Kevin M. Kruse

@kevinmkruse.bsky.social

395596 Followers 2248 Following

Historian: White Flight; New Suburban History; Fog of War; One Nation Under God; Fault Lines; Voter Suppression; Myth America. CAMPAIGN TRAILS: campaign-trails.ghost.io

The Secret Behind Communism
Nixon on the beach in slacks and dress shoes
An elderly Barney Fife, the moment the stroke kills him
World Cup Bronze
SCOTUS’s “hubristic originalists” have also corrupted our elections more broadly. The supermajority, Eddins wrote, has given “corporations the same speech rights as flesh-and-blood Americans,” letting “dollars talk louder than voters.” Just last month, it shredded “coordinated spending limits Congress had enacted, ensuring “that those who bankroll elections drown out the ordinary person.” As a result, “billionaires spend to be repaid. Everyone else just votes. The Roberts Court has made sure one’s wealth counts more than another’s vote.”
Redhead with white makeup and dark black around the eyes. Looks like Lucille Ball dressed as a panda
Residences Portnoy owns five personal residences worth a total of $95 million. His purchase of a 5,200 square foot residence in Nantucket for $43 million in 2023 was the highest price ever paid for a residence in the state of Massachusetts. In October 2025 he purchased a record-breaking $27.75 million 10,000 square foot waterfront compound in Islamorada, Florida. In 2021, he bought a 6,000 square foot waterfront house in Miami for $14 million and a 5,700 square foot house in Montauk, New York for $9.8 million.[58] He also bought a residence in Saratoga Springs, New York, a 1,522 sq. ft. house sitting on a 7,402 sq. ft. lot.[59] He bought the house in March, 2023, for $1.4 million.[60]
MAGA neck tattoo
Ken Paxton, mid-bullshit
The same man as in the original post, but now his affect suggests he's a celebrity chef for the Khmer Rouge.
A young South Asian man with curly red hair and comically thick framed and orange tinted sunglasses. Looks like they recast Doctor Octopus as a hipster doofus.
Polymarket ad: "Will you ask the question?"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/judge-orders-sanctions-against-blanche-says-trump-tried-to-manipulate-the-judicial-process-with-irs-settlement/ar-AA27PGnj
Revenge of the Nerds band performance, where Lamar is rapping
Mr Burns in a golden muscled body suit
As Biden warned about democracy’s collapse, TV networks aired reruns While broadcasters typically air a prime-time address by the president, they determined that this speech was more ‘political’ than newsworthy for live coverage
Marsha Blackburn, Image Consultant ad from the 1990s, really big hair on her
Two eagles dismissing the idea that the owl is a predator because he's never bothered either of them. "No idea what Mr. Mouse was going on about." https://www.facebook.com/nathanwpyle2/posts/1057523929076061/
see this watch? i got it by Crying. my car? crying. my beautiful wife? Crying. My perfect teeth? Crying. now get the fuck out of my office
Gary from Bird Box, forcing open a woman’s eyes
The old leading the dead
A Roy Lichenstein style Pop Art cartoon with a woman on the phone saying "GOODBYE! I'm going to see Patton Oswalt!"
Eddie Murphy in "White Like Me"
The guy literally spent years telling people Richard Nixon is somehow the key figure to understand MAGA.
Corey Robin: “ In a fairly hard-hitting piece on the rise of liberal Resistance historians, The New Republic writes: "The audience for [Heather Cox] Richardson and [Timothy] Snyder, whether on podcasts, Substack, or Threads, want to believe that the current president and his supporters are not heirs to their American legacy but have instead twisted the truth about this nation’s history for their own malign ends. In this context, not only are their detractors the real inheritors of the nation’s Founders, but there is a clear path to escaping this fraught moment: accepting the truth about the nation and following where it leads us." What's so interesting about this phenomenon, and the more general one of liberal patriotism, which has been a calling card of Boomer liberals since as long as I can remember, is how little it comports with the actual history of liberal progress in America. Take Thurgood Marshall. I would imagine most people would credit him as one of the giants of liberal progress in America. No romantic dreamer, no third-party fanatic, no Black Power militant (he loathed Malcolm X), he took the hard path of transforming the Constitution, piece by piece, dismantling its Jim Crow edifice, and creating something that came to be called "the living Constitution," which was opposed to the kind of constitutional fundamentalism we see today on the right and the left. Anyway, here is Marshall in 1987, speaking on the occasion of the bicentennial of the Constitution. A pretty august moment, in which the titan of liberal constitutionalism reflects upon the Founders. And here's what he says: "The focus of this celebration invites a complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the 'more perfect Union' it is said we now enjoy. I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not...find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised w…
