Read it.

Can an intellectual tradition dissociate itself from the very ideas it has helped to develop? That is the question running through “Left Is Not Woke,” one of the most widely discussed political essays of recent years. In it, Susan Neiman argues that the woke phenomenon does not represent the culmination of the Left, but rather its negation. The thesis is undeniably attractive. It allows the moral legacy of the Enlightenment Left to be preserved while attributing the excesses of identity politics to a deviation foreign to its own tradition. The question, however, is whether this historical reconstruction withstands scrutiny when examined in light of the history of ideas.

The New Neo.

Well, given the nature of his district, it ought to come as no surprise..Aisha Wahab will be replacing Swalwell until the November election, due to the results of a special election to determine the disgraced Swalwell’s successor. As you can probably tell from the name, Wahab is the US-born child of Muslim immigrants (in her case, her parents are from Afghanistan) and a DSA-supported candidate.

Hey, as long as Democrats will be stupid enough to support Muslims, Muslims will be clever enough to accept that support.

The Other McCain.

… and the weird thing — the creepy, scary thing — is that there are women taking the killer’s side of the case. Women are actually rallying outside the courtroom in support of this murderer. And, of course, blaming her husband for it.

The facts of the case are irrelevant to this; Lindsay’s supporters aren’t about facts, they’re about emotion. The core premise of their argument is very simple: No woman is ever responsible for anything.

ATQUE: Pink-Clad Feminist Mob Rallies In Support Of Confessed Child Murderer

Read it.

Professional associations are nothing more than labor unions/lobbying groups for Highly Educated People, the functional equivalent of medieval guilds (and the actual equivalent of medieval guilds when they succeed, as they so often do, in pushing their protective restrictions into law).

Such associations are among the first (along with the universities and the Narrative Media) to be corrupted by the Long March Through the Institutions that enshrined crypto-socialism in today’s Crust.

Read it.

Theodore Roosevelt could be turning over in his grave. And maybe Woodrow Wilson is spinning right along with him. Why? Well, the progressive vision of government-by-expert has taken a major hit in recent days. Someone like Anthony Fauci wasn’t exactly what either of them had had in mind. Or was it?

And just what was it that those presidents claimed to have had in mind? Disinterested expertise. That would be disinterested as in neutral, rather than disinterested as in uninterested. Agencies as advice-givers and agencies as umpires was the idea. And that was that, as far as they were concerned. Or was it?

The Constitution of 1787 might have been a great starting point—at least for TR. Maybe not so for Wilson. Possible differences aside, both of them thought that life in the early twentieth century had already grown too complicated for mere elected officials to handle. Divided government might not yet be a thing of the past, but a modern American government surely needed help when it came to steering the country in a progressive direction. Why not then turn to experts? Congressmen and presidents couldn’t–and shouldn’t–managing things alone. After all, the drafting, debating, passing and signing of legislation somehow ought to be beyond the grubby business of politics.

Therefore, they thought it was high time that the original Constitution of the late eighteenth century give way to a “living constitution” for the twentieth century and beyond. That certainly was Wilson’s preferred term. Of course, it wouldn’t be necessary to bother with a series of constitutional amendments to achieve this. Such would be a lengthy process at best. Besides, that very clumsy process was little more than an eighteenth-century relic.

Constitutions are only as effective as the men (and they are mostly men) who enforce them.

Don’t forget that both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were explicitly ‘progressive’, party affiliation notwithstanding. If I could go back in history and shoot three people as children, two of them would be TR and WW. (Actually, shooting TR would probably be enough, because his ego is the reason WW became a problem.)

Read it.

In what can only be described as a stunning failure of state and local policy and leadership, Los Angeles County recorded its highest tally of flea-borne typhus cases in 2025, confirming 220 diagnoses, up from 187 the year before, according to the county’s Department of Public Health. Almost nine in ten of those patients ended up hospitalized. Fleas that feed on infected rats, opossums, and other small mammals carry the bacteria behind the disease to humans, and Los Angeles has watched the case count climb for years. The 2025 total marks the sharpest jump yet.

The Foundry.

A new study estimates that Democrats’ proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $25/hour would cost the U.S. economy 5 million jobs and especially harm workers ages 16 to 24.

“Politicians on the Left are making empty promises that minimum wage hikes will magically fix the cost of living crisis without doing their research,” Rebekah Paxton, research director at the Employment Policies Institute, told the Daily Signal in a statement Thursday.

