Civil rights are enshrined in constitutional amendments and federal law. They’re not a partisan position.
A judge in Texas saying “I admire King”, while simultaneously ruling that an MLK image is too politically inflammatory for his courtroom, is a contradiction that only works when already you decided that the people invoking civil rights are the problem.
Full context matters enormously here. This is for a case that the Trump government calls their first federal prosecution of people who oppose fascism. To be clear, the government’s official framing calls them an “antifa cell,” which means the prosecution literally is naming opposition to fascism as the crime.
The jury pool was already expressing anti-ICE and anti-Trump sentiments, adjacent to anti-fascism. Judge Pittman, appointed by Trump, was already frustrated with lawyers questioning the jury pool over the difference between noise, protests and riots, which goes directly to the defense theory. Then he noticed MLK on the defense lawyer’s shirt and used it as a procedural vehicle to reset the jury pool. The first one appeared hostile to Trump’s un-American fascism, so this judge threw them out.
None of the defense attorneys asked for a mistrial. The prosecution didn’t ask either. Judge Pittman declared one alone sua sponte, something he admitted he’d never done before, over a shirt depicting American civil rights leaders. And he’s now threatening to issue sanctions against the defense lawyer who wore it, notably, in honor of Jesse Jackson passing away that morning. It should have been a day of mourning. Instead this federal judge was so disturbed by the image of MLK in his courtroom that he blew up his own trial.
It’s racism from the bench.
This judge’s recent record is also important. We are talking about the same man who was found by the Fifth Circuit to have abused his discretion in sanctioning lawyers. He sanctioned another attorney in this very case last month. There’s a pattern of him using procedural authority to punish defense counsel in a politically charged prosecution.
Is it any wonder he was appointed by Trump to rule against anyone opposed to fascism?
Oxford’s Wooldridge “glorified spreadsheets” speech shows he understands AI isn’t what people think it is, but his institutional position requires him to frame the problem as a future discrete risk rather than admit a present constant reality.
The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned.
Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products’ capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood.
The Royal Society lecture circuit doesn’t reward him saying “the disasters already happened, they are ongoing, and you enabled them, look at yourselves.”
He may as well be trying to convert people to Christianity by saying just wait until you meet Jesus. Sin now, someday later you can repent.
Looking for the catastrophe, as if to look for the conviction to act, despite the evidence demanding action accumulating the entire time, isn’t moral. It’s the same pattern as climate change denial: waiting for some mystical moment of belief instead of reading the data already in hand.
The Hindenburg was not somehow uniquely catastrophic. It killed sentiment because it was undeniable. Thirty-six people died on camera in front of reporters. That’s what made it different from every other airship failure — not the scale of harm, but the impossibility of looking away.
AI failures are designed for the opposite. They’re individualized, distributed, buried in terms of service and corporate liability shields that punch down. UnitedHealth’s algorithm denies claims at scale and patients die at home. Tesla’s software kills owners and pedestrians on public roads. AI-generated police reports fabricate evidence. Chatbots drive people toward self-harm and suicide. Each one is isolated, litigated, settled quietly. No cameras. No film at eleven.Teslas notoriously and repeatedly “veer” uncontrollably and crash. Design defects (e.g. Pinto doors) trap occupants and burn dozens of people to death as horrified witnesses and emergency responders watch helplessly. Source: VoCoFM, Korea, 2024
This is a celebrity-only model of societal risk. Elites wait for a signal dramatic enough to care about, while the harms they enabled accumulate below their threshold for paying attention. It treats a Pearl Harbor event as motivating catastrophe only because of the spoiled famous beauty of Hawaii and the loss of big ships. The actual failure was years of threat assessments ignored, warnings dismissed, intelligence misread. Willful ignorance has a huge societal cost, and it’s enabled by those who perform it at the top.
Wooldridge is warning about a future singular catastrophe that kills public confidence. The actual pattern is thousands of distributed catastrophes that never coalesce into a single spectacular image, because powerful institutions work to prevent exactly that. Don’t keep waiting for the one dramatic event that will finally wake everyone up. Those who waited for the “big one” with social media, with surveillance Big Tech, with every other integrity breach for thirty years, are still waiting.
The Hindenburg of AI crashes every day and nobody really cares. Just look at Wooldridge.
As America begins to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I’m pleased to have been asked to write about George Washington’s leadership. As president, I found great comfort and inspiration in reading about my predecessors and the qualities they embodied. […] Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility.
Humility? Hold on a minute, pardner.
The man who launched two unjustified wars on fabricated or inflated pretexts, authorized warrantless mass surveillance, torture, and indefinite detention, and whose administration’s “unitary executive” theory laid the legal groundwork Trump is now exploiting, including the “unlawful combatant” designation now being repurposed for Caribbean special operations. The man who created today’s Frankenstein, is now saying someone should do something about it because… humility?
There was a time when conservatives in America demanded a strong foundation in learning from well-known scholars and history precisely to fearlessly navigate new ideas. Strangely, Rove and pals have been able to hijack the group and turn it into drones waiting for instruction (e.g. fascism).
Bush’s absence of humility didn’t just create Trump’s legal architecture for authoritarianism, his administration built the shameless propaganda infrastructure that shoved the conservative base all the way into fascism.
This new Bush essay’s appeal to Washington’s “humility” is itself a Rove-style move: wrapping authoritarian complicity in aspirational language. It reads less like principled dissent and more like legacy management, distancing himself from the monster his own administration incubated, while enabling it to continue.
Invoking stories of Washington is always fraught with historiography. The voluntary relinquishment narrative that Bush tries to sell us is totally mythologized. Washington stepped down in part because he was exhausted, politically battered by partisan press, and understood a third term was politically untenable. It was not some noble philosophical commitment to republican virtue. The Bush hagiography serves the same function it always has: making supreme power appear self-limiting by nature rather than admit the contested struggle that actually forms democracy.
Bush is pumping deep propaganda about the man who owned over 300 enslaved people, pursued runaways relentlessly, rotated them through Philadelphia to exploit a loophole in Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law, and presided over a frontier policy of indigenous displacement. Bush calls out the defining motivational characteristic of Washington, human trafficking operations, and lands on “humility” and “self-restraint“?
You can’t model “putting the good of the nation over self-interest” while literally owning human beings as property.
Look at Georgia in 1733, Vermont in 1777, Carter 1793 who freed all his slaves and called out Washington for selfish refusal.
Georgia’s ban fifty years prior, and then Vermont’s constitution in his face, as well as Pennsylvania openly targeting Washington’s slaves, established that abolition wasn’t some anachronistic standard being imposed retroactively. The legal and moral frameworks existed and Washington was hiding and running. He knew, he wanted to be on the wrong side. He calculated. He moved against the entire world banning slavery, to selfishly force a new country to preserve and expand it instead.
Understand that Carter wasn’t some distant man from Washington. He was a hugely successful Virginia planter who looked at the same institution of human trafficking that Washington dreamed of profits from and said no. Carter shut it down.
It’s literally like someone today looking at Epstein and saying no. Who didn’t say no? That’s Washington.
Epstein and Trump
Every generation of powerful elites produces legal architectures for dehumanizing people for value extraction while maintaining plausible deniability, and then produces apologists who write fraudulent essays about humility after the damage is done.
George should know George better. His history illiteracy continues the tragedy.
Think about the Caribbean war crime operations where Trump is using Bush’s own “unlawful combatant” framework. We have two presidents implicated in connected dehumanizing legal architectures, with one writing hagiography about the other.
In short, as a historian, here’s a scientific measurement of the Bush Presidential message:
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