History

doctor paradox right wing wiki knowledge base

Here’s something that has bothered me for nine years: almost everything you need to know about who runs American politics is public.

The FEC filings. The court rulings. The Federal Register. The board seats, the donor networks, the speeches they gave out loud, on camera, to rooms full of people who clapped.

And yet.

Almost nobody can see it. That’s not because it’s hidden. It’s because it’s scattered across thousands of filings, press releases and paywalled archives, and nobody has time to trace Leonard Leo to the Federalist Society, then to a 6–3 Supreme Court, then to the rulings that changed your rights. The information is free. Connecting it costs time, and time is what oligarchy counts on you not having.

So I connected it.

Today I’m opening the Doctor Paradox Wiki: Civics vs. Oligarchy. It’s more than 10,000 linked pages mapping the people, money, ideas and institutions of the modern American right. Every page links to the people, organizations and ideas around it, so following the links is the fastest way to see how the pieces fit.

What’s inside

  • The money. Dark money networks, donor-advised funds, the Koch Network, Citizens United, and a running tracker of what officials say about federal spending compared with what the contracts and filings show.
  • The Tech Right. How Silicon Valley money and ideas moved to the center of right-wing power. It runs from Peter Thiel and Palantir to Curtis Yarvin and the defense-tech pipeline. Start at The Tech Right Hub.
  • The 2026 midterms. With less than three weeks until November 3, the 2026 Midterms Hub covers every Senate and governor’s race, the most competitive House seats, ballot measures, and how the election is actually run and counted.
  • The plumbing. Timelines, court rulings, terminology, and step-by-step maps of things most people never see, such as how a voter gets removed from the rolls between elections.

Where to start

If you have fifteen minutes, go to Start Here. Five pages tell the whole story in order: the plan, who pays for it, the new money, the story that mobilizes the base, and what’s at stake in November. If you have an hour, pick one of six reading tracks.

If you’re coming back, What’s New is refreshed daily. In the past week alone the wiki added 172 new pages and made 121 major updates.

How it’s built

I came up in the Friendster era, back when we really believed the open web would put information in everyone’s hands. Silicon Valley lost that plot. I didn’t.

I built this with heavy AI assistance for research, drafting and cross-linking, plus a separate fact-checking pass. The rules are simple. Claims carry sources. Where sources conflict or a number can’t be confirmed yet, the page says so in a warning box instead of quietly picking a side. Fast-moving pages say when their figures were last checked. Short pages are placeholders, there so a name can be linked, and they fill in over time.

It’s free and has no sponsors. It grows every day.

Its older sibling, Foundations, is still home to the dictionaries and timelines. The two sites are meant to be read together.

None of this was ever secret. Keeping it scattered was the trick.

Go connect the dots.

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Jared Kushner as the Bad Samaritan in his role "volunteering" in the Middle East while raising funds for his private equity business

The Hunter Standard, Part 1. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is negotiating two wars as a “volunteer,” which means nobody gets to see what he owns. Reporters found out anyway.

Republicans “nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships” and “should not unplug it now.” — Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sept. 22, 2026

Even people who have never cracked a Bible know the story of the Good Samaritan. A man traveling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho gets jumped by robbers, stripped, beaten, and left half dead in a ditch. A priest comes along and crosses to the other side of the road. So does a Levite. Then a Samaritan, a member of a group the story’s audience despised, stops, bandages the man’s wounds, puts him on his own animal, hauls him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper two silver coins out of his own pocket, promising to cover whatever else it costs.

The point of the parable is that being a neighbor costs you something.

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is still there. It runs through the West Bank. And the man the President of the United States sent to bind up the wounds of the region has worked out a much better arrangement with the innkeeper.

The volunteer

Jared Kushner holds no government job. He has spent the second Trump term negotiating over Gaza, Iran, and now Ukraine alongside special envoy Steve Witkoff, the President’s longtime friend and fellow real-estate developer. Kushner does it as an unpaid “volunteer.”

It sounds selfless. It’s actually the whole trick. Government officials file financial disclosures — volunteers don’t.

