Lucy...you've compressed the whole story into four sentences. The shift from contesting results to capturing administration is THE story...and you're right that it took a Republican whistle to make it undeniable.
Your last point deserves its own newsletter: this is asymmetric warfare.
One side has funded legal organizations working full-time on institutional capture. The other side has... attention spans. That imbalance is the vulnerability.
Thank you for seeing it clearly and saying it plainly!
A Republican county attorney just accused Stephen Miller's legal organization of attempting an "unprecedented power grab" over election administration.
Not a Democrat.
A Republican.
This story should be front-page news.
https://t.co/LIUmDCCI3Y
Colonialism is bad, right?
Wrong.
The Aztec Empire ran sacrifice at industrial scale. Excavations of the Huey Tzompantli, the skull rack next to the Templo Mayor, have uncovered hundreds of skulls of men, women, and children. Spanish eyewitnesses described tens of thousands. The Aztecs fought "Flower Wars" whose purpose was capturing live victims for the altar. Hearts were cut out of living people. Subject peoples hated Aztec rule so much that Tlaxcalans made up most of Cortes's army. The conquest was largely an indigenous uprising against an indigenous empire. The sacrifices ended under Spanish rule.
India: burning a widow alive on her husband's funeral pyre. British records from Bengal alone documented thousands of cases between 1815 and 1828. The British, with Indian reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, banned it in 1829. When priests told General Napier it was sacred custom, he answered: my nation also has a custom, we hang men who burn women alive. You follow yours, we will follow ours.
India: Thuggee cults murdered travelers by the tens of thousands over centuries as offerings to Kali. It was a hereditary profession. William Sleeman's campaign in the 1830s wiped it out.
Slavery was a universal indigenous institution. Dahomey and Ashanti were built on slave raiding and sold captives for a thousand years to Arab traders before any European ship arrived. Pacific Northwest tribes held up to a quarter of some village populations as slaves and killed them ceremonially at potlatches. The Comanche ran a captive-raiding economy across the Southwest. What colonizers introduced after 1807 was the first attempt in history to abolish slavery globally. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron spent fifty years hunting slave ships and freed about 150,000 Africans. African kings protested. The King of Bonny complained that abolition was destroying a trade ordained by his gods and priests.
The Dahomey kingdom's "Annual Customs" beheaded hundreds of captives and slaves every year to honor dead kings. Documented by European visitors for two centuries. It ended when France conquered Dahomey in 1894.
Sailors called Fiji the Cannibal Isles. Chief Ratu Udre Udre kept a stone for every victim he ate. His pile holds nearly 900. Shipwrecked sailors were killed and eaten. Within a generation of missionaries and British administration after 1874, the practice was gone.
Nigeria: In parts of Igboland, newborn twins were left in the bush to die and their mothers ostracized or killed. Missionary Mary Slessor spent decades in Calabar rescuing abandoned infants until the practice collapsed.
Indigenous genocide of indigenous people. In 1835, two Maori tribes invaded the Chatham Islands and slaughtered the Moriori, whose own law forbade them to fight back. They killed, enslaved, and ate them. The Moriori population fell from about 2,000 to barely 100. No European did this. British colonial law ended it.
Add headhunting in Borneo, the Philippines, and Nagaland. Female infanticide in India and Polynesia. Foot binding in China, dismantled partly by missionary campaigns. Every one of these ended under pressure from the colonial powers we are taught to treat as history's unique villains.
Colonialism was not charity. The Belgian Congo was a horror, conquest was for profit, and rule was without consent. But the ledger has two sides and one has been erased. Pre-colonial societies practiced slavery, human sacrifice, widow burning, infanticide, and genocide, because cruelty is not a European invention. The first civilization that tried to abolish these practices worldwide is the one you were taught to be ashamed of.
If "indigenous" means innocent and "colonizer" means guilty by definition, that is not history.
Back before the Republican Party was corrupted by special interests, Senator John Chafee urged Congress to address climate change. https://t.co/VBiMOcNcZh
13 workers left Palantir and issued this statement.
"Palantir is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a 'revolution' led by oligarchs. We must resist this trend."
SAVE WEST BANK CHRISTIANS.
Following the Israeli settler attack on the Christian village of Taybeh, I have received several phone calls from residents inside the village. People are terrified — fires are surrounding the village, and settlers opened fire on homes and civilians.
Last week, I was sitting in an arbitration hearing in which Washington Post leadership labeled me as a threat.
And excused away the purging of Black writers, questioning our merit.
Today, I’m getting a Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
I'm mortified by how the Trump administration is openly discriminating against officials, players, and fans from around the world--cancelling visas, invasive searches, detainments, racism, etc.--but none of it's surprising. He's a white supremacist, and FIFA are bootlickers.
