William Gill🌻

Former U.S. diplomat • hedonist-in-training • Int’l Affairs, History, Jazz, Film, Books enthusiast • tea lover but not teetotal

[William Gill🌻 @WilliamRGill]

“Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.” — Abraham Lincoln

[President Biden Archived @POTUS46Archive]

One year later, Kyiv stands. Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. America — and the world — stands with Ukraine.

Рік потому Київ стоїть. Україна стоїть. Демократія стоїть. Америка – і світ – стоїть з Україною.

[Chris D. Jackson @ChrisDJackson]

Just your weekly reminder that @JoeBiden was a damn good president.

[William Gill🌻 @WilliamRGill]

So many people were accomplices to arson but want to pretend otherwise.

[greg. @mistergeezy]

Is this you?

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

This is not a joke.

This is actually the reflecting Pool in Washington DC today.

Donald Trump wasted $10 million of our money on this.

No wonder why he bankrupted multiple casinos.

[Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney]

The bottom line: The federal judges have ruled more than 13,300 times — the overwhelming majority of the 15,100 rulings — that ICE had detained people in violation of the law or their due process rights.

https://t.co/3LIALFX6sP

[William Gill🌻 @WilliamRGill]

Something for the so-called America Firsters to consider.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

🧐🤔YOU WANTED A WALL, TRUMP? YOU’LL HAVE ONE.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded to Trump’s threats:
“So you voted to build a wall.
Well then, dear Americans — even if geography isn’t your strong suit, and you see America as a country rather than a continent — you should know that on the other side of that wall stand 7 billion people.
And if the word ‘people’ doesn’t resonate with you, let’s call them ‘consumers.’
Those 7 billion consumers can switch from iPhone to Samsung or Huawei in less than two days.
They can trade Levi’s for Zara or Massimo Dutti, and within six months replace Ford and Chevrolet with Toyota, KIA, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai, Volvo, Subaru, Renault, or BMW — brands that are already more popular in many places.
They can cancel DirecTV.
And even if they choose not to, they can stop watching Hollywood films and turn instead to higher-quality productions from Latin America or Europe — with richer storytelling and better filmmaking.
Believe it or not, people can skip Disney and visit the Xcaret resort in Cancún instead — or explore destinations across Mexico, Canada, or South America.
Even in Mexico, you can find better burgers than McDonald’s — with higher nutritional value.
Have you ever seen pyramids in the United States?
Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Sudan have ancient wonders — none of them in the U.S.
If they were, Trump would probably have bought and resold them by now.
We know Nike isn’t the only sneaker brand. There’s Adidas — and even Mexican brands like Panama.
We understand economics better than you think.
And we also know that when those 7 billion consumers stop buying American products, unemployment will rise, and your economy — trapped behind its own self-imposed wall — will begin to collapse to the point where you’ll be begging for help.
We didn’t want to do this.
But you wanted a wall?
Well.
You’ve got one.”
Her approval rating has reached a historic level — according to a recent poll, it stands at 85%.

[William Gill🌻 @WilliamRGill]

An argument that’s hard to refute.

[Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid]

If you can’t tax billionaires and trillionaire because “its unrealized gains until they cash out,” then stop letting them leverage that wealth for loans, as collateral, or as equity.

If it’s not real enough to tax, it shouldn’t be real enough to leverage.

This is why we say the system is rigged in favor of the super wealthy. Abolish billionaires, tax them out of existence, protect working people.

[Terry Moran 🇺🇸 @TerryMoran]

When your devotion to one man destroys your loyalty to your country and its laws.

For many in MAGA, Trump is the law.

And that is fundamentally un-American.

[William Gill🌻 @WilliamRGill]

“What he did to *us*”? This is delusional.

[Eric Boehm @EricBoehm87]

This @NYMag piece on the Bidens is bruuuuutal (and more than a little sad)

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

This is the United States paying a terrorist regime through a proxy. The United Arab Emirates would not be giving this money to a terrorist regime without our permission.

[Greg Siskind @gsiskind]

A reminder that Flo Balogun would not be on the US Men's National Team if Trump's birthright citizenship order was in place when he was born in NY. The first US man to score more than one goal in a World Cup match since the very first World Cup in 1930.

[William Gill🌻 @WilliamRGill]

The sad thing is a return to the status quo was the best that could be hoped for, and it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

JUST IN: This Is A Pretty Stunning Observation.

Trump is celebrating a new Iran agreement centered on a commitment that Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon.

According to ABC's Jonathan Karl, that same commitment appeared in the very first paragraph of President Obama's nuclear deal more than a decade ago.

Think about that.

First came Obama's agreement.

Then Trump tore it up.

Now Trump is celebrating an agreement built around the same core promise.

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Snyder: The U.S. is not just unreliable, it is behaving strangely.

Allies like Romania, Poland, Taiwan and South Korea expect America to save resources for serious moments, not waste munitions, reputation and focus on wars it cannot explain. 1/

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

Oh my god. A SECOND person died of exposure last winter after being released by DHS in the middle of the winter and far away from where they lived.

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

A little preview of Independence Day.

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Trump will never be able to do anything better than President Obama did it. Let’s remind him of that today and not let him take credit for an Iran “deal” that doesn’t leave us any better off and was only necessitated by Trump‘s need to distract us from the Epstein files with military action. Let’s not let him get away with that either.

[Brian Tyler Cohen @briantylercohen]

The 10 hours of erecting scaffolding wasn’t to strip the letters (something that 30 minutes in a boom lift could accomplish), it was to conceal the view with a curtain because Trump couldn’t handle the optics of the letters of his name being plucked off the building.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

The grift here is astounding. The "Trump Kennedy Center" people tried to outright STEAL more than half of a $300,000 bequest to the Washington National Opera made in a donor's will — even though the funds were intended to go solely to WNO. https://t.co/RKg6QTSJVo

[William Gill🌻 @WilliamRGill]

Well-deserved recognition for one of the greatest living actors.

[Royal Central @RoyalCentral]

Dame Helen Mirren joins the Order of the Companions of Honour.

The Oscar-winning actress receives one of Britain's rarest honours in recognition of her outstanding contribution to acting #BirthdayHonours

[Oceana @oceana]

#BREAKING: President Trump signed a proclamation to allow commercial fishing in three marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean, home to wildlife found nowhere else on the planet.

This puts some of our most irreplaceable ocean ecosystems at risk for short-term gain.