All 50 states have Good Samaritan laws that shield people who stop to help in an emergency from liability for whatever happens next. Kushner’s volunteer status works like a Good Samaritan law for his portfolio: it shields him from having to tell anyone what he owns while he decides how wars end.

So reporters had to find out the hard way. In the first week of October, they found two things.

Table one: Gaza

On October 1, CNN reported that while Kushner was negotiating an end to the war in Gaza, his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, was the largest shareholder in Phoenix, one of Israel’s biggest insurers and asset managers. Affinity held 7.4% of the company, a stake worth more than $1 billion.

Continue reading The Bad Samaritan — The Hunter Standard, Part 1: Jared Kushner
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American election security has always been a bit of a mixed bag and, at times, a rogue's gallery

You learned the fairy tale in civics class. The ballot box is the one clean machine — the sacred mechanism, the great equalizer, the place where the powerful and the powerless cancel each other out one vote at a time. The peaceful transfer of power is American scripture. We even built a little ritual around it: the concession call, the inauguration, the loser standing on the dais clapping for the winner.

It’s a lovely story. The documentary record just doesn’t back it up — especially after the 2020 election and the events of January 6, 2021.

This is part of my daily Mini Histories series — 40-second tilt-shift AI-created video dives into the moments American memory conveniently misplaced, each one built around a thesis that runs against the grain of what you were taught. (You can find the whole archive on the channel.)

And the elections file is one of the thickest, because the thing the fairy tale leaves out is that American elections don’t get stolen on election day, via so-called voter fraud. They get stolen before it, broken around it, or bought after it — by the very elites who cry big crocodile tears about the unfairness of elections as they rig them in their favor (sometimes, with the blessing of SCOTUS including recently). Election denial becomes a whole grift in itself for the unpopular party that cheats. Using three failure modes, over two hundred years, one remarkably consistent cast of beneficiaries emerges again and again to wield power against the will of the people.

Let’s go to the tape.

Stolen: the backroom

Long before anyone “stopped the steal,” the steal was a gentleman’s arrangement — the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms where deals were made amongst men of influence.

The Corrupt Bargain (1824)

The first stolen presidential election happened earlier than you think — Andrew Jackson won the most votes and the most electors, and still walked away with nothing after the contest got thrown to the House and the runners-up cut a deal.

Reconstruction, Thwarted (1877)

A half-century later they did it again, only this time the price was an entire people’s freedom. To settle a disputed election, the parties traded away Reconstruction itself — federal troops out of the South, the door held open for Jim Crow.

Continue reading Stolen, Broken, Bought: A Short History of the American Election
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gerrymandering -- an illustrated guide to its effects

A new long-form data brief on how representativeness has been gerrymandered away — and the first installment of a series on how American democracy was engineered to stop being competitive.

In 2024, Americans went to the polls to elect 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. 366 of those races were over before a single ballot was cast.

Not “predictable.” Not “incumbent advantage.” Decided — by maps drawn years earlier, with software, by politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around. According to the Cook Political Report‘s 2024 ratings, only 69 of 435 House seats — 15% — were genuinely competitive in the general election. The other 85% were already in the Republican or Democratic column before campaigning began.

That’s the headline of the new Doctor Paradox data brief, The Gerrymandered Republic, and it’s the launch piece for a new series: Structural Sabotage, on the ways American democracy has been engineered to stop being competitive.

This first installment is the receipt-collection edition. It covers:

  • The vote-share vs. seat-share gap in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio — and Maryland as the Democratic counter-example, because honesty matters
  • Packing and cracking — the two techniques every gerrymandered map uses, unchanged since 1812
  • The efficiency gap — the metric that quantifies how badly a map cheats
  • The collapse of swing seats from 164 in 1999 to 82 today — a 50% loss of competitive districts in 25 years
  • What actually works — independent commissions draw 19% of America’s districts and produce 41% of its toss-up races, a four-to-one ratio in favor of taking the pen out of politicians’ hands
  • The Supreme Court’s 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, which closed the only federal door left

Click the image below to open the new mini-magazine style format:

gerrymandering -- an illustrated guide to its effects

Stay tuned for part 2 of the Structural Sabotage series — on how primaries weaponize safe seats — that will be coming next. If 85% of seats are decided before the general election, then who actually decides them? The answer is a much smaller and more ideological electorate than most Americans realize.

