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Mike O'Malley

@mikeomalley.bsky.social

810 followers 370 following 1.9K posts

US history Prof. at GMU. Author most recently of The Color of Family: History, Race, and the Politics of Ancestry See https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/people/momalle3

historyarthistory.gmu.edu

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · Nov 16

My most recent book centers on the fact that two ancestors--one born in Ireland--were declared "colored" by the state of VA. Had they stayed in Virginia, my father couldn't have married my mother. Record keeping reinforced and sometimes simply invented permanent racial identities.

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 17h

What a shame if they leave. Wait is it?

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 1d

Some good news for a change

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 1d

Andrew Mellon, 1930: the depression "will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 1d

For pundits like Klein, working class means white men in flannel shirts. It's a vision formed by people who never held
a working class job in their lives

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 1d

Both Biden and trump acted to subsidize favored industries. It’s only “left” if you think solar power is either saintly or evil: symbolic politics. Rich pundits don’t like being constrained by moral arguments

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 1d

Sharply left means “not actively hostile to trans people” and “POCs holding actual power”. It’s hofstadters symbolic politics

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 1d

Visit any old cemetery. Not the age of death on the headstones. Get back to us

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 1d

"Children never got sick in the past." If you convince your self this is true, then, why, anything at all can be true

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 2d

This is EXTREMELY bad

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 3d

He's not wrong. Show your faces indeed, cowardly thugs

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 3d

I never thought that kind of rhetoric would be applied to me! It was for those other brown people!

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 3d

Demolishing the East wing to build a ballroom for entertaining oligarchs, while SNAP benefits are about to go unpaid. It's a perfect statement of our brutal Gilded Age

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

Me: Democratic socialist and family-having mortgage paying dad-joke telling person. Unpossible!

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

I think it was his nephew, Donald Dox

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

His Bird bio was pretty good and I'm sorry v. 2 has never appeared.

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

I don't think we disagree, friend

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

Yeah that is the key. Platner is not pitching his appeal to bro-fascists, as far as I know. He might pick some up, the same way Obama picked up some trump voters. He won't get many Susan Collins voters, who I think are cosseted in reactionary centrism and unreachable

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

I have Thesis and Antithesis but I ran out of space. Story of my intellectual life, actually

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

Yeah there a re a lot of things they shouldn't be, but here we are. I really don't want to elect 79 year old Janet Mills because Schumer thinks she's good. I want an aggressively fighting principled left

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

Koch money. GMU was 2nd or 3rd in right wing giving for decades, all to the Econ department and affiliated institutes for "public choice," by which they meant "no public goods to choose."

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

And Oz--Dr. Oz was his opponent

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

What a terrible Synema-esque person he turned out to be

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

Wayne is one of my heroes. Smart, iconoclastic, stubbornly original, consistently delightful. I've spent many hours trying to adapt Shorter compositions to guitar youtu.be/A9TVLsDVtU4?...

Yes or No

YouTube video by Mike O'Malley

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Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

I know! But notice that attack has evaporated

Mike O'Malley @mikeomalley.bsky.social · 4d

Not as far as I’m concerned. I’m withholding judgment, even though I to ink the tattoo is appalling