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Adam Serwer

@adamserwer.bsky.social
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  1. 1

    It is genuinely bizarre that we’ve become acclimatized to right wingers throwing a tantrum every time a black person (particularly a black woman) is cast in something, but are also supposed to pretend that this is not racism but related to some other substantive concern.

    24,043 5,039
    Jul 25, 2026
  2. 2

    Trump doesn’t force people to do bad things. All he did was show people they could get away with being horrible if they really wanted to, and a lot of powerful people decided they didn’t need to pretend anymore. Especially those in influential positions who could push back but did not.

    9,905 2,545
    Jul 13, 2026
  3. 3

    Basically the Supreme Court is 5-4 on whether America is white man's country

    9,554 2,005
    Jun 30, 2026
  4. 4

    As with some other things, i suspect if we have another dem president we will discover that the court did not so much transfer power to the executive as to themselves, ie they will find novel bullshit reasons to block a dem president the same way the find novel bullshit reasons to enable trump

    8,549 1,976
    Jun 29, 2026
  5. 5

    5-4 for what it explicitly says in the constitution is incredible. They were this close to undoing the civil war entirely. bsky.app/profile/mjsd...

    Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social
    The Supreme Court strikes down Trump's attack on birthright citizenship. By a 5–4 vote, it holds that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to children born of unauthorized and temporary immigrants. Roberts and Barrett join the three liberals. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
    6,450 1,897
    Jun 30, 2026
  6. 6

    people got mad at me yesterday when i said the dems were not ready to take court reform seriously. 5-4 for non-racial citizenship is not a win, it's a reprieve bsky.app/profile/schu...

    Chuck Schumer @schumer.senate.gov
    Despite Trump’s best efforts to bully them, the Supreme Court just reaffirmed that if you are born in America, you belong in America.
    6,451 1,321
    Jun 30, 2026
  7. 7

    Look if you think it’s fine for Trump to corruptly get a red card revoked (or “suspended”) bc FIFA is already corrupt, maybe you understand the MAGA mindset better than you think. “All politicians are corrupt so it’s ok for Trump to be corrupt” is a very common maga rationalization

    5,728 1,210
    Jul 6, 2026
  8. 8

    Conservatives in 2016: TRIGGERED LIB????
    Conservatives in 2026: We are installing trigger warnings in the Smithsonian

    6,027 1,090
    Jul 24, 2026
  9. 9

    I like how every far right party has realizes all they need to do is weaponize the mid life crisis bsky.app/profile/core...

    Corey Atad @coreyatad.com
    can't stop laughing at this Poilievre: "We will reinstill a warrior culture, not a woke culture."
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    6,057 979
    Jul 7, 2026
  10. 10

    It’s really a great question because it immediately reveals whether someone is unfit for public service. bsky.app/profile/atru...

    Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
    OSSOFF: Who won the 2020 election? CLAYTON: Uhm, you know, I'm not going to do this with you O: This is a job interview. You have an obligation to be honest with the committee. Who won the 2020 election? C: I'm not gonna get into that with you O: You're not being honest or forthright C: ...
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    5,280 948
    Jul 16, 2026
  11. 11

    The right-wing attack on birthright citizenship is not just about birthright citizenship itself. As MAGA’s reaction to the Supreme Court ruling proves, it is part of their opposition to a broader ideal, that “All men are created equal.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

    Elsewhere, less tactful conservatives expressed directly what the dissenting justices chose to do in euphemism. Stephen Miller, who runs immigration policy for the Trump administration, told Fox News that “we have people from all over the world, from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel.” He went on: “They can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen? That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones? Can decide who our mayors are? Our governors are? Our presidents are?” Miller’s long-standing view is that what ruined America was the repeal of eugenics-inspired immigration restrictions that had banned immigration from Asia and Africa and from nations in Europe deemed to be composed of lesser white races. There is very little difference between Miller’s position—if you come from a “Third World nation,” you are inferior—and that of antebellum Democrats and the opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment at the time it was adopted: American citizenship is degraded by having to share it with the biologically inferior. The justices are elite lawyers with the ability to obfuscate this project and ignore its aims, but the rest of us need not pretend. To put it bluntly, Miller’s objection, as articulated here, is not to birthright citizenship. It is to the idea that “all men are created equal.”
    2,577 842
    Jul 3, 2026
  12. 12

    Jackson.