Please share. The cover-up that worked is still working, and the least we can do is make sure people can see the map.

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Introduction to the Doctor Paradox Mini History Series

An Introduction to Doctor Paradox Mini Histories

On March 21, 1861, the Vice President of the Confederacy stood up in Savannah, Georgia and said the quiet part out loud.

Alexander Stephens told a packed house in his Cornerstone Speech that the new Southern government’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” He didn’t whisper it. He didn’t code it. He printed it. The newspapers carried it. The crowd applauded.

A century later, Americans were being taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights. That tariffs played a starring role. That slavery was, you know, part of it — but really it was about “Northern aggression” and economic anxiety and the noble agrarian way of life. The most explicit confession in American political history got memory-holed so thoroughly that to this day, polite people at dinner parties will tell you the war’s causes are “complicated.”

That isn’t historical drift. That’s organized forgetting.

And it’s the reason this series exists.

The lie at the foundation: The Lost Cause

The Lost Cause wasn’t a passive misremembering. It was an active, well-funded, multi-generational rewriting project — pushed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, baked into Southern schoolbooks, cemented in marble on courthouse lawns, sentimentalized by Hollywood from Birth of a Nation to Gone With the Wind. They built the cover-up the same way you build any successful piece of infrastructure: deliberately, expensively, and over a long enough timeline that most people forget it was ever built at all.

Continue reading The Cover-Ups That Worked: Doctor Paradox Mini Histories
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Results from the Kansas experiment with SAVE Act rules -- 99.9% of the voter registrations blocked were US citizens

The Kansas Prophecy: We Already Ran This Experiment and the SAVE Act in Kansas Was a Disaster

When Kansas tried its early version of the SAVE Act, a whopping 31,089 eligible American citizens were blocked from voting. Meanwhile only 39 noncitizens were “caught”… over 19 years. And many of them turned out to be administrative errors.

That’s the final score from Kansas’s proof-of-citizenship experiment — the same core policy the SAVE America Act would impose on all 50 states. Republicans are selling it as “election security.” Kansas already has the receipts on what it actually is.

Been There, Done That

In 2011, Kansas passed a law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. It was the brainchild of then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who styled himself as America’s foremost crusader against the specter of rampant illegal voting. The law went into effect in 2013 and immediately went sideways.

DMV clerks weren’t allowed to request the new documents — or even tell people the requirement existed. Voter registration drives cratered: one effort at Washburn University collected 400 applications but managed to fully register roughly 75 people. A process that used to take five minutes stretched to an hour. Steven Fish, a warehouse worker born on a now-closed Air Force base in Illinois, couldn’t produce an acceptable birth certificate. Multiple plaintiffs in the lawsuit that followed were military veterans. All were U.S. citizens. None were the noncitizen bogeymen the law was supposed to stop.

The federal courts annihilated it. A 118-page district court ruling struck it down as unconstitutional. The 10th Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court declined to hear it. The judge sanctioned Kobach personally and ordered him to take remedial legal education — a humiliation nearly without precedent for a sitting state official. Kansas paid $1.9 million in attorneys’ fees to the winning parties. The state’s current Republican Secretary of State, Scott Schwab — who voted for the law as a legislator — delivered the epitaph: “It didn’t work out so well.”

The “Problem” Rounds to Zero

And it’s not just Kansas. Everywhere officials have looked for the noncitizen voting crisis, they’ve found a rounding error:

The Heritage Foundation itself — which advocates for the SAVE Act — found 68 documented cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s out of over a billion ballots cast; a rate of 0.0000001% (!). Utah reviewed its entire voter list of two million registrants and found one noncitizen registration and zero noncitizen votes. Georgia audited 8.2 million voters and found 20 noncitizens. The Brennan Center found 30 suspected cases across 23.5 million votes. This isn’t a policy responding to a problem. It’s a solution in search of a pretext.

