Paul Crider

How to Eat An Elephant The essential plan to save America by persuading voters to discard MAGA into the ash heap of history (where it belongs). Featuring a foreword by Jonathan V. Last.

I pre-ordered @sarahlongwell25.bsky.social's book because @jvl.bsky.social told me to.

New Liberal Currents podcast about to drop!

Haha I'm just kidding. Unless ...

I am for this kind of thing.

This is one of the most jaw dropping moments of Trump’s presidency. Up there with brainstorming about injecting bleach and shining light up orifices to cure COVID.

I've got the eleven year old to myself tonight for movie night (without the 8yo). I'm thinking it's time to bust out Highlander.

We are going to need trials for war crimes and countless human rights violations.

This, again, is not about liberalism, which merely pushes us towards the only good choice of this trifecta. Preserving civil society, moral traditions, and healthy communities given the existence of large powerful states is not a unique challenge for liberalism, nor has liberalism been worse at it.

I too remember the earlier, woke wars. tons of spent microaggression munitions strewn about everywhere, friends crying out for God as they were slowly cancelled...look, if you weren't there, you'll never understand

Ok, since I’ve gotten a few “you don’t know for sure it’s not true!” let’s briefly say why. In a hyper-strict Cartesian sense of “know,” you can’t really “know” whether anything or anyone is conscious except yourself. But in the everyday sense, outside the dorm room…

Respect. Liebe Mutti.

That Trump repeats calls for Iran's unconditional surrender on same day he's got the defence industrial chiefs round for an emergency meeting on military supplies perfectly sums up his grasp of ends & means.

Oil prices are primarily being affected by choking the Strait of Hormuz, right? That seems like the kind of thing that *might* clear up quickly if Trump takes an early offramp?

I, for one, am here for #SwoleTheHutt. Lotta folks out here showing their asses with implicit anti-Hutt assumptions.

Highlighted passage from Kindle of Karl Marx in America. The passage says one of the hallmarks of millennial socialism is hatred for liberalism. It goes on to say that these socialists aren't thinking about FDR and the New Deal, but are really evaluating neoliberalism.

Ooh. I also found this refreshing because it's rarely stated so baldly. "One of the hallmarks of millennial socialism is its hatred of liberalism."

Piker gives strong ratfucker vibes, in the grand leftist tradition of the Green Party and Sanders campaign staff. He's soft on left-coded authoritarian regimes. And he's also just kinda gross. Mamdani and Piker are a world apart, imo.

Oh, he definitely does. I just think there's a danger in thinking that liberal democracy has a singular parent of Christianity.

Papa Frank on Western Civ.

I appreciate the intervention that, contra Rubio, western civilization is about cosmopolitanism, not ethnicity; descended from Christianity, but divorced from religion. I think liberal universalism has more and alternative origins than Christianity, however.

I don't think we should listen to *either* of these bozos.

🧵Feels like shouting into the void, but it is essential to note that the Trump/Rubio gutting of the State Department and blowtorching of US diplomatic capacity and credibility is an accelerant to this spiraling war and will seriously undercut US/allied efforts to pick up the pieces after. 1/

Constantly gaming like this. I've got like twenty pages left of What Is the Third Estate, by Abbé Sieyès, left over from a couple years ago. Gonna finish that to catch up. And I've skimmed Cugoano before, but planning to get through it now because it's short.

Like most Americans, I support abolishing ICE.

I started a biography of José Martí, which was long, so already taking awhile. Then I paused it to read Karl Marx in America, which was long and took weeks to finish. The plus I'm always reading a few books at a time, so ...

Anyway, good fodder in case we want to relitigate the Marx and liberalism discussion from a couple weeks ago. lol

To be sure, Hartman talks about the bad kinds of Marxism too, and one of the good things about the book is he's pretty clear-eyed about the authoritarian strains of 20th century communism. That's just not as interesting as the lines drawn between Marxism and various groups and movements in America.

It was fascinating to read about the Johnson-Forest Tendency, or the team of Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James, & Grace Lee (Boggs). I'd read D'kaya's Marxism & Freedom a couple years ago and hadn't realized she was American. Liberals should know about social justice-oriented, anti-Stalinist Marxisms!

Particularly interesting to me was how Marx's ideas were adapted in liberal-adjacent ways, as in the "sewer socialists" of Milwaukee and Eugene Debs's democratic socialism. But there are also just fascinating tidbits. Like, who knew socialism was big in Oklahoma in the early 20th century?

Embarrassing that it's March and I'm only now starting the 2026 book thread. I've read a bunch but finished nothing.

Anyway, I highly recommend @andrewhartman.bsky.social's book. It's worth reading just for the first chapter, on Marx and the Civil War, and the influence of the Forty-Eighters.

2026 Book Thread!

1. Karl Marx in America - Andrew Hartman. Fantastic, sprawling history of Marx's reception in the US. Really valuable for libs and other non-Marxists bc it presents the ideas in easy language. Shows Marx's deep connection to America & the wide diversity of Marx-ish thought.

Spain’s MEP Irene Montero speaking to reporters

Irene Montero: No woman has ever been freed by American bombs or illegal aggression — Not in Syria. Not in Iraq. Not in Afghanistan. It will not happen in Iran either

When they want to sell their oil wars, their wars for profit, their imperial wars — they hide behind women’s rights to justify them