“The vast majority of economists agree these mandates will kill jobs, leaving families without the paychecks they depend on,” she added. “Here’s the truth: Sky-high mandates will only make life more unaffordable for millions of Americans.”

The market price is the market price, Every attempt to manipulate prices politically (whether called ‘price controls’ or ‘minimum wages’) leads either to rationing or ‘black-marketeering’. The result of minimum wage laws is that low-skilled workers who aren’t worth that minimum to an employer get no jobs at all. Markets work as markets work, and they don’t care about your legislation or political fantasies.

Read it.

The same voices who demand “fairness” and insist every community must share the burden of mass illegal migration suddenly discover local democracy the moment the coaches might stop near their postcode.

A Mail on Sunday poll has laid bare the gap between principle and practice. Just 15 percent of people are happy with the idea of more illegal migrants arriving in their own area. Fifty-seven percent actively oppose it.

Yet many of those who back Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s call for affluent and rural places to “play their part” draw a firm line at their own front door.

Read it.

The chief reason to eliminate the rich is because their kids all turn out to be socialists.

Read it.

The following German video examines the case of a single African migrant who, after years of legal process, simply cannot be deported, because he has no documents and consistently lies about his country of origin.

Multiply this example by the millions of migrants who have flooded the country in the last ten or fifteen years, and it becomes clear that the future prospects for the Country Formerly Known as the Bundesrepublik Deutschland are grim indeed.

Read it.

The higher education racket is being exposed in America as diminishing standards, collapsing public trust, and a cult-like, often unlawful devotion to DEI ideology pushes its mid-20th century model past the point of breaking.

For several generations, going to a premier public or private university provided a smooth path to success for most Americans.

Sure, plenty of people made money by starting businesses—and a handful of entrepreneurs became monumentally wealthy—but for most Americans looking to get going on a good, high-paying, rewarding career, going to college was the path to success.

Now that path isn’t guaranteed and hasn’t been for decades. Employers have begun to view degrees from once-prestigious schools, even advanced degrees, as irrelevant or a marginal advantage at best.

These overproduced pseudo-elites—many of whom are high on self-esteem but short on what they see as an equivalent paycheck—constitute the foot soldiers of the angry, fanatical DSA class.

The hordes of frustrated college grads will undoubtedly shape American politics in coming years. But what of the colleges and universities that produced them?

Read it.

Well, what else was he going to do with them?

$53 million to settle lawsuits from families whose loved ones’ donated remains were allegedly sold on the black market by former morgue manager Cedric Lodge.

Those Facebook Marketplace sales can be pretty awkward, so hopefully this body salesman didn’t go that route!

Yuk yuk! Get it? ‘Black market’?

Read it.

Wow, what are the odds?

Read it.

Maybe her mom ought to sue for full custody.

John C. Wright.

The basic questions fall into these categories: 1. truth, 2. virtue, 3. beauty, 4. reason, 5. liberty, 6 romance., 7. salvation.

Leftism is Gnosticism, which inverts all of these.

The traditional answers in Christendom hold truth to be sacred, virtue to be true, beauty to be a correct reaction to virtue. Reason is objective, liberty is obedience to reasonable laws, romance is found in lawful passions, in marriage and childrearing, and salvation is found in Christ, who is sacred.

In Leftism all these questions are inverted, and turned into paradox and nonsense.

Truth is subjective. Virtue is tolerating the vice, while vice is stunning and brave. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but true beauty is brutalism and absurdity, meant to shock the bourgeoisie. Reason is racist. Liberty is disobedience to all law, including the laws of reason. Romance is only found in sterile perversion, loveless and childless, which, being vice, is stunning and brave. Salvation is rebellion against all authority, especially divine authority, truth and reason.

Read it.

A man previously recognized as an “outstanding refugee” by the Minnesota Department of Human Services has been charged over an alleged Medicaid fraud scheme, according to news coverage.

Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced Monday that his Medicaid Fraud Control Unit had charged two men for allegedly stealing more than $1.5 million from the state’s Medicaid program. Salman Ahmed Elmi was charged in the first case with eight felony theft offenses linked to Reva Health allegedly billing over $1,000,000 in Medicaid-funded services that were either never provided or were ineligible for reimbursement, per the announcement.