The bill is also set to take effect immediately, which is fairly insane to think about such a radical change to the rules of voting mere months before an election. I’m old enough to remember when supposedly Good Governance dictated that we leave a Supreme Court seat empty for an entire year — allegedly so “The People” could have their say on this important lifetime appointment. If the precedent is supposed to be that no major structural changes happen during an election year, then how does the right wing justify the sudden about face? It’s okay only when a Republican is in office, no doubt.

Kansas at Scale

The SAVE America Act is Kansas’s disaster, federalized and supercharged. In addition to the proof-of-citizenship registration requirements, it would force states to hand voter roll data to DHS with no safeguards on how it’s used, criminalize election workers who register someone without the right paperwork — even if that person is a citizen — and effectively eliminate online registration, mail registration, and automatic voter registration programs used by millions.

It passed the House in February 2026. The Senate opened debate March 17. Prediction markets give it roughly an 11% chance of becoming law. Trump has threatened to block all other legislation — including DHS funding during a partial shutdown — until it passes. A leaked 17-page executive order draft would require all 211 million registered Americans to re-register in person if the Senate doesn’t comply.

SAVE Act Network Graph Explorer

Explore the web of people, organizations, and money behind the push.

Open full screen ↗

The Quiet Part Out Loud

Kansas proved that proof-of-citizenship laws don’t catch noncitizen voters. They catch citizens. The 31,000-to-39 ratio isn’t a bug — it’s the feature. And the bill doesn’t need to pass the Senate to serve its real purpose: manufacturing a narrative that “Democrats are blocking election security,” setting the stage for executive overreach, filibuster destruction, or post-election delegitimization.

The Kansas cautionary tale isn’t that the policy is flawed. It’s that it works exactly as intended — just the opposite of the way they’re selling it.

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Alex Pretti just before he died at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis

There was a weird controversy that set in after the events of the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in which a neo-Nazi 8chan bottomfeeder killed Heather Heyer by running her over with his car, while injuring 19 others. It was a shocking moment for the nation and all Trump had to say about it was they condemned violence “on many sides, on many sides” — though there were only two sides, and only one of those two sides had killed someone.

A couple of days later he managed to get through a scripted teleprompter statement explicitly condemning white supremacists and neo-Nazis only to walk it back again and then double down on it the following day, saying “The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement… What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs—and it was vicious and it was horrible. You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

First of all, both sides did not have clubs. One side had tiki torches and a car that killed someone while the other side was armed with hymnals and homemade signage. Secondly — where were those “other” fine people? The vagueness allows for almost any interpretation — were some of the people with clubs “very fine” despite beating others about the head? Were some of the people who didn’t have clubs themselves but were cheering on the people with clubs “fine people”? Maybe there was a gathering of small invisible fairies merely caught up in the shuffle and Trump wanted to just make sure that possibility didn’t get overlooked and this innocent group of delicate souls unnecessarily besmirched?

The primary chosen “debunk” that detractors ended up going with from the wet clay of Trump’s stilted statement alleges that the *other* side Trump meant by “both” were simply innocent local townsfolk objecting to the removal of a statue of their beloved hero Robert E. Lee. Besides the fact that the right-wing has failed to this day to produce a shred of evidence that such people were even there, and the inconvenient reality that the rally was openly marketed as a white supremacist event, organized by avowed white nationalist organizations, it doesn’t even matter if they could produce such evidence — because those people are still not very fine! Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States and exalting him is not good!

Robert E. Lee Was Not a Fine People

In fact, Robert E. Lee was a terrible human being whose noble cause was maintaining his ownership of other human beings — as well as a shitty general who paid zero attention to the battle after giving a set of static orders and hoping God would sort out the rest. All he had to do was defend the borders of his baby white homeland, but he was an arrogant showboat who couldn’t keep it in his pants and had to go attacking Pennsylvania for no good reason.

He was also a senseless butcher who had the highest casualty rate of the entire war, being so reckless with his soldiers’ lives that he may as well have fed them into a woodchipper. He chewed through his entire army of 100,000 only 14 months into the campaign and by the war’s end had effectively annihilated his original army multiple times over through cumulative losses, as well as obliterating a whopping 30% of the total Confederate forces overall despite leading only one army in one theater.

