https:/www.harvard.com/events/hbs_channel/julian_e._zelizer
"Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes JULIAN E. ZELIZER--CNN Political Analyst and Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University--for a discussion of his latest book, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. He will be joined in conversation by RICK PERLSTEIN, author of the New York Times bestselling books The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America."

Should be right up your alley.

Solar IS Civil Defense

The final step was made with this decision by a Right Wing judge.

As part of a lawsuit against federal agents in the city, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum had requested that federal officers clearly identify themselves when seizing protesters and stop arrests without probable cause.

But U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mosman rejected the motion, arguing that she did not present enough evidence that future harm would continue at the hands of the agents. The judge also raised doubts about whether the state had legal standing to pursue a suit on behalf of protesters or others who might be targeted by the federal officers.

This means Federal police, of which there is ~120,000 in the US, can arrest people whenever they want, for any reason they want, and they do not have to show cause.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Boom: 'It's Retaliation': US Judge Orders Michael Cohen Released From Prison, Saying Book Condition Infringement of Speech Rights | New York Law Journal [_link]

— Joseph A. Bondy (@josephabondy) July 23, 2020

'Sapere aude'

Trump has helped the US to see its dark side. It will still be there when he goes | Nesrine Malik [_link]

— The Guardian (@guardian) July 26, 2020

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A bunch of GOP strategists built a GOP machine that created Trump. They now pretend they are horrified & want to fix things.

I don't know why anyone wants to hear from them, why the media insists on giving them a platform & why anyone sees them as anything other than monsters.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 26, 2020

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What's In A Name?

"The NYT's 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom & equality on which our nation was founded.

Federal funding shouldn't help indoctrinate young Americans w/ this left-wing garbage."

From another thread - Fascist Propaganda: Symbolism of Frankenstein

Interview with George Will | Columnist |

•  Why should I care about Jefferson?
  A late-20th-century America is concerned about its identity, and it's come to be aware of the fact that we are a creedal nation--and he gave us our creed. He made it accessible. A lot of nations emerge from the mists of history and their basic identity is tribal, it's rooted in groups. Ours is rooted in a great ascent, an ascent to certain propositions. We are, as Lincoln said--Lincoln being the greatest student of Jefferson of them all--"a nation dedicated to a proposition." Jefferson wrote the proposition.
•  How do you reconcile a man who could write the sentence, with a man who owned more than 200 slaves and never saw fit in his lifetime to manumit them?
  Jefferson was a man of his time and his place. And in 18th-century Virginia, property in human beings was the fabric of society. Still, Lincoln, the man who was to end that institution, said, "All honor to Jefferson," because Jefferson had taken what was a merely national struggle, the American struggle for independence, and cast it in rhetoric that made it a human struggle. And by doing so, he sowed the seeds of the end of the peculiar institution of slavery.
  "I think Jefferson was torn and the nation has been torn and will for the foreseeable future be torn by this legacy."
•  Do you think that there is an American fault line along which this question of race lies and that Jefferson himself embodies that tension?
  I think Jefferson was torn and the nation has been torn and for the foreseeable future will be torn by this legacy. But what, to me, is more remarkable than the fact that Jefferson kept his slaves, is the fact that he was putting down political markers expressing commitments, affirming values, rooting the nation in commitments that were bound to be resolved one day. He didn't know they'd be resolved in four years of fire and bloodshed. But he knew, it seems to me, he had to know that ideas have consequences, and the consequences of Jefferson's ideas had to be the end of slavery.
  "And he emphatically said yes to life...."
   
•  Do you find in Monticello a metaphor for the man who attempted to build it and for the nation?
  Exactly. What Jefferson exemplifies in his person is the fecundity of freedom, the tremendous possibilities, the unknowability of freedom and its consequences. Diplomat, executive, educator, mathematician, inventor, architect, agronomist, ethnologist--the list goes on... It was a polymath. And he emphatically said yes to life--in all its capacities--in a way that, in an era of specialization and intellectual compartmentalization, no one has the self-confidence to do in the late 20th century. In the late 18th century, a man could say, basically, "I have brought into my compass all of human endeavor." What a wonderful sense of serenity and confidence and power he must have had.

George Will offered his thoughts on American conservatism.

How the Tea Party movement radicalized the GOP.

Why We Should Care About George Will's Radical Transformation

'Sapere aude'

Never has the issue been resolved in that "Great Nation" claiming "exceptionalism".  

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations ....
("A Declaration of the Causes Which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union," February 2, 1861.)

'Sapere aude'

An increasing percentage of plans and attacks in the U.S. are linked to far-right activity, expert says. [_link]

— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 27, 2020

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Fossil Fuel Industry Pollutes Black & Brown Communities While Propping Up Racist Policing. We must pressure all U.S. Corporations to cease giving to police foundations. #defundpolice Defund police foundations [_link]

— Tikun Olam (@richards1052) July 28, 2020

'Sapere aude'

The Hive Interview: Can We Undo the GOP's Decimation of America? | Vanity Fair |

In his new book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, writer and public intellectual Kurt Andersen describes a kind of secret history that happened in broad daylight: Starting in the early '70s, he writes, a band of conservative economists and pro-business groups, terrified of the progressive movements of the 1960s, drew up plans and blueprints for a version of America in which big corporations and Wall Street would be liberated from regulation and labor unions and antitrust laws, allowing the free market to sort out the winners from the losers. Their ideas powered the Reagan Revolution of the '80s and over the next three decades reengineered the American economy to favor Wall Street and fatten the wealthy, resulting in a wildly inequitable society and the violent convulsions of the Trump presidency.

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