race population has become the fastest-growing segment of the American demos and, in real terms, a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed Black civilians were killed by police annually (typically between 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million, according to The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database) — and indeed other quality-of-life markers have been equalizing for significant numbers of Black people since the civil rights movement — the death of [Trayvon] Martin followed by [Michael] Brown (regardless of the specific contingencies of that case), and a high-profile slate of videotaped police and vigilante killings that converged with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and the pervasiveness of social media, thwarted any self-congratulatory sense of the inevitability of social progress still alive in the first half of Obama’s second administration. Huh? In addition to such passages, “Summer of Our Discontent” includes many distended excerpts — some spanning three pages — from not-so-obscure sources, including The Times. Midway through the book, Williams chides another writer on the race beat for propounding “an excruciatingly simplistic tale, fueled by a powerful unwillingness and incapacity to grapple with contemporary American racial and social complexity.” Regrettably, I know the feeling.

jesus christ this is an actual fisking

Standing up for the smallest of minorities is important because when you accept the premise that one group are expendable because small or ‘insignificant’, you have accepted the idea of the expendability of human life in general, and the enemy will use your acquiescence to pick off yet more.

Wilson Wilson in Utopia

Philip K Dick saw it: “Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans”

ICE crackdown imperils Afghans who aided U.S. war effort, lawyers say Advocates fear President Donald Trump’s ambitious deportation plan jeopardizes Afghan interpreters and other allies who worked for U.S. troops during the war.

A disgrace.

“One former interpreter for U.S. forces in Afghanistan was detained by immigration agents after he showed up for a routine green card appointment. A second was arrested just minutes after attending his first asylum hearing in San Diego.”

www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

I don't think enough good things can be said about the people who worked hard to build the political pressure for his and everyone else's release, including senator van hollen. otoh there is no bottom to my contempt for the people who were urging the opposite course of action

Israeli author David Grossman says his country is committing genocide in Gaza Writer says for many years he has refused to use word but now must ‘with immense pain and with a broken heart’

‘Grossman said that for many years he had refused to use the term. “But now I can’t help myself – not after what I’ve read in the papers, not after the images I’ve seen, not after speaking with people who’ve been there…” ‘ www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

University sidelines scientist who exposed toxic metals in Lake Maurepas The SELU scientist who discovered alarming levels of toxic chemicals in Lake Maurepas was abruptly removed from her research position without explanation.

“Shoot the messenger” is so hot right now lailluminator.com/2025/07/31/s...

Turns out this was a Starship launch

Yeah this was a good call and logic dictates there’s plenty more like this to come

China vibes

ADL Musk

I spoke with 40+ sources for a look inside the Anti-Defamation League. Here’s some of what I found.

ADL’s gentle response to Elon Musk’s infamous salute was partially driven by his support of Israel. To ADL, that indicated he didn’t have “antisemitic tendencies.” (1/x)

nymag.com/intelligence...

"“New plan,” Greenblatt said in his address to national leadership last year, repeating a phrase that had recently been taken up by other Jewish organizations: “Put on your own oxygen mask first.”"

is a rich text unto itself

How a Nazi-obsessed amateur historian went from obscurity to the top of Substack Tucker Carlson has called Darryl Cooper the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.” His background is more extreme than previously reported.

Daryl Cooper—the current #1 History Substacker—in 2016: “Think of how most people you know got here. It wasn’t from basic American ideology to reading Mein Kampf and then, boom, they’re onboard. It’s a process, and you have to initiate people without scaring them off."

NEW: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze federal funds.

Then the harassment began.

Pizzas sent to his home in the name of Judge Esther Salas’s murdered son, Daniel.

Six credible threats to his life.

More than 400 “vile” calls to his chambers—including this voicemail:

the right wing media ecosystem is so efficiently set up to take random posts from non public figures and turn them into pseudoevents. to the point where the entire social media system rn really just favors their viral propaganda machine.