Continue reading There aren’t plenty of fine people on both sides
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Jack Smith, Special Prosecutor in two federal cases brought against Donald Trump

Five years ago today, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. The man who incited them has since been re-elected president, which scuppered the investigation into him by Special Counsel Jack Smith. If that whiplash isn’t enough to give you vertigo, consider this: we now have sworn testimony, under oath, from the prosecutor who investigated Trump laying out exactly why his office believed they could convict Trump for breaking the law—and why they were stopped.

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s December testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is the closest thing we’ll get to the trial that should have happened. In it, Smith methodically dismantles every defense Trump and his allies have offered, explains how the case was built on testimony from Republicans willing to put country over party, and makes clear that the evidence of Trump’s guilt wasn’t circumstantial—it was direct.

In this post, I’m breaking down the key takeaways from Smith’s testimony, sharing one of my AI #MiniHistory videos marking the anniversary, and giving you a way to interrogate the evidence yourself through an interactive NotebookLM bot. Because if there’s one thing the incoming administration is counting on, it’s that you won’t have time to read 255 pages of testimony. Let’s make sure they’re wrong.

January 6 in 40 seconds

But first, a J6 refresher course — again, for busy folks.

I’ve been into making these little AI #MiniHistory videos with Glif agents, trying to tease out important signposts along our road to dictatorship and other interesting moments in history to highlight. Here’s the one I did for today and the 5th anniversary of January 6, 2021:

Continue reading Remembering January 6: Here’s how Jack Smith saw it
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Liberal Tears illustrates the sneering cynicism of the right wing who refuse to articulate political values

There’s something conspicuously absent from American political discourse: actual discussion of values and the morals, ethical choices, and beliefs that go into the creation of good government policy.

Think about the last major political debate you watched, or the last campaign ad that stuck with you. How much of it was about what government should do versus who you should hate? How much was articulating a vision for society versus performing dominance over the out-group?

This isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.

When your policy positions are wildly unpopular — when majorities oppose you on healthcare, taxation, abortion, climate change, guns, and wages — you don’t engage on the substance. You change the subject. You make politics about identity, grievance, and tribal belonging. You turn every election into a referendum on vibes rather than vision.

The American right has become extraordinarily sophisticated at this evasion. They’ve built an entire media ecosystem designed not to argue for right-wing values, but to ensure those values never have to be argued for at all. And the Trump administration is chock full of people from that media ecosystem.

The Polling Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable reality the modern right has to navigate, and we need to trumpet: their actual policy preferences are not popular.

Exposed to the individual provisions of the Affordable Care Act, majorities supported them — even among Republicans. Majorities support raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting Social Security and Medicare, acting on climate change, keeping abortion legal in most cases, and implementing universal background checks for gun purchases. On issue after issue, when you strip away the partisan framing and ask people what they actually want government to do, the “conservative” position loses.

This creates a strategic problem. You can’t win elections by articulating positions most people reject. So you articulate… something else.

The Retreat from Argument

Meanwhile, the right-wing has indefensible values, which is why they no longer even bother to try to articulate them. Instead, they express them obliquely through “memes” and mores that evince cruelty, bigotry, narcissism, domination, supremacy, greed, selfishness, and contempt for vulnerability — all while maintaining plausible deniability through irony, “just asking questions,” and the ever-ready accusation that anyone who names the pattern is being hysterical or unfair.

This is the function of the perpetual rhetorical shell game: you can’t pin down a position that’s never stated plainly. The cruelty gets expressed through policy and aesthetic, but when challenged, retreats behind procedural objections or “economic anxiety.” The bigotry shows up in who gets mocked and who gets protected, but is never admitted as such — it’s always reframed as “common sense” or “tradition.”

Continue reading The Quiet Part Loud: Why the right stopped talking about values
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Wealth Cult -- rich men behaving badly, by Midjourney

A network of exceedingly wealthy individuals and organizations have channeled their vast fortunes into influencing American politics, policy, and public opinion — they’ve formed a wealth cult. And they’ve leveraged that cult and its considerable fortune to influence and in many ways dramatically transform American politics.

