Kevin Elliott
LightNews LightNews
banner
kjephd.bsky.social
Kevin Elliott
@kjephd.bsky.social
29K followers 1.1K following 21K posts
Political theorist studying democracy, ethics, & institutions. Author of Democracy for Busy People (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo194847654.html); more at kevinjelliott.net. Generally poasting my way through this thing
Posts Replies Media Videos
kjephd.bsky.social
Watching hella fat boats turn is so satisfying
November 14, 2025 at 2:04 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Every time a new TCW piece drops and you consider engaging with it, just tell yourself:
I'm not falling for that hot take. That's clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at. I refuse to participate in that kind of perversion
November 14, 2025 at 4:17 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
What is a day in New Orleans without beignets
November 14, 2025 at 12:32 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
This new version of the political game requires a very different response than the ordinary one of waiting for thermostatic backlash to return power to you, & you simply hold onto it.

If Democrats have power returned to them, they'll have to dismantle the Trumpian presidency & refound democracy.
This extraordinary reality calls for something different from the usual approach. Senate Democrats may think they are fighting to position themselves for crossover votes in the midterm elections, but they are actually in a battle for self-government itself — for democratic freedom and the rule of law. In that fight, the goal of any legislative strategy should be to inflict as much pain on the ruling party as is feasible. Democrats were, up until this week, meeting the task at hand. The polling was clear: Republicans were losing the shutdown. Americans were souring on Trump even more than they already had. And nearly half of them were willing to keep the government on hiatus if it meant Congress would retain enhanced tax credits for health insurance. All of this is to say that Democrats will probably do well next year, especially if there is a crisis or disaster between now and next November. The problems come afterward, if and when they hold power in Washington. The task of a new Democratic Congress will be to hold the president accountable, to curb his lawlessness, to investigate his administration and to lay the groundwork for the reconstruction of the federal government in the wake of the implementation of Project 2025 and the president’s reactionary terror. If they win, Democrats will have to use their newfound authority to rethink, even dismantle, agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They may need to walk back the Bush-era decision to consolidate those agencies and others under a single department, given the wild abuses perpetrated under this administration and its predecessors. It will need to give serious thought to major political and social reform, including D.C. statehood, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, a new voting rights act and federal protections for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, including the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Democrats will also need to embrace the legislature’s constitutional authority to structure the executive branch and the judiciary, up to and including Supreme Court reform.
November 13, 2025 at 4:41 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
@jamellebouie.net clearly lays out the epistemological problem: the political game has fundamentally changed, but Democratic dinosaurs who've spent decades playing it the old way (pluralist politics) & are hugely insulated from the concrete realities of the new friend-enemy game can't see it.
Again, I can see the logic. I can even see the larger perspective. In this understanding of the overall political environment, Trump is no different from any president who overreaches in pursuit of his agenda. Last week’s elections were one predictable backlash, and another is on the horizon. Chastened by voter discontent, Republicans will retreat and try to salvage what’s left of their political position. It is, in other words, an ordinary moment that calls for ordinary politics. But this view is wrong. This isn’t an ordinary moment. The president is openly lawless. After firing thousands of civil servants and slashing entire agencies, he has turned much of what’s left of the federal government into a tool of authoritarian consolidation. He’s transformed the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies into a de facto secret police force, terrorizing communities across the country. He wants the National Guard to occupy American cities and has publicly mused about sending the military against protesters. He’s turned the Department of Justice into his personal law firm as well as the enforcement arm for his efforts to suppress dissent and force the institutions of civil society into compliance with his will. And his supplicants in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, are willing and eager to sacrifice their independence as constitutional actors on the altar of his personal rule.
November 13, 2025 at 4:36 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
Details:
The new message listed the types of suffering the church leaders say many undocumented migrants experience, including “arbitrarily” losing their legal status, being subject to poor detention conditions, and being afraid to take children to school or go to church. “We feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity,” the bishops wrote “Our immigrant brothers and sisters … are living in a deep state of fear,” El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, who leads the bishops’ committee on migration, told the ballroom of clerics in announcing “You Are Not Alone.” “I’ve been heartened by the statements of solidarity of so many of you and others in recent months.,” he said. “Of course as pastors devoted to the Gospel, we know statements are not enough.” The nationwide program has four purposes: to provide emergency support for immigrants; to support them with pastoral care; to communicate the breadth of Catholic teaching on immigration (countries have the right to control their borders, but humans have a right to migrate for better circumstances and immigrants should be treated with dignity); and to demonstrate public solidarity with them “Jesus says very clearly, at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening,” said Leo, the first pope from the U.S.
November 13, 2025 at 4:03 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
November 12, 2025 at 9:27 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
The gym looking like a sad, crying robot
November 12, 2025 at 1:54 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
This is the table of contents of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Look at those chapter titles!

