Richard Ashby Wilson
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richardawilson.bsky.social
Richard Ashby Wilson
@richardawilson.bsky.social

Princeton University Professor of #Anthropology. Co-Director of the Human Rights Initiative. I write about #HumanRights & #CivilRights
Views are personal.

Richard Ashby Wilson is an American–British social anthropologist of law and human rights. He is the Gladstein Distinguished professor of Human Rights and Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of Connecticut. In 2021, Wilson became the Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Intellectual Life at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Wilson established the interdisciplinary Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut and was the Director of the Human Rights Institute from 2003 to 2013. Wilson is one of the founders of the anthropology of human rights and was editor and an author of Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), the first edited volume in the field of the anthropology of human rights. .. more

Political science 48%
History 17%

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
#ICEShooting
#Minneapolis
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/u...
More Agents Head to Minnesota as U.S. Takes Over Shooting Investigation
www.nytimes.com

Today an appalling abandonment of the United States' commitment to multilateral solutions to global problems like #climatechange #terrorism and #nuclearproliferation (that won’t go away even if we put our head in the sand, or somewhere else...).
www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States
MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United
www.whitehouse.gov

Another absurdity in the Age of Ignorance. As a student I thought #Plato was an unbearable conservative, but now he's deemed too woke.
#AcademicFreedom
ACLU @aclu.org · 3d
We condemn ICE's killing of a Minneapolis woman today and call on federal agents to withdraw from Minnesota immediately.

This tragedy is further proof that ICE is out of control, endangering our communities, and must end its lawless operations before anyone else is brutally hurt or killed.
Walz: "Do you have no decency? We have someone dead in their car for no reason whatsoever. I don't want to be right about this, but I said if they do this they're gonna create a chaotic situation where someone innocent is gonna get killed. And they did it."

The Unitary Mobster Doctrine of Constitutional Law

UTTER INSANITY from Dr. Strangelove/Squidward.

Now that the United States has upheld the principle that sovereigns don't have immunity, I look forward to it enforcing the #InternationalCriminalCourt indictments against #Netanyahu and #Putin for mass atrocities.
MacCALLUM: You have about 100,000 dying from drug overdoses, most of those drugs from from Venezuela and other places

CROW: That's actually not true. The majority of the deaths by drugs in America are the result of meth and fentanyl. Almost none of that comes from Venezuela
Nicolás Maduro Charged With Felony Oil Possession

We are a country whose Constitution, according to the Supreme Court, gives our own presidents immunity for crimes committed while in office, but we will prosecute presidents of other countries for alleged crimes and invade them to execute arrest warrants.

Entering the neocolonial piracy stage of late capitalism.

True, but Trump v. USA violated established precedent in international law. See Pinochet, Taylor, Fujimori, Milosevic. This is tacit recognition of that fact.

This post is solid gold.

Trump sets the precedent that heads of state can be held accountable for crimes committed while in office. The prosecution will pound this point in his trial.

"U.S. attorney general declared that the United States indicted #Venezuelan President #Maduro...on narcotics charges and will be tried in federal court. That...raises the interesting possibility that #Trump claims he enjoys #immunity but not other heads of state."

open.substack.com/pub/contrari...
Updated: Headfirst Into War
The horrific attack on Venezuela overnight puts the U.S. in the same camp as Russia.
open.substack.com
In his 2019 memoir The Threat, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe quotes first-term Trump saying Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

zeteo.com/p/venezuela-...
Trump's Venezuela Attack: It’s All About the Oil, Stupid!
Here are five times Donald Trump himself admitted that illegally attacking Venezuela and toppling Nicolás Maduro was aimed at seizing the country’s massive oil reserves.
zeteo.com

Why the rule of law matters. One key protection from #dictatorship and electoral intimidation.
www.nytimes.com/live/2025/12...
Trump Administration Live Updates: President Abandons Effort to Deploy National Guard to 3 Cities
www.nytimes.com
Question: But the president’s statements that he believed the election was rife with fraud—those are statements protected by the First Amendment, correct?

Smith: Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and are made with knowing falsity, then no, they are not.

Went to in-network care but they used an out of network lab, incurring $565 in direct costs to me. After hours on the phone and much argument, my insurance company paid. Insane & wasteful system.
When and if sane and honest people ever again control the U.S. government, one of the first things they should do is enact a tax on large accumulations of wealth. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/if-the-market-were-working-well-we

Sure, amateurs compared to the military industrial complex and Big Pharma.
Trump gets his marching orders from the Kremlin’s murderous thug.

Lawyers for Illinois told the justices in their brief that an “unnecessary deployment” of troops would “escalate tensions and undermine the ordinary law enforcement activities of state and local entities.”

Corporate cravenness hits new lows as Bari Weiss of CBS kills 60 Minutes story revealing the horror of ICE deportations. Excellent explanation here:
One Courageous Correspondent
open.substack.com/pub/steady/p...
One Courageous Correspondent
What happened inside “60 Minutes” this weekend
open.substack.com
CBS pulled the 60 Minutes CECOT segment, but Canada aired it anyway.

The segment was streaming via Global TV and YouTube (since taken down). Having a VPN set to Canada helped. 🇨🇦

My take, there is no reason we shouldn’t see this. Most of it was known information, easily searchable.
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