Got out of the habit of getting these out, partially because there’s so much going on, partially because it’s easier to fail into the scrolling micro-content rabbit hole that read and engage on bigger articles. Partially because I was writing some other stuff and July’s a little weird now too.

As Rage Against the Machine highlighted 30 years ago, we’re facing the interrelated struggles today. The push for conformity in gender identities and sexual preferences. The claims of immigrants not assimilating. The freedom of US state forces to be brutal at home and abroad, but requiring submission and compromise by everyone facing that brutality.

Have things gotten better for us in those 30 years? Are those our dreams?

Listening

Know Your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine

Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission

Ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite

All of which are American dreams

Know Your Enemy (Live, Toronto, 1993) by Rage Against The Machine on TIDAL

Listen to Know Your Enemy (Live, Toronto, 1993) on TIDAL

The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover by Akela Lacy, Maia Hibbett

The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover - The Intercept Briefing | Acast

How democratic socialists, boosted by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, swept the Democratic establishment in Tuesday’s primaries.

Reading

To the Trans Girl Who Just Lost at the Supreme Court: So Did I 26 Years Ago by James Dale

That’s the thing nobody tells you about these long fights. The arc doesn’t move in a straight line. The Boy Scouts changed, not because any court told them to, but because people came to understand how wrong it was to exclude a kid for who he was. That understanding built slowly, over the years, because people like you refused to disappear. Someday, I believe, America will understand with the same clarity why excluding transgender kids is wrong. When that day comes, it will be because of what you built. The record you made. The five years you actually competed and showed everyone watching that the sky did not fall.

Today’s ruling will never erase that.

I don’t know exactly when the next one will come. I waited longer than anyone should have to wait, and you deserve better than that. Every transgender kid in this country deserves better. But I’ve watched this country learn things slowly, painfully, things it should have known all along. We keep learning. I believe that, even today.

You don’t quit. You show up.

Forget the Founders. Celebrate the Enslaved Black People Who Escaped on the 4th of July. by Dr Stacey Patton

So you see, American liberty was not born as some kind of abstract universal and then unfortunately delayed to Black folks and other marginalized groups in its application. It was born inside a world where personhood was already being rationed. Those white men who spoke most beautifully about freedom were also living inside systems that taught them to experience Black bondage, Native dispossession, and women’s dependence as compatible with liberty. This ain’t no minor flaw in America’s founding. It is THEE founding logic.

The 4th of July survives because it helps Americans avoid this logic. It teaches the country to treat the Declaration of Independence as aspiration rather than evidence. It encourages us to say, “Yes, they fell short, but look at the words.”

But words are not innocent simply because they are beautiful. Political language must be judged not only by what it claims, but by what it permits. A declaration of equality that can coexist with slavery and Jim Crow and racial violence is not merely incomplete. It reveals the boundaries of the moral imagination that produced it. A proclamation of liberty that does not disturb the slaveholder’s household is not yet freedom. It is freedom arranged around the slaveholder’s comfort.

Forget the Founders. Celebrate the Enslaved Black People Who Escaped on the 4th of July.

What should Black folks celebrate this Fourth of July as America turns 250 and the loud and delusional people dress up in a made-in-China flag they keep violating?

A Better World Is Not Possible by Emmett Rensin

In the past few years, the American Left has reformed once again, largely in protest of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Like the Vietnam War a generation ago, those protesters have been aided by a central, clarifying conflict—there has been, relative to the DSA of yesteryear, a bit less getting sidetracked into pointless internecine conflicts over the progressive stack—and unlike the Weather Underground, they have been free of any organized Action Faction, of any real effort to cross from building occupation and protest into violence. Of course, this has not spared them the same accusations of pointlessness, unreasonableness, and bigotry for failing to adequately appreciate the glorious incineration of children by US taxpayer-funded bombs. Merely protesting outside of sites dedicated to the auctioning of violently seized land is treated as a kind of violence itself, met with the same yowls and fainting that would meet actual efforts to resist the flattening of Gaza City, the illegal settlement of the West Bank, or at least the United States’ insistence on providing political and material cover for the ethnic cleansing of a captive population. They are still called childish for believing that the world does not have to be this way.

But if it is childish, if any of this—the outrage, the horror, the belief that something must be done—is childish, it is only because a child could see it. It is only adults who find comfort in the reassuring sobriety of pessimism. I keep reading that these protesters—like us, like the left wing of the Weather Underground—have been seduced by anti-American propaganda, by the nefarious infiltration of subversive “ideology” into feeds and articles and schools. If you believe that, you must imagine 9/11 with a twist: hours after the towers fell, as FDNY and NYPD officers swarmed the scene looking for survivors, a second wave of al-Qaeda hijackers brought another plane held in reserve, crashing it into the smoldering ground to kill the rescue workers they had lured there with the first attack. This is ordinary business in Gaza and Lebanon. What dastardly “ideology” is required to find this fact appalling? What far more common ideology is required to shrug, to accept that this is the way the world must be?

The United States commands the world from atop a mountain of skulls. That other empires have done the same—will do the same—is no more a defense than that of a murderer who tells the court that homicide is common, unavoidable. There is no nation we will not bomb; no children we will not incinerate; no civilian we will not maim; no people we will not turn to ash if doing so serves some minor interest; no persecution, surveillance, or exploitation we will not tolerate abroad or at home so long as we are not too troubled by it in our ordinary lives. Much of it does not even make the headlines. In the first months of 2026, the United States has bombed nearly 20 sovereign nations. I do not believe that you could name two-thirds of them without consulting your favored LLM.

A Better World Is Not Possible | Los Angeles Review of Books

Did the Weather Underground have a point?

“This is ground zero for Data Centers”: How New Jersey is taking action against proposed AI facilities by Demi Guo

The throughline that activists are calling for is a moratorium, but the four-point plan only proves to them that their needs aren’t being heard. “We asked for a moratorium, and [Governor Sherrill]’s just recycling things that were already in the process in the State House anyway,” said Casey Palmer, South Jersey Progressive Democrats member who has been protesting a data center local to her in New Jersey’s Monroe Township. At one Monroe Township Council meeting, she recalled, the data centers were not even on the agenda, “but people still went and spoke anyway because they see through the lines.”

“A state-level moratorium on data centers would hit the pause button on new data center permitting and construction until more long-term regulations can be put in place,” Voos explained. “Communities shouldn’t have to keep fending off these new data center plans.” A moratorium would let New Jerseyans engage in their civic duty and decide on the policies they need, instead of putting out last-minute fires.

“This is ground zero for Data Centers”: How New Jersey is taking action against proposed AI facilities — PUBLIC SQUARE

The throughline that activists are calling for is a moratorium, but the four-point plan only proves to them that their needs aren’t being heard. “We asked for a moratorium, and [Governor Sherrill]’s just recycling things that were already in the process in the State House anyway,” said Casey Palmer,