Just a 2-cent wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy could:
Lift millions of kids out of poverty
Fund universal child care
Make community college free
And we would still have money left over.
They say it takes a village, well I made a promise to mother on her death bed that I would make sure my nephew graduated from high school. Mission accomplished. Now he is on his way to an Electrical apprenticeship program so he continue his goal of becoming an electrician.
I grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Israel was not a country in my education. It was a crime. A wound kept open on purpose. Every funeral, every slogan, every sermon pointed in the same direction: there, across the border, is the source of your suffering. Believe it. Repeat it. Pass it on.
I believed it. I repeated it. For years.
Then I moved to France. And I met Jews.
Not the abstraction. Not the enemy. People. Neighbors. Colleagues. And the collision between what I had been taught and what I was seeing in front of me was so violent — so intellectually embarrassing — that I had no honest choice but to start over. To read. To ask. To dismantle, brick by brick, everything I had been given as truth.
What I found on the other side of that dismantling was not just the absence of hatred. It was something I had not expected: admiration.
Let me be precise about what I am defending and what I am not.
I am not defending every Israeli policy. I am not defending any government unconditionally. I am not asking anyone to check their critical faculties at the door.
I am defending what Israel is. What it represents. What it has built, against every conceivable pressure, in a region that has largely failed its own people.
Israel is a democracy in a neighborhood of autocracies. It is a state governed by law in a region where law is routinely weaponized against citizens. It is a country where Arabs sit in parliament, where women lead, where dissent is not a death sentence. It is imperfect — as every democracy is — but it is genuinely, structurally different from everything surrounding it.
That difference is not incidental. It is the point.
The so-called Palestinian cause, as it is prosecuted today, is not a national liberation movement. I say this not to dismiss Palestinian suffering; suffering is real, and real people pay its price. I say it because the infrastructure of the “cause” — its funders, its ideologues, its loudest champions — has never been interested in Palestinian statehood. It has been interested in Jewish elimination.
Look at who built the movement’s international architecture. Look at the 1997 Tehran OIC summit, where the language of “apartheid” was first systematically attached to Israel, not by Palestinians, but by the Iranian regime, for export. Look at Durban. Look at who profits when the conflict continues and who loses when it resolves. The answer is never the Palestinian family in Gaza. The answer is always the regime, the militia, the ideological infrastructure that needs the wound open.
The Palestinian cause, as it functions on the world stage today, is a tool of an anti-western civilizational project. Its goal is not a state alongside Israel. Its goal is a world without Israel, and, by extension, a world where the values Israel represents are defeated. Liberal democracy. Jewish self-determination. The idea that a small people can survive, build, and insist on their own dignity against the will of those who would erase them.
When western progressives march under that banner, they are not marching for freedom. They are marching for the annihilation of the only thing in the Middle East that resembles what they claim to value.
I came to Judaism slowly, the way you come to something true, not in a rush, but in accumulation.
It was not the politics that moved me first. It was the texts. The insistence, running through thousands of years of Jewish thought, that the human being is created in the image of G-d, and that this is not a metaphor but an obligation. An obligation to see the other. To argue. To question. To hold power accountable, including your own.
I had grown up in a culture where the highest virtue was submission. To the leader, the militia, the narrative. Judaism confronted me with the opposite proposition…
Read the rest of the essay on my Facebook page.
BREAKING: Israeli settlers are attacking the Christian village of Taybeh right now — setting fields on fire, hurling Molotov cocktails at homes, and attempting to set the village gas station ablaze.
https://t.co/QiOAbofNdn
Rep Tom Kean (R-NJ) hasn’t been seen in 96 days.
In that time he’s:
- missed 122 roll call votes,
- won an uncontested primary
- introduced 3 pieces of legislation
- made 13-15 individual stock trades with insider info.
Where is @CongressmanKean?
Is Tom Kean dead?
She went viral herself, so let’s help her out a little bit more!
Meet US Army PFC Fariah Brewer, a hijab-wearing service member, who while in uniform indicated she would REFUSE commands if they targeted Muslims, giving a thumbs-up in response.
She is an active-duty soldier who converted to Islam in late 2023 and made the statement in a live discussion.
US military regulations require obeying lawful orders; publicly stating intent to refuse them violates the enlistment oath and provides grounds for investigation or discharge.
@DeptOfWar … WeThePeople don’t want traitors among our truly brave and loyal soldiers. Please inform us of when US Army PFC Fariah Brewer is dishonorably discharged!
Trump & Elon Musk got rid of the USAID program that helped contain screwworms to Central America.
Now, thanks to them, our beef is being infected with parasites.
We’re all paying the price for this insane, far-right radical extremism.