Elmi previously received the “Outstanding Refugee Award for Entrepreneurship” from the Minnesota DHS, CBS News reported, citing state records.

The Cascade Policy Institute has published the Antiplanner’s policy brief about Portland’s War on Cars in three parts:

1. How Portland is losing the war;
2. The benefits of automobiles that Portland has ignored;
3. What Portland should do instead of fighting a losing war.

Read it.

Of the 42,338 people that entered Italy via NGO operations since October 2022, 22,513—just over 53%—arrived aboard vessels linked to German organisations. If organisations of other nationalities operating German-flagged ships are included, the figure rises to around 27,000.

Italy received 157,651 people by sea in 2023, 66,617 in 2024, and 66,316 in 2025. Vessels operated by these types of organisations—some of which have been accused of people trafficking—accounted for approximately 8% of all arrivals in 2023.

The role of German NGOs in dumping tens of thousands of migrants in Italy has now become a political issue between Rome and Berlin.

Here’s now the scam works:

1. Traffickers overload boats and rafts with ‘migrants’.
2. ‘Migrants’ paddle out beyond the origin contry’s territorial waters.
3. Libtard NGO boat, often colluding with the traffickers, swoop in and ‘rescue’ the deliberately overstuffed vessel full of ‘migrants’. (Sometimes they don’t make it in time, and many ‘migrants’ die. Traffickers don’t care; they got paid.)
4. NGO boat carries they the rest of the way to the invasion beach, where they all promptly claim asylum and enter the ponderous EU claim system, meanwhile living on welfare benefits paid for by the destination country’s taxpayers, in shantytowns rife with disease and piled high with trash, amusing themselves by sexually assaulting local European women.

The Antiplanner.

Most subsidized housing projects are rentals, but a developer called Alberta Alive Condiminiums, the townhouses squeeze three bedrooms and two-and-one-half baths into 1,400 square feet. To keep the footprint small in land-poor Portland, each townhouse occupies three floors.

CDP plans to sell each townhouse for $299,000. But it is spending more than $6 million building eight such townhouses, or $754,000 apiece. Thus, taxpayers are providing a $455,000 subsidy to each buyer. Buyers will be restricted from reselling the properties for more than they paid for them plus inflation, thus denying them one of the benefits of homeownership that most others enjoy. The land the condos are on will be owned by a “community land trust” that will charge the homeowners HOA fees for land management.

Socialism by any other name is just as unpleasant.

Read it.

LBJ bared his belly to show us his gallbladder scar.

Too much information.

AOC has bared hers to show us her quest to freeze her eggs in order to preserve her chances to have children. Also too much information. But certainly more interesting information, considering that this is a practice – purposely delaying conception and using medically-assisted means in an effort to get pregnant later at the “right” time – that has become more common.

The Left never ceases to try to force reality to fit their fantasies. From hormonal birth control to in-vitro fertilization, the push to turn women into fake men is never-ending.

Read it.

Talk Radio host Vince Coglianese said today that “non-DSA Democrats” support the same things that “Democratic Socialists” do, but they just won’t admit it.

Note the word “support.” I don’t know what most non-DSA Democrats believe. But I have noticed for years that almost all Democrats who run as moderates vote for every single far-leftist measure proposed in Congress.

During Trump’s first term and when Biden was president, the only rebels who stopped the far left’s plans to eliminate voting security and/or to make DC a state, for example, were Sinema (who ended up leaving the party and then leaving the Senate) and Manchin (who was from a deep red state).

Read it.

For a movement that talks incessantly about diversity, the Democratic Socialists of America has an awkward problem of its own: it is remarkably white.

According to an internal survey obtained by City & State New York, 60% of respondents in the New York City chapter of the DSA identified as white. Some 63% of the chapter’s 15,600 members completed the optional survey, so this was hardly a small sample.

These results are difficult to square with the organization’s own rhetoric.

In official NYC-DSA materials, the organization has repeatedly spoken of building and organizing a “multiracial working class.”

But if nearly three out of every five respondents to its own membership survey identify as white, just how representative of that multiracial working class is the DSA itself?

The Antiplanner.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority says that 70 percent of bus riders don’t pay fares, costing the agency at least $50 million a year. Before about 2016, the agency told drivers to tell boarding passengers, “Hello, the fare of $X.XX.” But in 2017, it abandoned this policy because fare disputes led to too many assaults on drivers.

