Using the pretext of one mugging of one of his cronies, Donald Trump is sending 800 National Guard troops to take over Washington DC. This is a gross overreaction on his part, but it’s his first impulse: let’s use unnecessary force in inappropriate ways to punish a blue city. It’s disgusting, it’s undemocratic, it’s un-American, it’s tinpot tyranny.

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was among officials joining Trump on the podium, said 800 national guard troops would take to the streets of Washington over the coming week. “They will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners,” he said.

Trump, who lost the presidential election in DC to Democrat Kamala Harris by 86 percentage points, added that he may send in the military “if needed”.

By invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the president is federalising DC’s Metropolitan police department for the first time in its history. He said he was declaring a public safety emergency and putting the police under the control of the attorney general, Pam Bondi.

Trump vowed to allow police to “do whatever the hell they want” in the face of provocations. “That’s the only language they [alleged criminals] understand. They like to spit in the face of the police. You spit, and we hit, and they get hit real hard.”

No, you cannot allow the police to do whatever they want. The police are required to be bound by the rule of law. Sending in the military is a criminal act by a lawless, corrupt president.

Washington DC is just his test case. If he is allowed to get away with this, you’re next.

Tim Walz knows Trump is itching to send the army in to crush all those cities that voted Democratic — you can bet Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland are also high on his hit list.

This is a fascist takeover. React appropriately.

A historical analysis reveals something that will probably sound familiar.

“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Do you know anybody who fits that description? Can you think of maybe a large number of people like that?

“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
…
it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

Uh-oh.

Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”

Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.

It’s all a bit on the nose, I think.

Maybe I should take up farming as a hobby.

But maybe our leaders will turn out to be enlightened and kind?

I wasn’t mad at Sydney Sweeney before — she was just a dumbass ignorant of genetics and making a commercial for money — but now she has lost all benefit of the doubt. She is a registered Republican.

Richard Hanania, who wrote for white supremacist news outlets under a pseudonym before becoming an above-board conservative columnist, took credit for Sweeney’s affiliation.

“It’s been revealed that Sydney Sweeney has been a registered Republican since June 2024, just a few months after I set off the discourse about her being the end of woke,” he wrote on X. “It looks like I memed into reality the biggest Republican celebrity recruit in years.”

I can’t say she was much of a draw for me before, but now I’ll be even more unenthused about her work. I’ll just visualize Jon Voight in her roles.

The Department of Homeland Security is now trying to brighten our mornings by posting their vision of America: small towns full of white people, with a church across the street from a little one room schoolhouse, and children gathering around the flagpole to pledge their allegiance.

“Protect the homeland,” it says. But only if a cheesy painting by Thomas Kincade(!) is your idea of a homeland. Turn back time to your imagined glory days of pale schmalz and pastoral pablum.

Unfortunately, the estate of Thomas Kincade (he’s dead, you know — drug abuse and alcoholism did him in) is unhappy that his art was used without authorization. Or without payment, I thought uncharitably, given Kincade’s notorious greed…but no, this is actually a very good statement.

“At The Kinkade Family Foundation, we strongly condemn the sentiment expressed in the post and the deplorable actions that DHS continues to carry out,” the foundation wrote in the statement.

“Like many of you, we were deeply troubled to see this image used to promote division and xenophobia associated with the ideals of DHS, as this is antithetical to our mission,” the statement continued. “We stand firmly with our communities who have been threatened and targeted by DHS, especially our immigrant, BIPOC, undocumented, LGBTQ+, and disabled relatives and neighbors.”

I’m mildly surprised that the heirs of that drunken, selfish sot seem to have turned out to be decent people.

The DHS responded to this rebuke, naturally.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that the agency is highlighting artwork that celebrates America’s heritage and history.

If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook, she said in the statement to the Post. This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage.

What history book would that be? Some sloppy propaganda composed by PragerU?

Growing up, did any of you hear some variation of the line, “You have to eat all your [broccoli][peas][lutefisk], there are children starving in [China][India][Africa]!” We were supposed to be grateful for the plenty that we are lucky to have, and feel pity for all the blameless children who weren’t so fortunate. In my case, it didn’t work particularly well (I was well aware that that pile of soggy broccoli on my plate wasn’t going to be scooped up and sent to China), but I did learn to feel guilt that we weren’t sharing with those in need.

Not everyone learned to feel that guilt, I guess. Some seem to think it’s fine to starve children.

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.

Heartbreaking testimonies gathered from medical staff, parents of children hospitalized for malnutrition and displaced Palestinians struggling to survive paint a horrifying picture of acute levels of starvation and desperation in Gaza. Their accounts provide further evidence of the catastrophic suffering caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on life-saving aid and its deadly militarized aid scheme coupled with mass forced displacement, relentless bombardment and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

Even worse, the food aid stations are set up as bait, drawing out parents of starving children to be gunned down by Israeli snipers.

Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that as of July 24, Israeli forces have killed 59,587 people and injured 143,498, including 8,363 deaths since a surge in Israeli strikes began in March 2025.

Since May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food, most near aid distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. The GHF has rejected the U.N.’s figures as “false and exaggerated.”

UNICEF estimates that 17,000 children are among those killed since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, with another 33,000 injured. Speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting on July 16, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said the toll is like “a whole classroom of children killed every day for nearly two years.”

Meanwhile, Israel, with the assistance of the US, is intentionally starving children.

A third of Palestinians in Gaza are going without food for days at a time, Smith said. He said about 100,000 women and children were suffering severe acute malnutrition in the territory.

OCHA, the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, reports that malnutrition has risen among children under age 5 in Gaza. Of more than 56,000 who’ve been screened, 9% were assessed as being “acute malnourished” in the first two weeks of July, up from 6% last month and 2.4% in February. In Gaza City, 16% of 15,000 children were found to suffer from acute malnutrition, quadruple the percentage from February.

