i’ll keep saying this but for example look no further than the ku klux klan, theatrical and silly and also deadly serious

we often talk about the overthrow of reconstruction as a singular organized effort, but it should be understood as something more disparate and fractured, with success tied less to martial superiority than the indifference of authorities to intimidation and violence.
a group of guys — maybe the owner of the general store, and the sheriff and some farmers who fought in the war — gets together to gripe and complain and plot a little mischief. they put on masks and grab guns and go beat up a black sharecropper or local clerk or whatever...
everyone knows who did it. but there’s no one to stop them. the army, if it’s even in the state, is tens or hundreds of miles away. and mustering a militia may risk open conflict. the guys realize they can do this and getaway with it. so they do it again.
maybe they have a few more people with them this time. maybe they escalate, not just beating up local blacks and their white allies but killing a few.
and also, this is happening in other towns, and sympathetic newspapers are calling for men to march on the state capitol to take it back from “negro rule”
what begins as a series of larks turns, pretty quickly, into a real force with the ability to inflict real violence and threaten the state’s control on violence
for example: in the span of a year, 1874, the White League in Louisiana went from terrorizing local teachers to occupying the state house in New Orleans and deposing the governor
after a few days, federal troops arrived and the League stood down. but no one was prosecuted and members learned an important lesson: they could do it again. so they did, in 1876, securing victory for the democratic candidate for governor in the process.
like-minded people in other states took note, and formed paramilitaries of their own. “White-Line” Democrats in Mississippi formed paramilitaries that killed and terrorized their way to political power in 1875 and 1876. “Red shirts” in South Carolina did the same.
more people know about Wilmington 1898 these days, but supporters of the “white supremacy” campaign that formed the backdrop to the Wilmington coup were very aware of what transpired in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina twenty years earlier.
as always, history isn’t a literal guide to the present; it can only give insight into the social forces that produce certain outcomes. and one important difference to take note of is that, in the late 1870s, an entire generation of men had direct experience in armed conflict.
having said that, we shouldn’t shrug off the fact that one of the participants in yesterday’s mob action was veterans of our forever wars. there were surely others. https://t.co/TXnnErXxQO
https://t.co/YFNIDJYPwI
oh, and one more thing: the men who led this violence didn’t just disappear. they became leaders. a few, even held office. and of that few, some even went to washington, like “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman
there’s a statue of Wade Hampton, the leader of the Red shirts, in the Capitol building right now
with enough impunity, distance and deliberate forgetting, mob leaders and insurrectionists can become statesmen. just an ending note for the “history will judge you” crowd.

happy thursday!

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1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley
I’ve asked Byers to clarify, but as I read this tweet, it seems that Bret Stephens included an unredacted use of the n-word in his column this week to make a point, and the column got spiked—maybe as a result?


Four times. The column used the n-word (in the context of a quote) four times. https://t.co/14vPhQZktB


For context: In 2019, a Times reporter was reprimanded for several incidents of racial insensitivity on a trip with high school students, including one in which he used the n-word in a discussion of racial slurs.

That incident became public late last month, and late last week, after 150 Times employees complained about how it had been handled, the reporter in question resigned.

In the course of all that, the Times' executive editor said that the paper does not "tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” This was the quote that Bret Stephens was pushing back against in his column. (Which, again, was deep-sixed by the paper.)

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