Julian Sanchez
@normative.bsky.social
He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. juliansanchez.com
One reason the political influence of billonaires has been pernicious is that at certain levels of wealth, people will fawn over whatever inane brain diarrhea you emit as though they’ve just bumped into Socrates in the agora.
Something that’s so striking in these emails is how…unimpressive Epstein is. He comes off as a pompous, sub-literate lech. Yes everyone is so mortifyingly solicitous of him! All fawning and flattery! Why?????
November 14, 2025 at 6:32 PM
One reason the political influence of billonaires has been pernicious is that at certain levels of wealth, people will fawn over whatever inane brain diarrhea you emit as though they’ve just bumped into Socrates in the agora.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
Something that’s so striking in these emails is how…unimpressive Epstein is. He comes off as a pompous, sub-literate lech. Yes everyone is so mortifyingly solicitous of him! All fawning and flattery! Why?????
November 13, 2025 at 3:43 AM
Something that’s so striking in these emails is how…unimpressive Epstein is. He comes off as a pompous, sub-literate lech. Yes everyone is so mortifyingly solicitous of him! All fawning and flattery! Why?????
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world for Republicans—until they weren’t, Adam Serwer argues.
The President Who Cried ‘Hoax’
Republicans went after Epstein only when it was politically useful.
bit.ly
November 14, 2025 at 6:28 PM
The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world for Republicans—until they weren’t, Adam Serwer argues.
OJ won’t rest untill he finds the real killers.
President Trump says he's asking the Justice Department to investigate Jeffrey Epstein's ties to high-profile figures, including political foes https://cnn.it/3M1ebp3
November 14, 2025 at 5:12 PM
OJ won’t rest untill he finds the real killers.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
We're now up to over 40 persons pardoned by Trump facing charges for new crimes. The recidivism rate is exceptionally high. Showing that the people sentenced were in fact hardened criminals... but wealthy enough to buy their pardons. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Ponzi Schemer Who Got Trump Clemency Faces 50 Years in New Fraud
A convicted Ponzi schemer whose 24-year prison term was commuted by President Donald Trump in 2021 now faces as much as 50 years behind bars for an investor fraud that took place after his clemency.
www.bloomberg.com
November 14, 2025 at 5:02 PM
We're now up to over 40 persons pardoned by Trump facing charges for new crimes. The recidivism rate is exceptionally high. Showing that the people sentenced were in fact hardened criminals... but wealthy enough to buy their pardons. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Bad headline aside, this is a pretty damning portrait of an institution decisively abandoning any real pretense to be a quasi-scholarly outfit in favor of manufacturing whatever slop power demands this week, like a ChatGPT made of meat.
Calling this a "gaffe" is the #BrokenTimes' way to dismiss and forgive the right-wing defense of a white supremacist. Credulity in the excuse of racism is racism.
In Explaining His Gaffe, Heritage Foundation Leader Pleads Ignorance www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u...
In Explaining His Gaffe, Heritage Foundation Leader Pleads Ignorance www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u...
In Explaining His Gaffe, Heritage Foundation Leader Pleads Ignorance
www.nytimes.com
November 14, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Bad headline aside, this is a pretty damning portrait of an institution decisively abandoning any real pretense to be a quasi-scholarly outfit in favor of manufacturing whatever slop power demands this week, like a ChatGPT made of meat.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
it's so funny that alex jones was totally right about everything, the government is a bunch of drug-addled pedophiles and masked regime thugs are grabbing people off the streets, and now he has to pretend it's all a hoax
November 13, 2025 at 9:44 PM
it's so funny that alex jones was totally right about everything, the government is a bunch of drug-addled pedophiles and masked regime thugs are grabbing people off the streets, and now he has to pretend it's all a hoax
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
Imagine having your village bombed by the US government because some old pedo got exposed with some emails.
November 14, 2025 at 3:17 AM
Imagine having your village bombed by the US government because some old pedo got exposed with some emails.