The most succinct way I have come up with to explain American politics is that the wealthy are dividing us over race and religion. Today far more openly than in the past, where much oligarch shadow influence was delivered via dark money kept intentionally untraceable back to its origins.

The term “dark money” refers to political spending meant to influence the decision-making and critical thinking of the public and lawmakers where the source of the money is not disclosed. This lack of transparency makes it challenging to trace the influence back to its origins, hence the term “dark.”

And, it is dark indeed.

Wealth cult anchors the trench coat

The Wealth Cult is one of 3 primary groups or clusters supporting the right-wing and generally, the Republican Party. It anchors the trench coat by funding the 2 cults above it: the Christian Cult, and the White Cult.

Its story is stealthy and significant.

A bunch of billionaires toast themselves to themselves, by Midjourney

The wealth cult has funded disinformation campaigns, the spread of conspiracy theories, created fake social movements through astroturfing, enabled violent extremists to attack their country’s capitol, aided and abetted a convicted felon, cruelly deprived vulnerable people (especially immigrants, poor people, and women) of the kind of state aid granted generously throughout the developed world, bribed regulators, rigged elections, crashed economies, and on and on in service of their extremist free market ideology beliefs (which, by the way, have resulted in catastrophic market crashes every single time).

They believe in “makers and takers,” or Mudsill Theory, as it was once called by pedophile and racist Senator and slavery enthusiast James Henry Hammond. Some people were born to serve others, they say. Hierarchies are natural, they claim. Wealthy men should make all the decisions — because that’s what’s best for everyone, they say in paternalistic tones.

I don’t buy it. I believe all men are created equal. So did a certain Founder of our country.

Continue reading Wealth Cult: The oligarchs influencing American politics from the shadows
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Slavery was the central question leading to the Civil War according to Abraham Lincoln, depicted here in a mini history video

But you don’t have to take our word for it — just ask the Vice President of the Confederacy what his reasons were in the infamous Cornerstone Speech of 1861, just a few weeks before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter:

“The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of . . . the equality of races. This was an error . . .

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”

— Alexander H. Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original

The “States’ Rights” Contradiction

One of the clearest ways to prove the war was about slavery—and not abstract “states’ rights”—is to look at how the Confederacy treated the rights of Northern states.

  • The Fugitive Slave Act Paradox: Southern leaders explicitly opposed “states’ rights” when Northern states attempted to exercise them. When Northern states passed “Personal Liberty Laws” (exercising their sovereign right to not enforce federal slave-catching laws), Southern states demanded the Federal Government override these state laws.​
  • South Carolina’s Declaration: In its “Declaration of Causes,” South Carolina specifically lists the failure of Northern states to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act as a primary grievance. They were not fighting for the right of states to choose their own laws; they were fighting for the federal government to enforce slavery across all states

The Rejection of the “Forever” Amendment (Corwin Amendment)

Perhaps the most damning evidence is the South’s rejection of the Corwin Amendment.

  • The Offer: In a last-ditch effort to prevent war, the Northern-controlled Congress actually passed a Constitutional Amendment (the original 13th Amendment) in early 1861. It would have protected slavery forever in the states where it already existed, guaranteeing the federal government could never abolish it.​
  • The Rejection: If the South were seceding simply to “protect their property” or “defend against Northern aggression,” they would have accepted this victory. Instead, they rejected it. Why? Because the amendment only protected slavery where it was, but did not guarantee its expansion into new western territories. The South seceded not just to keep slavery, but to ensure it could grow into a continental empire
Continue reading Was the Civil War about slavery? Yes.
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You’ll hear a common retort on the extreme right that now holds sway in the mainstream Republican Party, in response to protests about the dismantling of democracy in this country — that we’re “a republic, not a democracy.” Right off the bat, a republic is a form of democracy — so they are claiming something akin to having a Toyota and not a car. It’s a rhetorical trick, in which people who fully know better are hacking the simple ignorance of civics and basic political philosophy of the right-wing political base.

