Category: 2025

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Rebecca Solnit: Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning

The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn’t making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase–“what if they had a war and no one came?” What if we were in a war and no one noticed? Obviously all the people under direct attack have noticed, along with all the scientists and federal employees who’ve been fired, the foreign students afraid to come back, the medical professionals who understand what’s happening to public health, the economists who see the wrecking ball swinging, the university administrators whose institutions are under attack. I think most of us feel it and see it and know it. But too many of the powerful voices in this country are downplaying the crisis we’re in, and that tamps down the reactions that could save us.
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Two things under attack are the rule of law and the separation of powers, but the impact is largely downplayed. This year we’ve all heard a lot about the three co-equal branches of government. But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who, after the Big Brutal Bill (BBB) passed, literally handed his gavel to Trump in a horrifying gesture of surrender, is clearly and openly taking orders from him. Johnson is not interested in defending Congress’s powers, and so important powers Congress has, namely the power of the purse, the power to control the allocation and flow of federal funds, have been surrendered.
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John Pavlovitz: Call It What It Is: A Death Camp

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It is not a prison.

Prisons are for those who, through due process and the rigors of our legal system, are found to have committed crimes for which they face accountability.

This is a human kennel; a sweltering dumping ground for fathers, sons, husbands, and best friends, who have been stolen from their homes, workplaces, churches, and graduation ceremonies, for no other reason than to satisfy the irrational bloodlust of ignorant white people who spend their Sundays cosplaying followers of Jesus.
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Dispatch: ‘Just a Normal Life’

In Los Angeles, a prayer to the patron saint of lost causes.
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An according-to-Hoyle miracle? Maybe, maybe not. But her cancer is in remission, and Diego has a big-ass tattoo of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. For a while, he and his family seemed like they would enjoy the blessing of the one thing he kept bringing up over the course of our conversation on a beautiful afternoon in downtown Los Angeles: a normal life.

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“People are afraid,” Diego said. “Everybody is. They’re afraid to go out to a restaurant. They’re afraid to go to work.” He mentioned a colleague who now spends hundreds of dollars a week on rideshare apps rather than a few bucks on a transit pass because she is afraid she will be rounded up at a bus stop. (ICE raids have targeted mass transit in Los Angeles County, brandishing their firearms at literal little old ladies from Pasadena.) Immigrant-services groups have been printing up flyers with warnings and advice that would have sounded outlandish a few years ago: what to do if there is an ICE raid on your church, if ICE is targeting patients in a hospital, or if there is ICE activity at an elementary school.
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Bulwark: The ‘Parasites’ and the ‘Good Immigrants’

Meet more of the worst people in the world.

I’ve been listening to Robert Evans’ podcast series on Adolf Eichmann and one of the things Evans mentions is that throughout the Holocaust, many Nazis had in their lives a “Good Jew.” Some Jewish person who they liked and wished to save.
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One of the hallmarks of Trump’s mass deportation regime has been the emergence of Good Immigrants from certain MAGA communities. We saw these people in the small Missouri town which rallied to Carol, a beloved member of their community who was arrested by Trump’s secret police because her papers were not in order.

These MAGA diehards whined and complained until the administration relented and let Carol go. It seems to have occurred to precisely none of the townfolk that America is full of Carols.
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Dean Blundell: Trump Regime Sends Letter To Canadian Ambassador Demanding Canada Control the Weather In The US

It’s Epstein File Distraction Day! What better way to celebrate than to blame Canada’s forest fires and “arson” for ruining summer for Americans
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CLAIM #1: Canadian Fires Are Caused by Arson

Tiffany and Finstad: “We’ve seen things like arson as another way multiple large wildfires have ignited in Canada.”

Reality Check: According to the Canadian National Fire Database (CNFDB), lightning is responsible for ~50% of Canadian wildfires but causes over 85% of the total area burned. Arson, when it happens, accounts for less than 10%. In 2023, over 93% of the area burned was lightning-caused. That’s not arson. That’s climate-fueled nature punching back.
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CLAIM #2: Poor Forest Management Is to Blame

The letter: “A lack of active forest management” is a key driver.

Reality Check: Canada has one of the most sophisticated wildfire monitoring and response systems in the world, coordinated through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Most of Canada’s forests are in remote, boreal regions with little to no human access, let alone active mismanagement. Meanwhile, the U.S. sees 70,000 wildfires annually (Canada, 8,000), often in populated areas and on federal lands that Trump himself underfunded.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV: The Epstein client list story is not political. It’s not amusing. It is tragic.