Even before the war, an estimated 97% of Gaza’s drinking water was contaminated by the sea, sewage and farm runoff and was therefore considered unsafe. Since October 2023, Israeli airstrikes against critical infrastructure such as wells, desalination units, sewage pumps, tanks and pipelines have caused the system to collapse, according to Human Rights Watch.

I no longer support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. Dismantle that horrible government and turn the entire country over to Palestinians, with independent UN monitoring to prevent retaliation. Although, to be honest, I think some retaliation is necessary for justice to prevail — Netanyahu, for instance, ought to spend the rest of his disgusting life in prison.

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Additionally, it’s committing genocide. I don’t care to hear from people who are splitting hairs to deny that Israel is a genocidal monster of a state.

Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.

In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society.

A number of international and Palestinian groups have already described the war as genocidal, but reports from two of Israel-Palestine’s most respected human rights organisations, who have for decades documented systemic abuses, is likely to add to pressure for action.

Could someone explain to me how Marc Andreesen has so much clout? Everything I’ve ever read by him says he’s a flaming goofball and wanna-be fascist. Here he is expounding on academia.

So he is afraid that the white children of Trump voters, a notoriously ignorant group that hates education (especially secular education), is being displaced from educational opportunities by ambitious immigrants and go-getter minorities. This is a non-issue. We’re supposed to prioritize lazy students (or to be fair, students who have been deprived of a good basic education by America’s fucked-up public education policy) over students who are willing to work hard because their parents voted for Trump? What an insane proposal.

As usual, this the dream of freaked out conservatives who think student radicals are dictating the course of higher education. Somehow these kooks get all kinds of mainstream coverage, despite the fact that their beliefs are entirely counter to facts and reason. As Henry Farrell says

…most mainstream American commentary about free speech in the modern American university labors under a misconception. It regularly suggests that out of control students and crazy professors are running the place. There is an entire intellectual industry of centrist and conservative commentary driving this narrative, including people like Bari Weiss, the proprietor of the Free Press, who made her bones by working with The David Project to attack Columbia professors for purported anti-Semitism. Marc Andreessen claims that “politically radical institutions” are driving a leftward shift by teaching students “how to be America-hating communists.”

Anyone who has day-to-day experience with actual American students knows that these claims are complete horseshit. Some students are left, some moderate, some conservative. Most are more interested in getting jobs than burning flags. America-Hating Communism 101 is not, actually, a required course on most campuses. Econ 101 often is. And those who are protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza? They have something to protest.

I know my students, and they’re diverse and you can’t pigeonhole them into the caricatures Weiss and Andreesen have fabricated. These students are here to learn — or to get certified for a better job — and they definitely do not sign up for a buttload of debt and years of work so they can tear down the establishment. What happens is they get into an environment where they are expected to pay attention to the world, and history, and politics, and they are outraged, honestly and righteously. You can’t change this, unless you think the university should be a propaganda mill that refuses to represent reality. It’s also the case that even if the student body was full of bomb-throwing radicals, it wouldn’t matter, because they don’t control our curriculum, and they don’t even control our big money investments, or the appointments of our faculty and administrators.

Ideally, I consider the students to be the voice of the university’s conscience, which is all too often ignored.

If you think students and a radical faculty are in charge, look at this news from Duke University.

Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) plans to implement new faculty productivity guidelines that would tie tenured professors’ salaries to external research funding, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle.

Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the school’s basic science units, which include departments ranging from biochemistry to neurobiology and various centers and institutes such as the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasingly difficult to come by due to slowdowns in grant review processes, an uptick in terminations and a lack of new funding opportunities since President Donald Trump assumed office.

Under the guidelines, each department must establish a minimum expectation for external grant funding. Tenured faculty members who do not meet the threshold — measured as a three-year average — would be given the option to either enter a 12-month “Safe Harbor” period, after which further inability to meet productivity standards will result in salary reductions, or consider career transition alternatives.

I guarantee you that the faculty did not approve massive salary cuts, tied to getting grants at a time when the government is destroying the apparatus of grant disbursement. This was a decision made in contradiction to faculty interests.

Farrell also made this lovely table that compares the perceived hierarchy of power within academia to the actual, little known (to the public, or to asshole pundits like Andreesen and Weiss) hierarchy.

I guess I’m at about level 4 in the distribution of power at the university, and even that’s misleading. If we were to plot the influence quantitatively, we’d have to use a power law distribution. Everything is in the hands of the board of trustees. Even where we faculty have some say in decisions, we can be overruled by the Board. Tenure, for instance, is proposed by faculty, but then has to be approved by the president, who then passes on the nomination to the Board, who can kill the idea without anything like a hearing or a discussion from the affected parties.

And students? Hah. Sorry. If students want to affect the administration of the university, they have to SCREAM and take over buildings and do all the things conservative hate, because they have no other options.

I hate it, but this Epstein story is destroying my confidence in government, which was already in tatters by Trump’s election. Now Mike Johnson has shut down the house of representatives early, sending everyone home for an early vacation, in order to prevent a vote to release the Epstein files? That’s a blatant coverup. The secrets are dribbling out…now we learn that Trump is mentioned many times in the files, but we don’t know the context.

It’s also raising questions we should have considered long ago. How did Epstein transition from high school teacher to billionaire with a private plane and his very own island? Personally, I’d like to know how to do that, but if it involves sex trafficking I’ll pass. Is the market for young girls that lucrative? Who is buying that access?

I’m also wondering if giving someone a billion dollars flips a switch in their brain and turns them into predators on children, or if being a predatory pedophile makes it easier to become a billionaire. Either way, it’s another reason to outlaw billionaires.