iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Is it really possible to translate 2,000 year old poetry like this? Like: how can this not just be considered an original poem, inspired by, and shaped like, another in Latin?

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Spend 10,000 hours with these, you'll turn you into a me.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Quite the bolt from the blue, this whole MAGA "takeover" of the Republican Party....

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

University of Michigan today. The most tipping-point image I've seen to exemplify our fascist descent. And the surrender was won with the weapon of false antisemitism charges against people protesting genocide--making administrations complicit in genocide. A moral nadir. This is how republics die.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Spending these days fact-checking and endnoting, I've been Googling at industrial scale, which has given my a brain-melting lesson in how fucked we are as a civilization. In today's installment, a quote from Geo W. Bush's 2nd inaugural in 2005 is depicted—why not?—as one from Obama's in 2013.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

We're staking our economy on forcing a technology down people's throats that outputs misinformation as a matter of course. Someone asked me about my interview with Gil Duran. This is happened when I googled our names together. I have not interviewed Gil Duran. This path: civilizational death.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

More fun with "AI." I Googled a famous quote from the guy who, for saying this, Rahm Emanuel sent a dead fish, and got this output back.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Not where our cabin is, and probably in many rural and other under-invested areas, because Facebook is FREE. Every restaurant etc. Is only on Facebook, and it works fine. Some very faves...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

So fascinating. Who'da thunk. The WSJ serves the plutocracy what they need to know on the news page, and the proaganda line on the op-ed page. News coverage means: DSA is a real-deal contender for power. A blessed event for the prospects of liberty, no matter the all-too-human flaws of some of DSA.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Gramps is doing endnotes. Gather around the Victoria, kids, and I'll tell you a story of a time when, if you typed a string of words at a website called Google and enclosed them inside quotation marks, it obedient coughed up every time those words appeared together on the Internet, without comment.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Sheesh. The bots aren't "asking" about anything. They are pattern-repeaters, so output grammatical sentences that repeat what every AI in every science fiction story does, ever. Talk about machines like they are people, and you do the tech bros' propaganda work for them.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Yeah, pleeeeeeez tell me more about how Gloria Steinem was a crypto-neoliberal CIA cutout...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

This was the kind of lunacy I grew up around in an overwhelmingly Zionist community, and I think my fascination with such epostemological psychosis, as a politically precocious adolescent, was what, unconsciously, turned my into a scholar of phenomenon like the John Birch Society and Q Anon.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

When Brother Benny gets to the cabin, things do tend to get fonkay.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

In my next book I call this "winning the wrong way, " and provide evidence of cases where leaders of the Democrats' "centrist" wing (actually, bought-and-paid-for wing) expresses a preference to lose. On one page, Cottle gets a name-check for boosting Chris Christie a 2016 presidential comer.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I'm in NYC. Come down to the speaking tomorrow (Tuesday, 8/25) at @DCTV, 87 Lafayette Street at 6:30 (pm, not am).

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Here's a fun game, let's see how long a mid-size American city can go without electricity before the New York Times notices. Two weeks, so far. (Clarifying: not actually fun.)

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Fascist propagandists lie, thereby to murder; make up a meaning of "theoretically" that is synonymous with "a red flag" that is synonymous with "risk." Think of this as it appears in a museum 75 years from now, the one recording the ruins of a civilisation that perished of a preventable plague.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

This is much how America stole what is now California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

YOU'RE TELLING ME! When I started I'm not even sure I could GROW a full beard, and now it's Santa-colored!

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Updated 25th anniversary edition available for pre-order now! www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1645...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Getting my next book, "The Infernal Triangle," ready for the copy editor. Of more than academic interest for what the Democratic Party's corporate and pro-Israel wing is up to now...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I called this one, alas. open.substack.com/pub/rickperl...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

In which the author exults. rickperlstein.substack.com/p/my-moment-...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

In case you're wondering how Trump's speech played among the base...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

"Disgusts independents." This is why my slogan is "you can't win the horse race if you burn down the track." Because this is how journalism that cannot take that onboard as part of their narrative has taught people to think. It does not help people understand the political situation they're in.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Public authorities ginning up this much hate, ere long we can expect pogroms.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Fun fact: about a year after 9/11, George W. Bush gave a speech at Mt. Rushmore with his podium angled so he would look like the fifth face.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

I'm kind of proud that the book I have coming out in a year brings the receipts to prove that anti-left Democrats have literally articulated a preference for losing over winning the wrong way--with economic populism--since the 1980s. It's fun to be proven correct.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

"Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth"

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

rickperlstein.substack.com/p/knuckling-...

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

To be fair, here's Mrs. P. in effect on the other side of the building.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Axios don't need no stinkin' recordings!

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I feel like this might be the day a certain country jumps the shark.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The Blaze is my Early Warning Beacon.

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Rick Perlstein @rickperlstein.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

This frog fixing to become the world's biggest frog by eating up all the little sunfishes stuck in the spillway. Check out how he treats the competition!

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