"Elixirs of Death," "And No Birds Sing," "Indiscriminately from the Skies," "One in Every Four," "Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias," "Nature Fights Back."

Irresistible! How could not want to read these
Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 A Fable for Tomorrow i 2 The Obligation to Endure 5 3 Elixirs of Death 15 4 Surface Waters and Underground Seas 39 5 Realms of the Soil 53 6 Earth’s Green Mantle 63 7 Needless Havoc 85 8 And No Birds Sing 103 9 Rivers of Death 129 10 Indiscriminately from the Skies 154 11 Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias 173 12 The Human Price 187 13 Through a Narrow Window 199 14 One in Every Four 219 15 Nature Fights Back 245 16 The Rumblings of an Avalanche 262 17 The Other Road 277 List of Principal Sources 301 Index 357
November 11, 2025 at 4:45 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Cartoon showing an inventor saying he's invented a device to let people relive the worst moment of their day over and over. It is the snooze button on an alarm clock
November 11, 2025 at 12:41 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Sounds like somebody from higher ed got some facetime with the boss
Look, assuming everyone treats us badly because that’s the way I am, but we’re taking trillions of dollars from students. You know, the students pay more than double when they come in from most foreign countries. I want to see our school system thrive. Trump insisted, “It’s not that I want them, but I view it as a business.”
November 11, 2025 at 2:54 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
This is so insightful:
Noem and her stylists—those who’ve arranged both the frightened men in the cell and Noem’s luxurious locks—have made her a model for Trump women, “sexy & strong”; a thirst trap for right-wing men; and bait for everybody else. That is, it’s an invitation to criticize her in the very terms we condemn as sexism. To talk about her look rather than her ideas. “See?” fascists say. “Who’s the sexist now? Hypocrites!” The video is a trap because for fascism the aesthetic—the physicalized embodiment of a theory of power—has always been a central “idea.” But that trap only “works” if we judge its result by pre-fascist norms. The Noem video, like the ASMR video of faceless immigrants being shackled, dares us to name their intention: the sadistic eroticization of power. The trap is: name it, and then you’re the pervert, the one who makes something perfectly ordinary—a White House video (or fetish porn), a video of a cabinet secretary (or Lara Croft with shirtless caged men)—weird. Which is why we have to identify the whole apparatus of the trap, not just the bait.
November 10, 2025 at 9:58 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Methodology slide:
Methodology slide saying n = 61,798 and the sampling comes from the G7 countries populations
November 10, 2025 at 6:17 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
They obviously hire the internet's most skilled trolls & rage-farmers to write all the headlines these days