D.C. is full of Democrats i.e. criminals. This ought to come as no surprise.

Now the agency is in financial trouble, and it also recognizes that allowing passengers to evade fares simply encourages more serious transit crimes. So it once again has asked drivers to make fare announcements. But the transit union is objecting, saying this is likely to lead to an increase in driver assaults. As an example, they posted the above video of a masked passenger beating on a bus driver, though the reason for the attack was the driver saying the passenger could not have an alcoholic beverage, not that he had to pay a fare.

Betcha he was a Person of Color, too. Betcha.

Part of the problem is that agencies like Washington Metro have no incentive to reign in costs and every incentive to spend more to keep union workers, contractors, and bureaucrats happy. Transit agencies have convinced the public, or at least politicians, that profits are unimportant, so hardly anyone other than the Antiplanner bothers to calculate how much money agencies like WMATA lose.

Sound like Democrats to me. Perhaps you have been following, as I have, the YouTube videos from Europeans who were over here for the World Cup. Uniformly, they express amazement that Americans are the horrible people portrayed in movies and headlines.

Well, they’re half-right. Americans who live outside of big Democrat-ruled behavioral sinks aren’t what they expected to be, but if they spend any time in the Blue Cites (even in Red States there are Blue Cities) they would have found conditions as they were expecting.

Culture is king.

New York Post.

Thanks to “criminal-justice reform,” you can rack up almost 150 arrests in this town and still get to walk when caught again.

Meet career crook Shaquan Seth, cut loose last week after five, count ’em five, shoplifting busts in Queens — less than six days after he got out of Rikers after a five-month stint for previous thievery — because New York law forbids cash bail for offenses like Seth’s.

No matter that he was no sooner back on the streets than he was eagerly reoffending, nor that he stole $600 worth of fancy candles, when the no-bail believers insist such theft is mostly out of need, like Jean Valjean.

No matter that he threatened to shoot a young female clerk who was brave enough to try stopping him.

He was put right back on the street.

So you’ll be reading about Shaquan Seth again in these pages; we hope it’s not because he’s made good on his promise to shoot someone.

The Foundry.

The battle to end DEI in higher education is one that can only be won through attrition against a stubborn enemy that won’t back away from the ideology that created it.

One might think that the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision that prohibited racial discrimination in college admissions would have put an end to the issue. It didn’t. At least some of America’s top schools unsurprisingly appear to be doing their best to dance around the courts and the law.

For those who’ve paid attention to how higher education has behaved in recent decades, it was clear that many schools would find ways to cheat the system. It’s all the rage these days for students and administrators, I guess.

That looks to be the case at Duke Law school. The Department of Justice recently accused the school of responding to the Supreme Court decision by creating a stealthier way to discriminate.

The Department of Justice said that following the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision “Duke Law emphasized racial diversity in admissions and engaged in a deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes for its incoming classes.”

The school highlighted “DEI” as one of the school’s “most important values” in late 2023 according to internal communications obtained by the DOJ and pledged to “work even harder” to admit “a racially diverse class.”

Read it.

When I was a student, I lived in the Boston area, and that was a different feel, more of what we can find in our Blue American cities today. I have to say that Cambridge was ahead of its time. When I worked on the student janitorial crew, my boss, one of the wisest men in Boston—a dyed-in-the-wool Bruins, Red Sox, and Patriots fan and Vietnam vet—comforted me one day as we sat together on the steps in Radcliffe Yard. Bob said to me, “Donnie, the thing you need to know about this place is that it’s basically an insane asylum where the inmates would never think of leaving.” It is a fact of my life that the best advice I have ever received has not come from professors or academics, and certainly not lawyers, but working people.

Read it.

America’s largest unions don’t just mobilize workers to fight for better wages and benefits. Many of them operate as hubs of leftist advocacy and engines for the Democrat Party.

Read it.

Leftists have for years decried American Thanksgiving, mostly because they assert that the holiday celebrates the arrival of “white” Europeans in North America, which was bad because of the impact that arrival had on the pre-existing population of people in North America. Such leftists also assert that Christopher Columbus should be “canceled” because his exploratory travel from Spain paved the way for the migration of “white” Europeans to North America.