    Such universalist appeals were a conscious choice. Yes, Black Americans had suffered a singular wrong. And yes, they had “‘fought and bled’” for the Union, paying a steep price for their freedom.28 But the delegates did not rest on these laurels. Rather, they drew upon the moral and political force of the universal principles that were already core to the Nation’s identity. That bears repeating: Freed Blacks did not advocate for a unique set of rules that catered only to their situation. Nor did they seek to advance their own position relative to, or at the expense and exclusion of, other marginalized groups.
    4,168 800
    Jun 30, 2026
  13. 13

    Despite the whining about “ historical accuracy,” the racist backlash to the casting in Nolan’s Odyssey is about the right wanting to justify racial hierarchy by projecting it into a past where it did not actually exist. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

    When some on the right speak of reverence for “civilization,” what they’re doing is trying to anachronistically justify the hierarchy of race they would like to see enacted today by rooting it in antiquity. You cannot cast Black people in The Odyssey, because The Odyssey is a pillar of “Western civilization,” which they consider to be white. This faction of the far right imagines antiquity as a kind of idyllic Jim Crow universe of utterly separate civilizations, one in which the integration they despise could not possibly exist. But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
    3,688 789
    Jul 25, 2026
  14. 14

    Ruling against TPS for Haitians, the Trump justices on the Supreme Court have set a new impossible standard for proving discrimination against non-whites: if there is any other reason *in addition* to the racism, the racism doesn’t count www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

    Mullin now sets up an even more impossible double standard. If the government wants to discriminate against Black people, any pretext will do. “As long as there is a plausible basis—any plausible articulable basis—for the government’s action, then the Court will look to that basis as sufficient,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me, “even in the face of evidence that government actors were motivated by animus.” If a Black person wants to prove they’ve been discriminated against, however, no amount of evidence will suffice. “This Court sees race when it wants to, and blinds itself to racism in most other cases,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “It’s hard to imagine how egregious the statement would have to be to be considered ‘overtly racial’.”
    2,624 754
    Jun 29, 2026
  15. 15

    The racist backlash to Chris Nolan’s Odyssey is a kind of stolen valor, an attempt by the right to claim credit for achievements they had nothing to do with in order to justify racial hierarchy in the present. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

    The Fear of Black Greeks
    White people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece.
    2,766 675
    Jul 24, 2026
  16. 16

    This was by design of course. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...

    Four Black women. Nine degrees. Not one steady paycheck.
    The president promised to save “Black jobs,” but his policies have resulted in fresh pain for the Black middle class as the employment gap widens.
    2,766 661
    Jun 28, 2026
  17. 17

    I’m just a shitlib, but until the dems are willing to take on the concentrated power of capital and the mechanisms that led to it they’re just painting the titanic a different color. bsky.app/profile/mjsd...

    Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social
    The Supreme Court's second opinion is NRSC v. FEC. By a 6–3 vote, the court guts another campaign finance statute and overturns a 2001 precedent that upheld restrictions on political parties' coordinated expenditures with candidates. The three liberals dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
    3,060 639
    Jun 30, 2026
  18. 18

    The premise here, repeated throughout American history, is that only some kind of mental manipulation could make white people enjoy art by black people. You start acknowledging black cultural contributions as valuable it’s a slippery slope to seeing black people as people bsky.app/profile/left...

    W.E.D.em Boyz @leftistwonk.bsky.social
    I'm not sure there is a more cooked brain on the planet than Joe Rogan's
    ROGAN: “People are pointing out that right now it's one of the rare times where no rap music is on the charts. And they're saying, how does this coincide with USAID? Was USAID actively promoting rap music?”
    3,246 629
    Jul 3, 2026
  19. 19

    “Racism is good and policy should be designed to reflect that principle,” couched in euphemism, is an acceptable opinion in the anglosphere leadership class but “racism is bad and policy should be designed to reflect that principle” is wokeness gone amok and unacceptable bsky.app/profile/okwo...