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That Donald Trump’s Attorney General was questioned in his presence about her handling of a sex scandal involving one of his personal friends is an enormous outrage that in another time, involving another man, would have brought down a president. That in itself is a terrible commentary on how low we have fallen as the nation that put that man in that room in that previously august national treasure known as the White House.

But it is too easy to lose sight of the story behind the scandal, the very real damage that has been done again and again, over and over, to little children who were powerless to stop the powerful men who destroyed their innocence and scarred them for life, whether those men were presidents, businessmen, celebrities, or their own fathers, uncles, or neighbors.

The story of Jeffrey Epstein and the crimes he committed is not a political story. It is not something that should be bandied about by podcasters and television news hosts, or in posts on platforms like X and Facebook. Child abuse is a civilizational tragedy and a crime. All those who have abused children should be prosecuted and put behind bars, no matter who they are or what their station in life.

Period.
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Jay Kuo: It Really Is A Cover Up

A memo from the Justice Department reopens claims that it’s hiding the truth to protect powerful people.
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One thing has always piqued my curiosity, though. Donald Trump’s name appears multiple times on Epstein’s call and flight logs. He was friends with Epstein for a long time before distancing himself. Trump himself has a public history of sexual assault, and there are credible allegations of rape of a minor against Trump and Epstein together.

So how would the White House handle all the potential evidence once Trump was back in office?

It turns out, by issuing a quite unbelievable and outright denial, and seeking to close the case forever. Maybe they haven’t heard of the Streisand Effect, which says a cover-up only increases the visibility of the thing you don’t want people to talk about.
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We Hold Truths

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Jim Palmer: What are we born with?

Unpacking the myth of human nature

Distinguished evolutionist Michael Ghiselin asked, “What does evolution teach us about human nature?” His answer: “It teaches us that human nature is a superstition.”
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The way we perceive human nature today is still influenced by assumptions from the Medieval Christian world view (human nature as fallen, depraved, and flawed) and the Age of Enlightenment (human nature as inherently good and capable of continuous improvement through reason and education). Consequently, much of humanity behaves according to these assumptions, and both pessimistic and optimistic view of human nature has its problems.

Human beings are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative, and most destructive of all animals.
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In my mind, Eve is the hero in the story. God said don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She did. The world often makes its greatest advances by disobedient people who break the rules. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Disobedience is man’s original virtue.” Except it was a woman and it was Eve. She was the was first rule-breaker, and we should honor her for this.
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Rebecca Solnit: Immigrants: A Love Letter

It has never been easy to be an immigrant to the United States – for most economic, linguistic, and cultural barriers make life here a struggle, even if they were escaping a worse life elsewhere. The utterly evil bill that just squeaked through in Congress, among other harms, aims to make many immigrants’ lives go from difficult to terrifying nightmare. It gives ICE a truly outrageous amount of money, and we’ve already seen ICE turn since January into a faceless, unaccountable Gestapo grabbing workers, nursing mothers, sick children off the streets, out of their cars, from their homes, indifferent to what their legal status is, sometimes sweeping up citizens in their frenzy, sending the captives to domestic concentration camps or to gulags overseas or deporting them to countries they’ve never visited or left decades ago. Many people are simply disappearing, their friends, family, employers, coworkers simply unable to find out where they’ve been taken. Thousands have been directly impacted; tens of millions are indirectly impacted as they find themselves living in fear of these fates, and it is ravaging both mental health and the ability to continue to participate in everyday life and earn a living. Many are, with good reason, afraid to leave their homes.
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There’s a racist/white supremacist fantasy that only a certain kind of white and descended from Europeans who got here in the seventeenth-to-early-twentieth centuries is a real American – a descendant of immigrants, but the right kind at the right time (until recently, Protestant was part of the criterion; Jews and Catholics were outsiders to these nativists). One idea driving the claims Joe Biden wasn’t legitimately elected in 2020 was that he was elected by city people and by women and Black and brown people, including naturalized immigrants and their children, while Trump got the majority of the white Protestant rural, suburban, and male vote, and some of the latter regarded themselves as “real Americans” and the rest of us as not so.
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We need to defend immigrants but also value them and respect their contributions, and we need a we in which there is no them, a we that does not divide us, a we as big as this country. And maybe we have it already: we the people. That opening line of the Constitution,does not break down by immigration status, race, gender or other criteria (though obviously it was a deeply discriminatory society, but this rhetoric transcended it for at least a few lines). The other great founding document, the Declaration of Independence begins with the we of its signatories, the we who hold these truths, but it is a proclamation that all people “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” That’s a we worth reclaiming and defending.
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