Yet, the family lineage of many of these leftists traces their presence in North America to times much more recent than the 17th century. For example, Ms. Hong’s family arrived in North America (from Korea) only a few decades ago. Why was it wrong for Europeans to come to North America in the 17th century, disrupting the pre-existing local population, yet acceptable or even laudatory, for Ms. Hong’s Korean family to come to North America in the 20th century, and in its own way disrupt the pre-existing local population?

Read it.

As well they should.

Read it.

Life in blue states is just an episode of SNL now.

My favorite part? When the lawyer pulled the race card. Classic!

…

The mayor (again, for a Massachusetts town) has repeatedly said he does not speak English.

City Journal.

In June, the president of the United Auto Workers celebrated the victory of one of “the UAW’s own” in a Democratic primary election. Shawn Fain wasn’t talking about a machinist from Flint or an assembly-line worker in Kokomo. He meant Claire Valdez, a program assistant in Columbia University’s visual arts department, who won the primary in New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic Seventh Congressional District with 58 percent of the vote. She will be prohibitively favored to win the seat in November.

Valdez came to politics through her union. She joined UAW Local 2110 as a Columbia employee, served on her unit’s bargaining committee, and in 2022 was elected chair of a unit representing 500 administrative coworkers. Local 2110 holds some 30 contracts covering universities, publishing houses, museums, and law firms, and its Columbia units have included thousands of graduate student workers.

Valdez offers a preview of what the UAW is becoming: a union that puts politics first and is leaning heavily on higher education to sustain its dwindling numbers. The results of this transformation are changing not just unions but higher ed itself.

The Foundry.

Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good.

Yet the last Democrat presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education.

The Trump administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage the Biden administration inflicted is still being felt.

What’s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still prevent real estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.

Interfering with homebuyers was a first-week priority for the Biden administration.

Read it.

The UN’s climate funds spent a July dialogue asking for more money. The best thing America did was stop sending it.

Read it.

I’m guessing this culprit had the same motivations as the white libs who tore up the Reflecting Pool liner or killed the grass on the National Mall to spell out “86 47.”

No better way to protest the guy you call the next Hitler than to deface the memorial of those who died fighting the real Hitler!

UPDATE: WWII Memorial Vandalism Suspect in Custody, Pirro Says

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Read it.

Minnesota, where the men use tampons, the women wear hijabs, and the poll workers are below average.

Right-wing activist Cam Higby showed up to a polling location in Minnesota to test the election integrity of the city. The very white man put on an entire burqa, with only a cutout for his eyes, told poll workers that he was a Muslim woman, and the results were horrifying.

The Foundry.

Under the administration of President Joe Biden, foreign service officers were asked to read materials on critical race theory, reparations, and so-called white fragility.

The Biden State Department provided a document titled “Resources for Talking About Racism and Injustices” to instructors of Foreign Service Officers. The materials covered topics including “When White Women Cry: How White Women Tears Oppress Women of Color.”

“As shown through this scenario, the White woman’s reality is visible, acknowledged, and legitimized because of her tears, while a woman of color’s reality, like her struggle, is invisible, overlooked, and pathologized based on the operating ‘standard of humanity,’” the article said.

Read it.

Eleven years have passed since Angela Merkel opened the floodgates of migration to chaos. The European Union, already firmly in the grip of statists and numerous left-wing currents, has since become almost unrecognizable. The advance of Islamization and the dissolution of established urban milieus, traditions and cultures are progressing and contributing to the disintegration of European societies.

What is particularly striking is the emergence of a kind of Islamo-Marxist movement, a fusion of radical socialist social ideals with a Sharia-based reinterpretation of society – as long as it is directed against the bourgeois West and the civilizational achievements of old Europe. Migration from North Africa and the Middle East is the united Left’s battering ram against the remnants of bourgeois European societies.

Against an increasingly tense backdrop came the Ceuta crisis: the invasion of more than seventy thousand mostly young men, tolerated as a triviality by the Spanish government – initially portrayed by the mainstream media, in a desperate attempt, as a kind of party invasion, later as a wave of poverty migration, and finally, with some reluctance, as an organized and aggressive political act. In the end, one sober conclusion remains: The European Union has no effective border protection whatsoever. Its organization Frontex is a band-aid, hastily stuck onto the gaping wound of a migration policy that, in reality, has made mass migration a goal of the left-wing consensus.

Read it.