COVID is the deadliest virus ever when they talk about the "lab leak" theory to gin up outrage, but just a mild little cold when they talk about masking and public health measures to gin up outrage.

These guys are describing a real thing but it’s not the thing they think it is: they’re actually describing the absolutely enormous right-wing media ecosystem’s ability to blow up huge cultural outrages out of absolutely nothing, milking them to radicalize young men into racial and gender extremism

Joe Walsh @walshfreedom.bsky.social • 19h A message I just got from a buddy of mine, who's a long time Democratic Party campaign consultant: "This Sydney Sweeney thing is the kind of thing that turns men away from our party. It's why men think our party is weak & insane." My response to him? "Fuck yea it is. You are exactly right." y 562 门 301 © 196 •• joepatt.bsky.social @joepatt.bsky.social • 19h Q: Who in the Democratic Party is pushing this Sydney Sweeney thing? Answer: No one. It's some randos on TikTok and Twitter. Has nothing to do with the Democrats. What a weird strawman. 口6 668 Wes Clone @wesclone.bsky.social • 11h It doesn't have to "come" from the party leadership, it's very obviously only left-leaning people who get their outrage detectors out to search for micro-aggressions. It's an ad for jeans, and yet another reason for people who lean "anti-woke" to laugh at the people who care about things $ 42 © 25 •• Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com • 2h It is nothing compared to the insane backlash over one bud light instagram ad featuring a trans woman. But somehow that is never a problem for the republican party.

Yeah, what @katelynburns.com said

Bret Stephens: The Trump Presidency Takes a Better Turn

the piece in question www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/o...

Some of this is good policy that’s gone too far: We no longer have a migration crisis, an achievement that should not have eluded the Biden administration for most of its term and that cost the Democrats dearly. But Americans want an immigration policy that secures the border and deports criminals, not one that goes after law-abiding, hardworking undocumented immigrants on whom many areas of the economy depend and who should be given a viable path to citizenship.

Meanwhile deporting law-abiding immigrants is just “good policy that’s gone too far”

All of this leaves plenty to fear, dislike and even despise when it comes to this administration. We do not strengthen alliances by threatening to seize the territory of our allies. We do not depoliticize justice by accusing a former president of treason or threatening to “go after people.” We do not safeguard free speech by suing journalists. We do not strengthen the rule of law by shaking down law firms. We do not make America healthy again by promoting medical quackery.

That’s quite a “to be sure” graf in a column about how good a job Trump is doing lately

ha haa

How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic The COVID pandemic likely began when the virus jumped from animals to humans, and didn’t start in a lab. But false narratives continue to circulate.

Our research has been engulfed by an endless torrent of lab leak conspiracy theories about the origin of the pandemic - even as the evidence for zoonosis has only grown stronger.

This fuels anti-science agendas and erodes public trust.

Now, we respond 👇

theconversation.com/how-conspira...

The "EXTREME HEAT" warning is just too perfect for this story

Is starvation in Gaza really Israel's fault? The facts are clear Rising starvation in Gaza may have a number of factors. But Israel's wartime policies on humanitarian aid are inarguably among them.

For @forward.com, I wrote about how we know that Israel has been withholding food as a military tactic because Israeli officials have said versions of “we are withholding food as a military tactic” for the entirety of the war and pretending otherwise is willful ignorance forward.com/opinion/7586...

everything is fine

85% of Gaza is on the brink of death due to starvation. Israel could let aid in at any moment. And some people (like these men tried to do with me on Friday) are still trying to justify this atrocity.

There is no justification. This could stop at any moment. End the blockade now.

Foreign-born residents and workers around Wells have reacted to the ICE threat by trying to stay out of sight. Many are scared, said a woman from southern Africa who lives near Wells and helps connect asylum seekers with social services and jobs, including in tourism businesses. The woman, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her safety. She said that following the revelation that Wells police officers were working with ICE, some local immigrants would only attend church online and are keeping their children from school.

We've reached the point where a naturalized citizen won't speak on the record "out of concern for her safety."

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/t...