I know this, I know why they've done it, and here I am, falling for it

(if you must: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...)
New Yorker headline: What Did Men Do to Deserve This? Changes in the economy and in the culture seem to have hit them hard. Scott Galloway believes they need an “aspirational vision of masculinity.” By Jessica Winter November 9, 2025
November 10, 2025 at 5:47 AM
kjephd.bsky.social
Chat, is it good for the Republican-controlled federal government to kill jobs in the purplest state in the Union
apnews.com/article/geor...
ATLANTA (AP) — A South Korean solar company says it will temporarily reduce pay and working hours for about 1,000 of its 3,000 employees in Georgia because U.S. customs officials have been detaining imported components needed to make solar panels. Qcells, a unit of South Korea’s Hanwha Solutions, said Friday that it will also lay off 300 workers from staffing agencies at its plants in Dalton and Cartersville, both northwest of Atlanta.
November 9, 2025 at 11:48 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
You'd be in good company:
How posterity would judge an American coin featuring a sitting president remains an open question. But if the Washington/Coolidge coin of 1926 is any measure, the answer is: Not well. The U.S. Mint struck a million of the half-dollars featuring the first and 30th presidents. Nearly 860,000 of them were returned and melted.
November 9, 2025 at 2:25 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
This is an official rendering of a planned bicentennial coin from the US Treasury
Obverse side of US 1 dollar coin showing Trump with his fist raised with a flag behind him with all caps "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT" above him. The caption reads: Depicting the president on both sides of the coin also poses production challenges. US Treasury
November 9, 2025 at 1:19 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Here are some key passages. The betrayal of the law & Constitution has cost Trump's Dept of Justice literally thousands of professionals, and now many lawyers are dedicating their lives to stopping his evil, anti-American agenda.
Government attorneys have been driven out of the public sector in droves since the start of the Trump administration — and more and more of them are starting boutique firms to fight back against the government and agencies they once represented. The moves come at a perilous time for the Department of Justice. Longtime lawyers with both institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of the law are leaving the federal government even as it is bombarded with legal challenges to Trump policies and facing increasing questions from judges who are skeptical of DOJ’s representations in court. Those developments, former government lawyers warn, will have dramatic long-term consequences. Many attorneys have left the agency because they came to believe “that they could be given unethical or illegal orders by Justice Department leadership,” Young said. “We’ve seen that happen time and time again — and a lot of people haven’t been willing to put themselves in that position.” Some of the new firms have an explicit mission to fight back against Trump policies, including the administration’s broad attacks on federal workers. Others want to fill what they say are gaps in areas like civil rights enforcement and anti-corruption law. And they count among their partners some of the most accomplished and seasoned lawyers from the government’s premier litigation and administrative law shops.
November 7, 2025 at 5:18 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Here was my little matrix of factors:
November 7, 2025 at 1:57 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
"Not every whim that buzzes into your head is a keeper, your majesty" shouldn't be impossible to say, but when one of the things you're most famous for is disposing of a critic via bonesaw, you're gonna get this:
Exhibitions of design work would be set up for Prince Mohammed, who was a hands-on chair of Neom. “The underlying emotion that was felt in the room was fear, people would just mimic whatever he had to say,” said the planner. “MBS would arrive with his entourage of about 40-50 people. And as he walks around, there’s absolute silence.” At one point he would say that he liked something and “he would turn to his entourage and they'd all go, ‘love it’”. Then he would see something he didn’t like and his entourage would all shake their heads, tutting.
November 6, 2025 at 5:44 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Absolute monarchy means nobody could say to MBS—when he suggested turning a city on its side, like a book—that it was probably the dumbest idea they'd ever heard
MBS suggesting he turn a city into a book
November 6, 2025 at 5:39 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Somebody needed to be in the room, when whoever suggested having "Sixth Avenue at 150m in the air, 7th Avenue at 250m, 8th Avenue at 350 and so forth," who was in a position to say, "this is crazy," and for others to be able to agree
"Sixth Avenue at 150m in the air, 7th Avenue at 250m, 8th Avenue at 350 and so forth," he said earlier this year.
November 6, 2025 at 5:35 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
OpenAI looking for a bailout guarantee from the government seems, uh, bad, considering the fact that its spending on data centers seems to be single-handedly holding American capitalism together
November 5, 2025 at 10:13 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Hmmm
William F Buckley commemorative stamp
November 5, 2025 at 8:18 PM
kjephd.bsky.social
Well, well, well

It appears our victory is complete.

Goodnight, friends. Enjoy the feeling
CA Prop 50 is approved by voters
November 5, 2025 at 4:06 AM