A really important point. You can't "solve"misinformation without understanding the ways beliefs function as identity markers more than attempts to represent reality accurately gone awry.
Misinformation *is* central to democratic problems today, but the solution is *not* to correct such epistemic failures directly. Instead, we must address them at their roots, in social identity.
Or so I argue in a new post for @apaphilosophy.bsky.social.
blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/12/t...
Or so I argue in a new post for @apaphilosophy.bsky.social.
blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/12/t...
The Problem is Epistemic. The Solution is Not. | Blog of the APA
Doubts about the wisdom of the masses are as old as philosophy itself. Yet interest in democracy’s “epistemic” merits has surged in the last decade—and it is no mystery why. Democracy is collapsing ar...
blog.apaonline.org
November 14, 2025 at 3:00 AM
A really important point. You can't "solve"misinformation without understanding the ways beliefs function as identity markers more than attempts to represent reality accurately gone awry.
Do political science profs have to explain to their students that, for most of American history, it was actually borderline unthinkable that elected officials and their spokespersons would constantly talk like trashy reality show contestants?
After calling Schumer a "Palestinian," Leavitt refers to "Gavin Newscum." So she's just ripping off her boss's smears now.
November 14, 2025 at 1:29 AM
Do political science profs have to explain to their students that, for most of American history, it was actually borderline unthinkable that elected officials and their spokespersons would constantly talk like trashy reality show contestants?
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university.
You’re working at a state propaganda factory.
You’re working at a state propaganda factory.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) — Texas A&M adopts policy requiring professors to get OK from school president to discuss certain race and gender issues.
November 13, 2025 at 11:48 PM
If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university.
You’re working at a state propaganda factory.
You’re working at a state propaganda factory.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
I’m surprised JD Vance has left this tweet and reply up.
November 13, 2025 at 11:30 PM
I’m surprised JD Vance has left this tweet and reply up.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
Actually, economists are agreed that pretty much the opposite of everything JD Vance says here is true. Immigrants are essential to fueling residential construction. Removing them in number will, and has, caused a slump in new construction.
JD Vance: "A lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive. Why is that? Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens."
November 13, 2025 at 11:03 PM
Actually, economists are agreed that pretty much the opposite of everything JD Vance says here is true. Immigrants are essential to fueling residential construction. Removing them in number will, and has, caused a slump in new construction.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
Starting a war to distract his base from the Epstein files
November 13, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Starting a war to distract his base from the Epstein files
This is both comically ignorant economically and, on the immigrant count, empirically wrong by a factor of 2-3.
JD Vance: "A lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive. Why is that? Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens."
November 13, 2025 at 10:58 PM
This is both comically ignorant economically and, on the immigrant count, empirically wrong by a factor of 2-3.
One thing that seems like it would be potentially valuable right now is for some kind of private/academic consortium to try to compile and release data about the state of the economy, since it seems like official stats are almost certainly going to be either nonexistent or wildly unreliable.
NEW — I spoke to DoorDash about the White House claiming the company's report shows "inflation has been tamed" and whether that's an interpretation one should make. An economist also weighed in, pointing out dictatorships use data obfuscation as a tool, and right now they're "grasping at straws."
WH claims 'inflation tamed,' per DoorDash stats. Company says that's not in its report.
It comes the same week we learned the WH would likely not release key economic reports for October.
www.thehandbasket.co
November 13, 2025 at 10:44 PM
One thing that seems like it would be potentially valuable right now is for some kind of private/academic consortium to try to compile and release data about the state of the economy, since it seems like official stats are almost certainly going to be either nonexistent or wildly unreliable.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
NEW — I spoke to DoorDash about the White House claiming the company's report shows "inflation has been tamed" and whether that's an interpretation one should make. An economist also weighed in, pointing out dictatorships use data obfuscation as a tool, and right now they're "grasping at straws."
