John Cox

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Interesting

www.independent.co.uk

Tributes paid to six US troops killed in Iran drone strike including mother who was two days away from returning home

This piece profiles the six US Army Reserve soldiers killed when Iran struck a logistics command centre near Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, a day into the joint US-Israel "Operation Epic Fury" campaign against Iran. It centres on personal details from grieving families—Sgt. Amor's near-return home and unprotected relocation, Sgt. Coady's fresh promotion and cybersecurity studies, Capt. Khork's ROTC-driven patriotism, and Sgt. Tietjens' martial arts teaching—giving a human face to the first named American casualties of the escalating conflict.

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www.resistandunsubscribe.com

Resist and Unsubscribe

This document outlines a "Resist and Unsubscribe" campaign targeting major tech and service companies alleged to have ties to ICE or political figures, providing specific boycott actions for each (such as canceling AT&T service, avoiding Dell computers, or unsubscribing from Amazon Prime). The campaign emphasizes simplicity and measurability, offering tools like QuitGPT for easy one-action boycotts and an Impact Calculator that quantifies how individual consumer actions translate into specific revenue losses and market cap effects for targeted companies. The organizers highlight their methodology for estimating campaign impact, calculating that each converted participant canceling an average of two subscriptions results in approximately $30 monthly revenue loss per company, scaled across estimated audience reach.

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www.theatlantic.com

Trump Almost Has a Point About the Federal Reserve

While Trump's plan to control the Federal Reserve is likely illegal and dangerous, the article argues that Democrats should not simply defend the status quo. The Fed deserves independence over interest-rate setting to shield monetary policy from electoral pressure, but it has abused its broader powers—including bank regulation, payment systems oversight, and emergency lending—consistently favoring financial institutions over ordinary people, from its refusal to regulate subprime mortgages before 2008 to its miserly $17.5 billion Main Street lending during the pandemic versus over $100 billion to Wall Street. The solution is legislation that preserves Fed independence for monetary policy while stripping away its other authorities and transferring them to democratically accountable institutions like the comptroller of the currency or FDIC.

Permalink politicseconomydonald trumpfederal reserve

www.npr.org

'Raising questions' isn't enough. The best films of the year took a stance

This essay surveys 2025 films that tried to grapple with the current political climate, arguing that success depends on commitment rather than neutrality, nostalgia, or deliberate ambiguity. It sorts its examples into those that failed through vagueness or smug defeatism (Ella McCay, Eddington, Bugonia, Good Fortune) and those that succeeded through clear stances and emotional honesty (Sinners, The Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident). Its closing claim is that art now need not change the world but must help audiences make sense of it.

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www.scotusblog.com

How deferential is the Roberts court to presidential power?

This article analyzes whether the [[Roberts Court]] has been unusually deferential to presidential authority by measuring how often the [[United States]] wins on the merits through support-rate data drawn from the [[Supreme Court Database]] and terms through 2024–25. Adam Feldman situates the analysis within scholarship on the attitudinal model, partisanship, and historical chief-justice eras, comparing support rates across eras and by appointing president while examining individual justices’ voting patterns. The piece finds the Roberts Court’s 49.39% pro-government rate below many past courts, highlights partisan sorting and docket effects, and notes important caveats — notably exclusion of the [[shadow docket]], agency-deference cases where the government is not a party, and the complexity of separating Trump-specific from party-driven patterns — and calls for further granular study. It warns that other issue areas may show different patterns.

Permalink politicsdonald trump

www.nytimes.com

How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World

Rupert Murdoch suffered a serious spinal injury in January 2018 that forced his adult children to contemplate succession for the first time, raising questions about who would control his sprawling global media empire and its outsized political influence across the English-speaking world. The piece traces how Murdoch built this empire by using his outlets to support favored political candidates and then leveraging those relationships to remove regulatory obstacles to his expansion, a formula his father Keith pioneered in Australia and that Rupert perfected across Britain and America, particularly through Fox News's role in amplifying right-wing populism including Trump's rise. The narrative reveals deep tensions between Murdoch's sons—the idealistic, centrist James who wanted to modernize the company and his more conservative older brother Lachlan, whom Murdoch ultimately favored—and explains how the controlling family trust structure means that Murdoch's death would trigger a power struggle that could reshape global politics.