    Musa Okwonga @okwonga.bsky.social
    The editor in chief of The Economist referring here to the AfD’s leader as a “perfectly thoughtful person“ instead of what she truly is - a driver and enabler of German fascism - is a huge part of the problem.
    2,664 629
    Jul 26, 2026
  20. 20

    Reply to @adamserwer.bsky.social

    That's right.

    During the ratification debates, Senator Cowan took aim at the Roma people too, characterizing them as undeserving of birthright citizenship because they “wander[ed] in gangs,” “infest[ed] society,” and “impos[ed] upon the simple and weak everywhere.”49 And again, Senator Conness dismissed Senator Cowan’s prejudices: “The only invasion of Pennsylvania within my recollection was an invasion very much worse and more disastrous to the State, and more to be feared and more feared, than that of Gypsies. It was an invasion of rebels [at Gettysburg].
    3,220 592
    Jun 30, 2026
  21. 21

    Wrote about the Roberts Court’s highly selective aversion to identifying racism, echoing the logic of the infamous Korematsu decision, which the Roberts Court has both condemned and imitated. Call it Neo-Korematsu doctrine. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

    In Trump v. Hawaii, Roberts wrote that “the forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.” But the author of the Korematsu opinion, having exchanged his white robe for a dark one, would have agreed. After all, Hugo Black wrote that “pressing public necessity”—not “racial antagonism”—motivated the Japanese-internment policy. Black upheld Fred Korematsu’s conviction because he argued that the presence of a national-security motive meant the racism against Japanese Americans didn’t count. And that is exactly the logic the Roberts Court has followed in so many cases. This reasoning—Black’s reasoning—has been reiterated again and again by Roberts and his right-wing colleagues to sanction discrimination against the vulnerable populations targeted by the Republican Party. The Korematsu decision may be overturned by the “court of history.” But its legacy lives on in the Roberts Court.
    2,177 582
    Jul 14, 2026
  22. 22

    The justices that upheld birthright citizenship in 1898 were racist men in a racist era who still could not avoid the plain text of the Constitution. What changed between is that the GOP now sees multiracial democracy as a threat rather than an ideal or aspiration www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

    The Fourteenth Amendment has not changed since 1898. What have changed are the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement. Trump believes that “if you import the Third World, you become the Third World.” His rise to power began with his willingness to be a standard-bearer for a movement that cast the first Black president as an illegitimate invader and demanded to see his birth certificate. Trump’s second-term campaign promised “mass deportation” of those very same “Third World” immigrants, and since taking office, he has established an effectively whites-only refugee policy, specifically for white South Africans, illustrating that his objection is less to immigration itself, or to immigrants from the “Third World,” than to immigrants who are not white.
    2,108 576
    Jul 3, 2026
  23. 23

    A little tired of the ubermensch nonsense from a guy who would get his wallet run by a husky middle schooler bsky.app/profile/peip...

    PEIPolitical 🇨🇦 @peipolitical.bsky.social
    Miller: "It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism." #cdnpoli
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    3,818 494
    Jul 17, 2026
  24. 24

    Reply to @adamserwer.bsky.social

    And just from a dad’s perspective, it seems to me one of the explicit aims here is to make black girls feel like they are ugly. Like why else are you angry about a black little mermaid. And yes I take that shit personal.

    4,952 467
    Jul 25, 2026
  25. 25

    For them, it does. They cannot conceive of a world in which someone they think should belong to a suboordinate class has the same rights as them. That's also why they hate the Reconstruction amendments. bsky.app/profile/gabr...

    Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor.bsky.social
    Justice Thomas, also in dissent, similarly claims that it "devalues" citizenship to recognize the children of "birth tourists and illegal aliens" as citizens. Again, as if the quality of American citizenship depends on who else is a citizen.
    Meanwhile, the Court has repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text. Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens. VII I am not sure that today’s opinion will stand the test of time. The Citizenship Clause “added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship.” Plessy, 163 U. S., at 555 (Harlan, J., dissenting). Today’s opinion devalues that citizenship. I respectfully dissent.
    1,888 395
    Jun 30, 2026