As you all know by now, late last month a new migration crisis exploded in Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclaves in North Africa. Tens of thousands of African migrants (possibly as many as 72,000) swam around or broke through the barriers designed to keep them out of Spanish territory, and rampaged through the city. Most of them have supposedly returned home, but thousands remain. The local Spanish population is on edge, and women are terrified, since the New Spaniards have a well-known propensity to rape unprotected white women.

According rumors that have spread via social media, another mass invasion of Ceuta from Morocco is being planned for this Saturday, August 15. In response, the Ceuta military command has ordered the cancellation of leave for all soldiers stationed in the city.

Read it.

There is a madness peculiar to the over-educated, chronically online progressive—a psychosis of over-correction, not always malice, though the post-Widdicombe-Kirk strain is real and includes those capable of more than mere cruelty. It is the fever of a machine built to measure injustice, running so hot it melts its own circuitry.

Thankfully, we are hearing its death rattle. But death rattles can be undignified, and pockets remain—university towns, Twitter-addled London boroughs, humanities faculties, underfunded Labour fiefdoms—where the disease still festers.

The Telegraph (UK).

The queue of migrants watched in bemusement as volunteer clowns attempted to lift their spirits.

But Laurence Quetel, 67, and her dungaree-clad troupe’s juggling performance barely elicited a smile from the crowds waiting to be served lunch.

It was an incongruous performance in the squalid camp of Loon-Plage on the outskirts of Calais where 2,500 people were awaiting passage to the UK.

Everybody knows why they’re there, everybody knows that they’re intending to break the law, and nobody is doing a damned thing about it.

The Telegraph (UK).

Moving asylum seekers to middle-class areas will cost taxpayers more, Downing Street has admitted.

Andy Burnham will push ahead with his plan to send asylum seekers to more expensive postcodes as a “point of principle”, despite acknowledging the greater costs.

The principle being that progressives are never happy unless they are pissing in someone else’s soup.

Read it.

Information provided to Paxton’s office shows that Gabriel was diagnosed at 20 weeks’ gestation. The intended parents, who reside in California and are using a surrogate mother from Alaska, requested that Gabriel be terminated. Following their request, the surrogate traveled to Texas to seek protection and ensure that Gabriel could receive the lifesaving surgery he needed to survive.

The intended parents have refused to consent to the surgery upon birth and may attempt to transport Gabriel out of Texas to prevent him from receiving the procedure, according to Paxton’s office.

After learning of the situation, Paxton filed an intervention in the case and asked a district court to prohibit Gabriel from being removed from the state.

On Tuesday afternoon, Paxton announced that a Dallas County judge had entered an emergency temporary order preventing Gabriel from being removed from Texas.

Babylon Bee.

Oh, the humanity!

Read it.

Dozens of migrants who entered the Spanish territory of Ceuta during last month’s massive border surge have reportedly reached mainland Spain, contradicting the socialist government’s insistence that none had left the North African enclave.

Read it.

Because why not marry a Chinese national? It’s not like they’re loyal to our largest adversary on the planet or anything!

Read it.

Poor iddle special snowflakes.

Next, I suppose, is that every freshman gets a Participation Trophy.

Read it.

Well, I bet that the social justice warriors in Portland got really quiet about this one.

A dead body was discovered near an ICE facility in Portland, prompting speculation from the anti-ICE crowd that ICE agents, for no reason whatsoever, executed the man and left his body outside on the street.

Read it.

Former Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organizer Jake Altman argues that over the past 10-15 years, the organization has transformed from a relatively pragmatic working-class social-democratic group into a much more radical movement driven by younger activists and open to more extreme ideas.

Quillette.

Amnesty’s approach in the Rowling affair followed the familiar NGO playbook that has allowed human-rights organisations to survive crises for decades to preserve their moral authority and avoid meaningful accountability. First, downplay the incident by framing it as a regrettable breakdown in an otherwise scrupulous system; second, promise an investigation; third, wait for the news cycle to move on. But maybe that won’t work this time. Is it too much to hope that Rowling’s stand-off with Amnesty will finally produce a reckoning for an increasingly unaccountable sector?

A realist might well conclude that there is almost no chance of that. Organisations like Amnesty International—which command budgets that run into hundreds of millions, and even billions, of US dollars—have spent decades surviving controversies and evading scrutiny, even though they exert enormous political and cultural influence. An optimist, on the other hand, might point out that history has a habit of stripping moral halos from individuals and institutions (like the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America) that were once thought beyond reproach. The wheels of accountability may turn slowly, but turn they do.