But it manages to get worse — the origins of the bully taunt “a republic, not a democracy” go way back — they’re actually located in the segregationist movement. Specifically, the concept comes from the pro-segregation book You and Segregation, written in 1955 by future Senator Herman E. Talmadge.

John Birch Society loonies laud “a republic, not a democracy”

The “republic, not a democracy” meme would go on to be featured in the John Birch Society Blue Book — an organization so toxically extremist that even conservative darling William F. Buckley distanced himself from them. They feared the idea that increasing democratization would be a shifting balance of power away from white conservative men, and they spun numerous conspiracy theories to explain this as the result of nefarious undercover plot to overthrow Western Civilization.

In reality, the trend towards greater democracy is something the Founders themselves envisioned — though they likely could not have imagined how it would turn out. They believed fiercely in self-governance, and a clear separation from the tyranny of kings.

Continue reading “A republic, not a democracy” came from segregationists
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progressive capitalism as articulated by Ro Khanna as interviewed by Heather Cox Richardson

After last night’s solid trouncing of the entire GOP steez by the Democrats in elections coast to coast (p.s. don’t miss Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech — it’s a banger), the time is ripe for articulating a new vision of the American Dream. And the vision of progressive capitalism is sounding like the right tone for a nation state that wishes to remain the leader of the free world.

I believe there is pent-up energy in the Democratic reservoir — with a deep bench of political talent of people who actually seem to care about other people. And who actually understand and exalt the real promise of America — as a beacon of hope for a new experiment in self-governance — if we can keep it.

One of those politicians is Ro Khanna, who represents the bulk of Silicon Valley in his California district. He recently sat down with my favorite historian of all time, Heather Cox Richardson, to talk about the vision of progressive capitalism for lifting us out of this moment of reactionary pessimism and “nostalgia populism” — a promise he says is fake in the age of AI because it won’t generate real opportunity (I agree). The following video is a great introduction to this promising vision for a way out of the quagmire we feel ourselves in.

What is progressive capitalism?

Progressive capitalism summary

1. What Khanna means by “progressive capitalism”

  • Khanna argues that place matters: for decades, US policy has let capital go wherever it wants and told people in hollowed-out towns, “move if you want opportunity.”
  • His version of progressive capitalism says:
    • Markets and free enterprise are valuable for freedom and innovation, but
    • Government must intentionally invest in people’s health, education, and communities so they can actually develop their capabilities where they live.
  • He calls for a national economic development strategy — a kind of “Marshall Plan for the United States” — tailored to each region:
    • Advanced manufacturing in some places
    • Trade schools and tech institutes (AI, data, cyber) so people don’t have to leave small towns
    • Jobs in healthcare, education, childcare, and elder care

2. Care economy and tech economy, not either/or

  • Heather Cox Richardson pushes him on care work (childcare, elder care, education), noting it’s already present in every community, dominated by women and immigrants, and chronically underinvested in.
Continue reading Progressive Capitalism: A vision for the future
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Common Sense pamphlet by Thomas Paine that changed the world

Common Sense Review: The Original Viral Manifesto and What It Teaches Us About Revolutionary Rhetoric

A reading guide for the disinformation age

There’s a certain type of political document that doesn’t just argue for change—it manifests the psychological conditions that make change feel inevitable. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is the template for this genre, and if you’re trying to understand how populist movements gain momentum, how institutional legitimacy crumbles, or how a pamphlet can reshape a nation’s self-concept in under 50 pages, you need to study this text like it’s a masterclass in persuasion engineering. And we’ll help you do just that in this Common Sense Book Review.

Published in January 1776, Common Sense sold an estimated 500,000 copies in a population of 2.5 million. Do the math: that’s a 20% penetration rate in an era when literacy wasn’t universal and distribution meant physical printing presses. In modern terms, Paine achieved what every content creator dreams of—he didn’t just go viral, he became the conversation.

But Paine wasn’t writing for the Continental Congress or the educated elite debating in Philadelphia drawing rooms. He was popularizing revolutionary ideas among ordinary colonists—farmers, tradesmen, shopkeepers—transforming an elite political dispute into a mass movement. This wasn’t theory; it was a manual for collective action that an entire society could rally behind.