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www.nytimes.com

Breonna Taylor’s Life Was Changing. Then the Police Came to Her Door.

# Summary Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician with no criminal record, was shot five times and killed by Louisville police during a March 2020 raid on her apartment that was ostensibly targeting her ex-boyfriend, a convicted drug dealer named Jamarcus Glover. The raid resulted from a flawed investigation: while police had legitimate evidence of Glover's drug operation at nearby addresses, their justification for raiding Taylor's apartment relied on thinner evidence—his GPS-tracked visits to her complex, her car appearing at a drug house, and bank transfers between them—leading to questions about whether probable cause existed. Taylor had distanced herself from Glover weeks before her death and was planning a future with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who fired one shot in self-defense when officers breached the door without adequately announcing themselves, prompting police to return fire; one officer was later fired for blindly shooting through her window from the parking lot, and no drugs or cash were found in her apartment.

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www.nytimes.com

Colin Powell Still Wants Answers

Colin Powell privately opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion as foolish and warned President Bush it would end badly, yet he became the war's most persuasive public advocate by delivering the February 2003 U.N. speech presenting allegedly solid intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The article reveals that C.I.A. analysts and other intelligence officials doubted much of the evidence Powell presented—including claims from a dubious source nicknamed Curveball—and that the speech was constructed under pressure to make an unconvincing case more "slam dunk" persuasive for domestic audiences, with dissenters kept out of the preparation process. Powell later acknowledged he could have simply refused the assignment and resigned, which might have created a political domino effect that prevented the war, but he chose not to because "he's the president."

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www.newyorker.com

Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol

Trump's incitement drove thousands to the Capitol on January 6th, where the author witnessed white supremacists, militia members, conspiracy theorists, and QAnon adherents breach the building, ransack offices, and threaten lawmakers—a culmination of months of false election claims amplified by right-wing media, politicians, and figures like Alex Jones and Nicholas Fuentes. The riot was not spontaneous chaos but the predictable apotheosis of a coordinated disinformation campaign that exploited pre-existing grievances about lockdowns, demographic change, and perceived persecution to radicalize a substantial portion of the Republican base into believing that violent resistance to the "deep state" was justified. The author documents how conspiracy theories, white Christian nationalism, and the GOP's cynical accommodation of Trump's power grab have created an ecosystem where millions remain insulated from factual correction and primed for continued insurgency beyond Trump's presidency.

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www.buzzfeednews.com

The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time

The 2010s marked the shift from the internet as a discrete destination to an omnipresent algorithmic feed woven into daily life, with platforms like Instagram and Twitter replacing chronological timelines with engagement-based algorithms that fundamentally altered how information, politics, and culture reach us. This transformation—enabled by smartphones, streaming services, and social media's evolution—created a disorienting temporal experience where past and present collapse, making figures like Trump the ideal vessel for such a system while spawning cultural backlash (vintage watches, vinyl records, digital detox rhetoric) that ultimately fails because the internet has become inseparable from physical reality. The essay argues that what defines the decade isn't any single technology but the complete merger of our online and offline identities, creating a perpetual state of algorithmic fragmentation that keeps us perpetually scrolling, reacting, and unable to escape.

Permalink social mediatechnologyculturestreaming

www.bbc.com

Did American History X foreshadow the resurgence of white nationalism in the US?

Released in 1998, *American History X* dramatized white nationalist recruitment and violence by centering the story on a white family where racist ideology takes root through economic anxiety, parental influence, and the search for belonging—a bold choice that shifted focus from pathologizing black families to examining how white families incubate extremism. The film's portrayal of how charismatic demagogues exploit alienated young men, leverage internet connectivity, and weaponize racial grievances proved prescient for the rise of the alt-right and movements like the Proud Boys, though experts note it failed to anticipate how these fringe ideologies would eventually enter mainstream Republican politics. While the film's unflinching critique of white supremacy was ahead of its time in the 1990s, critics argue it ultimately reproduced racist stereotypes about black people and centered white redemption rather than addressing the systemic nature of racial inequality.

