“Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas.
The scent of Musk: Power, charisma and paranoia in Silicon Valley
Why is Naomi Klein Funding Substack’s Hate Machine?
Writers of good conscience should not be building new media companies on the back of a platform that opportunistically coddles white supremacy.
Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s <em>Two</em> Proletariats
[epq-quote align="align-right"]"What can be more radical or liberating than freedom and justice for all?"[/epq-quote] As an ideal, liberal democracy has great appeal. What can be more radical or liberating than...
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about this 2015 observatio...
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about this 2015 observation on Tumblr about the dangerous conflation of respect of personhood and the respect of authority.
Epstein and the Capitalist Conspiracy
Naomi Klein discusses what to do with a narrative that mirrors the worst anti-Jewish theories and the importance of holding our depraved elites…
‘Blueskyism’, Political Violence, and Open Social Networks Under Authoritarianism
After Kirk's murder, calls for censorship and the crackdown on political places started to include Bluesky. Open social networks must now fight political suppression as well as platform monopolies.
Opinion | The Age of Interdisciplinary Slop
The corporate jargon of change masks the decimation of intellectual life.
NYT: Boycott, Divest, Unsubscribe — WRITERS AGAINST THE WAR ON GAZA
The New York Times is not unique among media outlets in manufacturing consent for war, for exploitation, for genocide. It is, rather, exemplary. The Times’ reputation for liberalism, for rigor, for non-partisan independence is precisely what makes it so dangerous, because it hides what it really is: a publication that exists to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism.
The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.
The Inner Life of Liberalism - Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog
The practices that make your life better are the same ones that sustain a free society. It's time liberalism took that seriously.
Regina Harsanyi on Twitter / X
I've realized that a commons-based, peer-to-peer society is only possible at scale if anchored in a widely believed, collectively internalized narrative, or what sociologist Robert Bellah would call “civil religion.” Such narrative would help normalize cooperation,…— Regina Harsanyi (@ReginaHarsanyi) November 8, 2025
‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley
As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them
Bluesky civil war shows free speech is harder than it looks
Last week, a joke familiar from X circulated on rival platform Bluesky: “(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??” It was obviously a jab at the moral intensity that now seems to define the site, and indeed much of the rest of the social media landscape. On most platforms such a [...]Read More...
Solitude and Leadership - The American Scholar
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
the viability of many right-wing intellectuals and intellectual spaces is enormously dependent on the largesse of reactionary billionaires and foreign governments, who help them circumvent a marketplace of ideas where they would otherwise post extraordinarily poor sales
Don Moynihan
Its fair to ask if Orban's successful cultivation of the Western right wing intellectuals reflected that their networks were already dependent on patronage. Rod Dreher was funded by a weird billionaire, and when he stopped paying his salary, Orban did. Dreher already looking for a new gig.