The Structural Genius: Four Pillars, One Conclusion

Paine’s architecture is deceptively simple:

  1. Government vs. Society – Establishes the mental model that government is inherently suspect
  2. Monarchy is Absurd – Demolishes hereditary succession through both scripture and reason
  3. The Case for Independence – Makes reconciliation seem more radical than revolution
  4. America’s Material Capability – Provides the practical roadmap

He doesn’t start with independence — he starts by reframing how you think about authority itself. By the time you reach his actual policy proposal, your conceptual framework has been rebuilt from the foundation up. This is first-principles argumentation at its finest.

And the foundation he’s building? It’s the core democratic principle that the law should rule, not hereditary dynasties. Not kings, not aristocrats, not whoever was born into the right family. Paine is arguing for a system where the law governs consenting people who agree to the terms of mutual self-governance—even when they disagree on specific policies. This is the actual American political tradition, and reading Common Sense is the perfect antidote to the current disinformation campaign claiming “the US is a republic, not a democracy!” Paine clearly articulates what the public sentiment actually was at the founding: a forceful rejection of monarchy and inherited power.

Before we dive deeper into the specifics, here’s a video overview:

Mental Model: The Overton Window as Battering Ram

What Paine understood—and what every effective propagandist since has internalized—is that you don’t persuade people by meeting them where they are. You move the window of acceptable discourse so dramatically that your previously extreme position becomes the moderate compromise.

In 1776, most colonists still considered themselves British subjects seeking redress of grievances. Independence wasn’t just radical—it was treasonous. Paine’s innovation was to make continued loyalty to Britain seem like the radical position:

“As well can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress, as the continent forgive the murders of Britain.”

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What is fascism, and what are the signs of fascism? The fascist form of government is a complex and multi-faceted ideology that can manifest in various ways, making it challenging to pin down with a single definition.

Fascism resists simple definition precisely because it’s a syncretic ideology—adaptable to different contexts while maintaining core structural features. Rather than a fixed doctrine, it operates as a political methodology characterized by specific power dynamics, rhetorical strategies, and institutional patterns.

Structural characteristics of fascism

These are the ideological foundations and belief systems that define fascist movements—not merely policy positions but the fundamental orientations toward power, identity, and social organization that shape how fascism understands the world and its place in it.

  1. Authoritarian Consolidation: Fascism centralizes power through the dismantling of horizontal accountability structures, typically concentrating authority in a charismatic executive who positions themselves above institutional constraints.
  2. Ultranationalism as Identity Politics: Goes beyond patriotism to assert inherent civilizational superiority or racial supremacy, often manifesting as collective narcissism where national mythmaking replaces historical accuracy.
  3. Militarized Social Order: Valorization of martial virtues, hierarchical discipline, and violence as political tools. Fascist movements frequently draw from veteran communities and paramilitary traditions.
  4. Anti-Intellectualism and Epistemic Closure: Systematic devaluation of expertise, academic inquiry, and empirical reasoning in favor of intuition, emotion, and revealed truth. The “coastal elite” or “ivory tower” becomes a rhetorical enemy.
  5. Ethno-Nationalism and Boundary Enforcement: Xenophobia operating through strict in-group/out-group categorization, often targeting immigrants, religious minorities, or racialized “others.”
  6. Reactionary Temporal Orientation: Deployment of a mythologized past as political program—the promise to restore a golden age that never existed, weaponizing nostalgia against pluralism.
  7. Anti-Leftist Mobilization: Positioning communism, socialism, and progressive movements as existential threats, often conflating disparate left ideologies to create a unified enemy.

The Us vs. Them Architecture: In-group/Out-group dynamics as core infrastructure

Fascism doesn’t just exploit social divisions—it requires their constant production and intensification as its primary source of political energy. While most political movements contain some degree of group identity, fascism is structurally dependent on a stark binary between insiders and outsiders, making this dynamic its foundational operating system rather than an incidental feature. The movement coheres not around shared policy goals or governance philosophy, but around the ongoing project of boundary maintenance: defining, defending, and purifying the “us” against an ever-present “them.”

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