You know what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world. In other words, the language of rights, the language of rule of law, the language of separation of powers. You know, all of these are states that are seeking to create a kind of total environment where the regime or the leader or the ruling party controls all media, all conversation.
On this 250th birthday of the United States, the bill that would allow Mother Randall to be compensated is languishing in some congressional committee somewhere. Bills for black reparations for slavery have sat collecting dust for decades, but people convicted for their roles in January 6 came way closer to official government sanctioned redress than anybody in those groups. So, who counts as having been harmed by the state?
As as people thought that they were doing the will of God through violence, well, suddenly there's a sanction for violence that has almost a universal adapter.
Another war in the Middle East. A retreat from the international order. A presidency built on self-dealing and arbitrary power. It's enough to make you think the U.S. is in a steep decline — but Fareed Zakaria thinks otherwise.
The word is doing a tremendous amount of work — it's marking race, it's marking power, it's marking intimacy, it's marking hatred, it's marking love. And what's extraordinary about it is that it can mark all those things simultaneously.
I have no leverage. Trump is me in the Hungarian forest right now. Because he never bothered to consult Congress and offended them. Because he never even signed up or even briefed European allies. Because he did not in any way coordinate anything around intelligence around the Straits of Hormuz, getting expats out of the Gulf, figuring out putting in place the right defense mechanisms.
There are people who don't have running water and who have live sewage in their front yards. And it was not until representation was present that those neighbors were actually able to be served. If you have no one at the table who is representing your interest and who is concerned about you, then you know that you will not be represented in the result.
The sort of closeness that we've seen between Russia and China since the Russian invasion of Ukraine is probably the most consequential geopolitical shift that we've seen in the world over the last decade.
But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way.
I think we now need alternative minimum taxes of 60 or 70% on anything over a billion dollars for an individual because these individuals are under the impression that they are not subject to the standards of Western society, decency or any or the law.
I would say in American society, forward momentum has always been met by retrenchment. Going all the way back to reconstruction after eight years of active effort to create full citizenship for the freed slaves, there came decades after that of retrenchment.
If you do not want everything to be owned by a tiny elite, you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth. Because otherwise, if you're Jeff Bezos, what is he worth? $300 billion, right? Even if he makes 5% a year, he's making $15 billion a year, right? And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly.
Do you want everything to be owned by the tiny elite or not? If you do not want everything to be owned by a tiny elite, you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth.
The day of the IPO, they went into a conference room, this, you know, nice, fairly unattractive guy who had no sexual currency their whole life, and they come out and they're the sexiest man alive.
The dehumanization, the delegitimization, the exclusion, the criminalization, the existential threat framing. No individual in public office has done more of this in the world than Donald Trump.
I would say all of this to me means that the rivalry has entered a new phase. The White House is talking about exploring measures to hold foreign actors accountable. That's the phrase they use for industrial scale distillation campaigns. To me, I think the important thing is that politically, geopolitically, this is a step change.
The German chancellor publicly said the United States is being humiliated. The French president publicly said that the US president um the Russian president, the Chinese uh president are all directly against Europe uh acting together against Europe. Those are those are things that at best you usually hear with inside voices.
If Miranda Priestly were Michael Priestly, there would be no movie, the first movie. Everything she does is sort of slightly horrible, but would be kind of adorable if a man said it. But there's a special tinge of mercury around that kind of remark from a woman. It just hurts more.
And the teacher said, 'No, no, the way you convey power is how everyone else in the room behaves when you enter it. You just act naturally. You just behave.' But the molecules around you — so that was the direction, that you gave me, that everybody was afraid of me.
Even Vince has acknowledged that he really enjoyed playing this character because in many ways this character was true to real life. In real life, he was philandering. He had many affairs. He was ruthless, sometimes contractually, with his wrestlers.
Anti-racism, especially in 2020, around the George Floyd protests, became so palatable to corporations and, you know, wealthy individuals and philanthropic institutions and other institutions and individuals in these massive positions of power is because they saw that it was a way to call for change in a way that would ultimately protect their own interests.
Does power truly flow from the barrel of a gun? Pop culture and conventional history often teach us that violence is the most effective way to produce change. But is that common assumption actually true?
You can spend all your time trying to prove that we are humans, that we had a civilization, that we have art, that we have culture. But it's a distraction because there's always going to be one more thing. And actually, the problem is not us. The problem is the racist who has no other way of feeling full, no other way of having integrity other than putting someone else down.
The 0.1% have their own transportation. They don't give a shit about 4-hour TSA lines. They have their own police forces. They live in buildings in neighborhoods that are of incredible security. They have their own health care. So what is their vested interest?
China is still a highly transactional power. It doesn't have allies with the exception of one and that is North Korea. It has a formal treaty with North Korea signed in 1961. But aside from that, China has no treaty obligation to go in and protect and defend any other country were that country to be attacked.
In the media space, I would say the biggest northstar that we have is we're trying to effectively constrain the power of the large national programmers while empowering local TV stations.
Lobbyists weren't created in 2025. They've been around for a long time. Um, and I think when you're I think the position, I don't speak for Andrew, but the position we try to take is we'll meet with anybody. If you want to come and discuss your matter, deal on the criminal side, whatever it is, we'll always give you an audience, but that doesn't entitle you to anything and certainly not entitled to outcomes.
Billions of Saudi dollars were already reshaping the US economy. And now many of those tech companies are vulnerable as Iran targets their infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in the ongoing war.
China has captured America's most famous company. It's an extraordinary realization that Apple is worth about 3.7 trillion US dollars on the stock market, but it isn't really the company's shareholders that actually call the shots, at least not in China. In China, it's the Chinese government that calls the shots.
Because of this persistent migration pattern over a long period of time, if someone got too bossy or even just got too much influence, someone else was usually moving down the river and saying, "They're not my chief." So, Ojibwe culture tended to be very tolerant of cultural variation, but very intolerant of being told what to do.
If you look at history, there's as much danger of an autocrat coming from the far left as from the far right. I believe the far left is as dangerous as the far right. It's the extremes that present a threat to society.
So they left the US in search of another slave society where they could continue their way of life with white supremacy as the social order and slavery as the economic system.
For a revolutionary regime whose political ideology is premised on martyrdom, the central question is whether these assassinations will ultimately extinguish the ideology or help revive it.
The Chinese are playing a long game in the Middle East, but also a long game around the world. So the China of today is far deeper in the Middle East, including the Gulf, including Iran, including Iraq. When Western companies are not so forthcoming to build things, the Chinese are always there to build things.
It's about gender and race and a push for seemingly very, very small acknowledgement of womanhood or I guess I should say against a denial of womanhood. It was about the right for black women to be called miss and addressed as adults.
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Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
