curated news excerpts & citations
Free Press: Are Conservatives the New Snowflakes?
Members of the right once derided the left for emotional hypersensitivity. Today, they lead the charge to suppress ideas that unsettle them.
Slave owners tried very hard to justify themselves. In the early years of the 19th century, wave after wave of preposterous pseudoscience was published to help them rationalize what was obviously wrong but incredibly profitable. Soon, speech criticizing slavery was policed. Books were banned; possession of some, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were criminalized. Newspaper owners were targeted, their presses thrown into the river. Abolitionists were lynched and driven from the South. Slave owners’ sublimated guilt was so fragile that they needed soft and hard power—indeed, the entire force of culture and government—to maintain the specious lie that slavery was not only not bad, it was right.
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The Civil War was driven by greed and cruelty, but another way to see it is that it was started rashly and stupidly by men and women who lived in a delusional, paranoid bubble in which they were the victims, that they were the ones being persecuted (by the North) instead of being the villains who enslaved and raped and killed. Slave owners were monsters, but they were also incredibly sensitive, unable to face what they’d done and terrified of living in a world where they couldn’t keep doing it.
(Free Press more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – October 28, 2025
In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. …
Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing they alone truly knew what was best for the country.
…… And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down.
…Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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LAWdork: Full Ninth Circuit keeps Trump’s Oregon National Guard efforts blocked for now, tossing order that sided with Trump
The appeals court voted to vacate last week’s 2-1 order, which had sought to allow Trump to send troops to Portland during litigation.
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Roosevelt Institute: Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration
We know the tragic effects of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the federal government. But the truth is, Trump and Elon Musk alone didn’t break our governing institutions. Even prior to the current administration’s actions, both parties presided over decades of disinvestment in federal government capacity, too often abdicating power to private market forces where public institutions once shaped outcomes in the public interest …
… As President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government.”
To avoid that fate, American policymakers must prove that democracy can still deliver—that democratic institutions can operate with urgency to meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary people, and that the government is answerable to the people, not just the monied few. Doing so will require reimagining and building a new, more responsive, and more effective set of federal government institutions, rather than simply restoring what existed before Trump. Future administrations must flip the government’s risk profile away from status quo bias and toward delivering bold, timely, and resonant results for working people.
(Roosevelt Institute more…)
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Maj. Gen. Randy Manner, US Army (Ret.): I helped lead the National Guard. Troops don’t belong in our cities.
We must not permit this gross misuse of the military to be normalized.
I served for more than 35 years in the US Army and the National Guard. …
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Every bit of that experience tells me that the deployments we’re currently seeing inside American cities—including Los Angeles, Washington DC, Memphis, Portland, and Chicago—are not only un-American and wrong, they’re being done at the expense of our young men and women in uniform, their families, and their civilian employers.
(Maj. Gen. Randy Manner, US Army (Ret.) more…)
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Michele Hornish: Tank Man Had Shopping Bags. She Had a Polka Dot Dress.
One person can make a difference, and everyone should try. ~John F. Kennedy
Last week, a woman in a polka dot dress stopped traffic in New York City. Her defiant image went viral.
And reminded me of a man who, on a summer day in 1989, became world famous.
We still don’t know who he is.
In the summer of 1989, pro-democracy protestors occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Students and workers and soldiers and teachers had joined together in peaceful protest, seeking democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. They were joined by more, and more – and still more people. At its height an estimated one million people occupied the Square – and their efforts inspired the world.
But early on June 4, the Chinese government cracked down on those protests in the most gruesome way, sending in armed military and tanks. The government killed hundreds – some say thousands – of protestors, shooting some in the back as they fled.
It’s with that backdrop that we meet Tank Man.
(Michele Hornish more…)
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Boing Boing: Hegseth’s new shaving policy will force out thousands of Black troops
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Terrence Goggin: “King Donald” is not the first president to be mocked as a king; General Ulysses Grant defied President Andrew Johnson : “the military must refuse direct presidential orders that are against the law”.
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Ken Klippenstein: MAGA’s 9/11 Is an Assassination
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… Now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a Yale-educated, lifelong Wall Street suit (who, ironically, served as a top executive on a George Soros-owned hedge fund) is joining in, recently calling Kirk’s murder “a domestic 9/11.”The little-noticed interview with the “Charlie Kirk Show” took place in the marbled “cash room” of the U.S. Treasury building with an American flag in the backdrop. Bessent seemed to be making a policy statement as he described how his Department would now play the same role it once did in dismantling Osama bin Laden’s and al Qaeda’s networks.
(Ken Klippenstein more…)
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PBS: British political commentator Sami Hamdi detained by ICE while on U.S. speaking tour
RNS: In detaining Sami Hamdi, the administration is admitting it is using ICE to silence critics
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KUT: Here are the 16 painted crosswalks and street murals Austin may have to remove under Abbott order
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Health Nerd: Apple Cider Vinegar For Weight Loss – A Study That May Never Have Happened At All
Some fascinating insights into the world of scientific integrity.
(Health Nerd more…)
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Tim Bray: Grokipedia
Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.
On Bray · My Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article. It’s pretty clear how it was generated; an LLM, trained on who-knows-what but definitely including that Wikipedia article and this blog, was told to go nuts.
Speaking as a leading but highly biased expert on the subject of T. Bray, here are the key take-aways …
…Take-away · Wikipedia is, to quote myself, the encyclopedia that “anyone who’s willing to provide citations can edit”. Grokipedia is “the encyclopedia that Elon Musk’s LLM can edit, with sketchy citations and no progressive argument left un-attacked.”
So I guess it’s Working As Intended?
(Tim Bray more…)Matt Mullenweg: Grokipedia
Verge: Grokipedia is racist, transphobic, and loves Elon Musk
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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