https://x.com/daniel_dsj2110/status/2074472269900812451?s=20
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kevin-m-kruse/myth-america/9781541604667/?lens=basic-books
June 24, 2025 Katherine Kelaidis MAGA Is Waging an All-Out War on Family Liberty From forced births to bans on gender-affirming care for minors, the new authoritarian right seeks total state control over intimate family decisions. Share This Story May 21, 2024 Katherine Kelaidis The Religious Battle Behind Harrison Butker’s Culture-War Speech The rise of trad Catholicism is sowing discord at religious institutions—including Benedictine College, where the NFL kicker made his controversial remarks. Share This Story
In any other time, this persistent bit of American Exceptionalism might be excusable, even charming. But in a moment in which it seems not only increasingly impossible, but irresponsible, to ignore the deep flaws at the heart of the American project, this is exactly the choice that has been made by a certain brand of liberal public intellectual cum influencer in the Trump era. This cohort includes figures such as Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B. Freeman, and Kevin M. Kruse.
In any other time, this persistent bit of American Exceptionalism might be excusable, even charming. But in a moment in which it seems not only increasingly impossible, but irresponsible, to ignore the deep flaws at the heart of the American project, this is exactly the choice that has been made by a certain brand of liberal public intellectual cum influencer in the Trump era. This cohort includes figures such as Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B. Freeman, and Kevin M. Kruse.
Conversation Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer Lib: "Happy birthday." USA: "Thanks!" (Eating apple pie) Lib: "You’re not perfect." USA: "Yeah…okay." Lib: "People say you’re exceptional." USA: "Oh, that’s nice!" Lib: "You ARE exceptional." USA: "Thank you?" Lib: "What makes you exceptional is that we can still change everything that is so crappy about you! YOU ARE PRETTY TERRIBLE." USA: "This seems like a time and place issue. It’s my birthday." Lib: "And on every single birthday you have disappointed me."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/03/trump-georgia-raffensperger-call-biden-washington-post
The Envy of the World America's Economy
REP. MASSIE GOOD
Prediction markers are ... the closest thing we have to a truth machine and knowing the future
Just some people who are definitely not Nazis, out there living their lives and ignoring the horrors that are barely audible over the fence there.
A creepy monster who wants to destroy us all
Puck cartoon showing "assimilated" immigrants stopping the arrival of someone who was once just like them
Hello Kevin M. Kruse I rarely reach out like this. The response and attention surrounding your book genuinely stood out to me, and I felt compelled to connect. Are you the author of Fog of War
Draft Kings: official partner of the NFL
The few thousand antiwar protestors, now badly outnumbered, had been pushed to the fringes. Nevertheless, they had grown bolder over the afternoon, “liberating” a concession stand, raiding two Pepsi trucks and, most improbably, flipping a giant spotlight into the reflecting pool. “The police are under orders to play it cool, to lean over backwards to avoid violence,” a Time reporter explained in a wire to his office. Policemen tried to preserve the “DMZ” between the Honor America Day crowd and the radicals taunting them, but when a small group of protestors started throwing rocks, bottles and cherry bombs, they moved in. As the U.S. Navy Band began the Star Spangled Banner, parks police launched tear gas into the thicket of protesters. They misjudged the wind, however, and the smoke swept over the celebration’s attendees. “To the final strains of the anthem,” a reporter wrote, “there was a mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes.”
The illustration for "dork" in Webster's Fifth Edition
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