Michael J. Steudeman

After the Civil War, many in Congress invoked education to transform white Southern prejudices & secure republicanism. They abandoned that vision to pursue superficial feelings of reconciliation. We still live with the consequences. Learn more in my book: www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Abse...

After years of school library closures, Detroit officials are considering a plan to reopen libraries across the district by fall 2027. The proposal also includes expanded air conditioning and building upgrades.

I don't know that there is a template or a "secret sauce" or a clear-cut lesson to take from this. But if there is one it's the idea of treating social media as the hostile territory that it is, of actually acting like you are a participant in propaganda warfare and not like a consumer.

It’s telling that the part of Obama’s remark people are angry about is the Cheesecake Factory part and not the Saddam Hussein comparison

AOC: "As AI begins to encroach in our society, their goal is to take your cognition away from you. AI's goal is to take your thoughts away from you, your ability to think away from you, so that you become dependent on a machine ... reading books is active resistance"

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

Pretty nearly the whole actual point of getting white college students to go to Mississsippi for Freedom Summer was to draw national media attention

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

holy smokes, conan strikes up a chat with a random lady on the subway and she immediately starts riffing on his level, no problem.

I'm not sure how much more blatant it can get that these guys are looting the federal government and then pointing over there and saying "look what THOSE BLACK PEOPLE ARE GETTING AWAY WITH!!!" bsky.app/profile/atru...

THEY ARE NOT POWERLESS TO STOP HIM! Go back to Washington, stand on the steps of the Capitol and demand Johnson and Thune recall the House and Senate, and impeach him. THIS IS HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK! THERE IS LITERALLY AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL! (It's called the Constitution.)

Sabotaging American foreign policy in order to help win an election is one area where Trump genuinely isn't an aberration. Nixon sabotaged peace talks with Vietnam and Reagan backchanneled to prevent Carter from getting the hostages in Tehran released. A long-standing Republican tradition of treason

there’s no middle ground position on this. either musk is forcibly rooted out of government infrastructure or every war proceeds at the whims and dictates of a generational buffoon

the big media effort over the next 2 years will be to promote Vance as a different, more reasonable and moderate guy than Trump. You can already see this in the "leaks" about how Vance secretly opposes the Iran War, attempting to position him, absurdly, as an anti-war candidate for 2028

…

ah we are going to get some nice reverse disparate impact where having too many black people is evidence of anti-white discrimination

Last week I wrote about how Texas politicians’ “free speech” campaign has led to a campaign of academic censorship in the state’s universities that exceeds even the McCarthy era (🎁🔗) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

One thing you learn from reading the academic literature on parental estrangement is that it's rarely *just* about events from childhood. Most adults are willing to reconcile with their problematic parents as long as they can acknowledge their mistakes and own up to them. A lot of them refuse.

the problem is politically appointed profs indoctrinating rather than educating students, I think to myself, resolving to spend 100 million dollars on a Western Civ center I can fill with conservatives teaching mandatory courses while the pols I bankroll axe "studies" departments and ban their ideas

Turns out the “censorship industrial complex” was less a criticism than an aspiration

Meta took down the No Kings organizing page today - the biggest day of protest this fall. They provided zero explanation. It stayed down for the entire afternoon until most of the protests were done. Outrageous. Put this on the January investigation list.

Like, people often wonder what Mark Twain would say if we could bring him back today and they assume he would talk about politics or whatever. I think he'd be amazed that we have a vaccine to prevent the disease that caused the death of his infant son.

We can’t just not open the portal to hell. We’d love to live in that world, but grow up. Someone is going to open the portal to hell. It might as well be us. Do you trust the other guys to open the portal to hell responsibly?

oh you made the computer sound like a guy? it can summarize answers really fast? well life-giving liquid just falls out of the sky and a delicious tomato can just appear magically out of dirt. id say "but your thing is cool too" but id be lying. your thing is dumb as fuck compared to a tomato

Last weekend we buried my dad. He was one of the kindest, most selfless, most persistent people I've ever known. Here I share a (lightly edited) eulogy I delivered at his funeral. I hope I captured at least some aspect of how remarkable he was; I miss you, dad. steudeman.bearblog.dev/remembering-...

strategic political capture of the court has, for 40 years, been a one-way ratchet. among other things, this has inculcated a sense among conservatives that they can act with virtual impunity. showing them that their opponents will play hardball is a necessary first step toward a better status quo.

It sounds like a trite 19th century observation, but character matters in a republic. Part of our crisis today is an electorate whose only heuristic for character is sycophantic loyalty. By framing his answers in terms of how he judges character, AES is teaching the electorate this essential skill.

Still trying to understand how Napster got shut down, but Anthropic is going public and still hasn’t paid us authors yet after stealing our work.

It’s here!! Wild to have an actual copy of the book I spent 13 years on in my hands! If you want to preorder a copy of The Political Supreme Court, there’s still time before the official release date on October 27: a.co/d/08PThSrx. (Or uncpress.org/978146969713... if you’re avoiding Amazon)

Former “free speech” crusaders have ushered in an unprecedented campaign of censorship in Texas universities, resulting in pulitzer winning books being banned, medical and scientific facts being suppressed, and entire fields of study deemed “woke” being eliminated www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

Slight stylistic departure in my dad's latest Time Travelling Cat painting.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

"What Metro Surge showed the world is that people do not want to watch their neighbors be brutalized, shot, and torn from their homes, and no amount of Trump posting on Truth Social is ever going to change that"