Permalink historyfilmunited statespolitics

nymag.com

The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Documents

Scott Sayare's piece traces how journalist Jefferson Morley, using declassified files from the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, uncovered that CIA officer George Joannides—secretly Oswald-era handler of the anti-Castro group DRE—was deceptively installed as the Agency's liaison to the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations, blocking scrutiny of his own prior role. The article builds the case that CIA headquarters knowingly falsified cables about Oswald before the assassination and then spent decades stonewalling congressional and independent investigators (HSCA, the Church Committee, the ARRB), while also probing the limits and possible overreach of Morley's own escalating theories about Oswald as a CIA "agent of influence." It's a dense, well-sourced anatomy of institutional cover-up and the perils of obsessive truth-seeking, worth keeping as one of the more sober, document-driven accounts of the assassination's unresolved CIA angle.

Permalink politicsjournalisminvestigation

newrepublic.com

The GOP Is Dying. Time for a Whig Revival?

Timothy Noah argues that the GOP is effectively dead—hollowed out into an authoritarian Trump cult, as Liz Cheney and historian Sean Wilentz both contend—and that any post-Trump conservative party won't revive Buckley/Reagan orthodoxy but might instead resemble the 19th-century Whig Party. He lays out why the Whigs (anti-Jacksonian, pro-infrastructure, wary of executive overreach and manifest destiny, skeptical of populist mythologizing) offer a surprisingly apt template for a reformed, government-friendly conservatism that Democrats could actually negotiate with. Worth keeping for its historical analogy explaining what a "sane" successor to today's Republican Party might look like.

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newrepublic.com

The Corporations Funding the End of Democracy

This piece argues that handwringing op-eds and press-criticism amount to inaction, and that real leverage against GOP minority rule lies in pressuring the corporations bankrolling groups like the RSLC's REDMAP gerrymandering project. It names dozens of major companies—many of which also issued BLM statements—that funded the redistricting and voter-suppression push, and calls for boycotts and public pressure campaigns modeled on the 2012 ALEC divestment wave. It's a concrete, actionable counterpoint to despair-driven commentary, worth keeping for the corporate donor list and the boycott strategy it proposes.

Permalink politicsdonald trump

The Atlantic

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

Tim Alberta's profile chronicles Chris Licht's troubled tenure as CNN's new leader, examining his ambitious but largely failed effort to reorient the network toward ideological centrism and win back Republican audiences. Through extensive reporting and interviews, Alberta documents how Licht's grand pronouncements about fixing CNN's perceived liberal bias alienated his own newsroom while failing to attract the conservative viewers he courted, culminating in a disastrous May 2023 Trump town hall that showcased his strategic miscalculations. The piece portrays a well-intentioned but isolated executive caught between his corporate overseers' demands and his staff's open hostility, ultimately revealing the limits of one man's ability to reshape a major news organization through force of will alone.

Permalink politicsnewsbusinessmedia

Business Insider

144 Republicans Who Voted For Default - Business Insider

During the 2013 government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis, 144 House Republicans, including fiscally conservative Paul Ryan, voted against a compromise bill that would reopen the government and prevent default, while 285 members (all Democrats and some Republicans) voted to pass it. The piece argues that Ryan's vote against averting default undermines his reputation for fiscal responsibility, and that any truly responsible leader would have prioritized the country's interests over political posturing.

Permalink politicsnewsbusinesseconomics

BuzzFeed News

These Republicans Who Voted To Cut Food Stamps Personally Received Large Farm Subsidies

House Republicans who voted to cut $39 billion from food stamps over a decade included several members whose family farms had received substantial government agricultural subsidies—Rep. Stephen Fincher received $3.4 million in farm subsidies while quoting scripture to justify denying aid to those unwilling to work, Rep. Vicky Hartzler's farm received over $800,000, and Rep. Kristi Noem's family ranch received $3.4 million. The hypocrisy highlighted the inconsistency of lawmakers accepting government payments for agriculture while arguing against public assistance for the poor based on principles of personal responsibility.

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Slate Magazine