WH claims 'inflation tamed,' per DoorDash stats. Company says that's not in its report.
It comes the same week we learned the WH would likely not release key economic reports for October.
www.thehandbasket.co
November 13, 2025 at 9:52 PM
NEW — I spoke to DoorDash about the White House claiming the company's report shows "inflation has been tamed" and whether that's an interpretation one should make. An economist also weighed in, pointing out dictatorships use data obfuscation as a tool, and right now they're "grasping at straws."
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
There's a tendency among a certain type of poster to assume everything they hate about politics and the state can be blamed on avarice, and I'm here to tell you it's actually worse than that.
I continue to disagree with this. The goal of mass detention is mass deportations. A private prison company leasing 100 beds to ICE gets paid the same if the beds are filled by 100 people for a year each or 1,000 people for a few days each. They don't earn more with long-term detention.
November 13, 2025 at 10:36 PM
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
There's a tendency among a certain type of poster to assume everything they hate about politics and the state can be blamed on avarice, and I'm here to tell you it's actually worse than that.
I continue to disagree with this. The goal of mass detention is mass deportations. A private prison company leasing 100 beds to ICE gets paid the same if the beds are filled by 100 people for a year each or 1,000 people for a few days each. They don't earn more with long-term detention.
It's not about deporting them. It's about detaining them indefinitely and enriching Prisons for Profiteers and the grift the Convict in the Oval Office collects per detainee.
November 13, 2025 at 10:29 PM
There's a tendency among a certain type of poster to assume everything they hate about politics and the state can be blamed on avarice, and I'm here to tell you it's actually worse than that.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
For the first time since it's founding there's an actual conspiracy that indicts powerful elites and there are actual documents that actually prove it and Infowars is like "nah"
November 13, 2025 at 3:47 AM
For the first time since it's founding there's an actual conspiracy that indicts powerful elites and there are actual documents that actually prove it and Infowars is like "nah"
I have the same reaction to American Integralists as I do to progressives het up about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine: In what toothfairy fantasy universe are you imagining you’re not *immediately* the victim of this power?
A big problem for the Catholic integralists in their project to convert America into a Catholic theocracy is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are quite confident Catholicism, as set of metaphysical claims, just ain't true.
More US adults identify with no religion (29%) than with the Catholic Church (19%) or evangelical Protestant denominations (23%).
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
November 13, 2025 at 10:02 PM
I have the same reaction to American Integralists as I do to progressives het up about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine: In what toothfairy fantasy universe are you imagining you’re not *immediately* the victim of this power?
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
A big problem for the Catholic integralists in their project to convert America into a Catholic theocracy is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are quite confident Catholicism, as set of metaphysical claims, just ain't true.
More US adults identify with no religion (29%) than with the Catholic Church (19%) or evangelical Protestant denominations (23%).
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
November 13, 2025 at 9:54 PM
A big problem for the Catholic integralists in their project to convert America into a Catholic theocracy is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are quite confident Catholicism, as set of metaphysical claims, just ain't true.
Reposted by Julian Sanchez
This is traumatizing. We are going to have hundreds of thousands of traumatized men, women, and children afraid to leave their homes when this administration leaves office for fear they will "feel hands all over me". Utterly sickening www.yahoo.com/news/article...
November 13, 2025 at 9:39 PM
This is traumatizing. We are going to have hundreds of thousands of traumatized men, women, and children afraid to leave their homes when this administration leaves office for fear they will "feel hands all over me". Utterly sickening www.yahoo.com/news/article...
I have never seen an image or this guy, regardless of the topic under discussion, where he doesn’t have that same shit-eating grin plastered on his face.
Hassett: "The Council of Economic Advisers informs me that they think we're probably gonna see something like 60,000 job losses because of the shutdown, and it'll take a while to get that back."
November 13, 2025 at 9:26 PM
I have never seen an image or this guy, regardless of the topic under discussion, where he doesn’t have that same shit-eating grin plastered on his face.