Misc
I am broken. The latest dive into how Brown v. Board of Education really changed America, and not entirely for the better, really is why we're where we are today.
The Empty Creel
The Never Trump movement may have already persuaded nearly everyone it can. Democrats need a growth strategy, not another search party.
recap
The week in review, July 26th through August 1. tot6
The Backlash Machine
The Panthers were a civil rights answer to police violence. The Weathermen were a Vietnam answer to a war that wouldn't end. Everyone keeps mashing them into one story. That mashing isn't an accident, and it erases exactly what each group was actually responding to.
The Backlash Machine
Turns out you don't need barbed wire and a snake dungeon to fight integration. You just need a church, a tax exemption, and about eight years to find a better word for what you're actually defending. The IRS didn't create the religious right. It just gave it a reason to organize.
The Backlash Machine
Wilson hid behind appointees. Mississippi hid behind file cabinets. Leander Perez didn't hide behind anything, he ran two Louisiana parishes like a personal kingdom, built a snake-infested prison out of spite, and got excommunicated for being too much even for the Catholic Church.
Geoff's Musical Musings
Eric Gale brings da' FIRE. A medley for the ages.
A bit slower of a week, but after listening to the outstanding podcast "Weird Little Men" – part of the Cool Zone Media ecosystem – that covered the racist shitbag, Byron de la Beckwith (the fucker that shot Medgar Evers in 1963) that really piqued my interest in the singularity
The Backlash Machine
Mississippi built a taxpayer-funded spy agency to crush the civil rights movement, then watched Louisiana and Alabama copy the homework. Georgia skipped the espionage and just staged a fake listening tour instead. Same con, three costumes.
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Woodrow Wilson promised Black America a seat at the table, then had his cabinet quietly move the table to a different room. A hundred years later, progressives are still doing the "quietly move the room" trick — they've just gotten better at calling it strategy instead of segregation.
Economic terrorism with a rotary club newsletter: how Mississippi's 'moderate' segregationists built the farm system for a murder.
In 1954 Mississippi built a segregationist club so extreme even its own founders told one guy to tone it down. Then the state gave him a job application for a spy agency. This is how a Supreme Court ruling armed both sides of a war.
Posts from the week of July 13 - 18
My favorite fucker, Elon Musk, needs another look as we close out the second season of the BVC
Donor-class preferences enter the All-In podcast as private consensus, exit as public analysis, and arrive at the policy table already formatted for legislative language. It's not a debate show. It's a credibility laundromat with a Spotify deal.
History has three ways this ends: the extremists win, the party dies, or everyone pretends to make up and don't. Pick your favorite, because 'grow a spine' isn't on the menu.
In 2007 thirteen men posed in mafia cosplay for Fortune magazine and called themselves the PayPal Mafia. The photo looks different now. It's not thirteen men performing menace. It's a class photo — of the cohort that just finished taking over the government.
A day late, sorry, Saturday got out of control for me. Sunday, July 5th: A read on the perennial argument (often fronted by the Never Trump crew) about the Can, vs. Will in the context of winning. This was pre-planner meltdown: Will Win vs. Can WinRon Johnson tried to
David French gets oh so close, but then he has to put his blinders on. But the real gem comes from the comment section.
ORACLE stands for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. He started with a CIA contract, named the company after it, and told investors citizens will be on their 'best behavior' once we're all constantly recorded. He didn't disrupt the system. He built it.
Meta's employees named their internal AI status leaderboard 'Claudeonomics.' Not Llamanomics. Claudeonomics. Zuckerberg spent billions building a frontier AI model his own people won't use, while paying a competitor to power his flagship AI product. The acquirer can't sell to his own staff.
