Barrett Holmes Pitner

My book "The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America" is published today! This is an incredible feeling. I'm struggling to find the words to express my feelings. You can buy it everywhere thecrimewithoutaname.com @CounterpointLLC @penguinrandom

Nailed it. LOL

A Dialogue with Claude AI That Reconstructs Western Philosophy open.substack.com/pub/thereconst…

this is the bleakest thing i've ever read lmfao

UN votes to recognise slavery as 'gravest crime against humanity' bbc.in/3PnDIe6

Ryan Coogler after winning outstanding motion picture at the 2026 NAACP Image Awards for Sinners: "Our people have been here over four centuries, there's always been a lot of lies told about us. And a lie, no matter how powerful the person saying it is, it's still a lie. And the truth, no matter how little power the person has at saying the truth, it's still the truth. And the truth is y'all are loved, y'all are beautiful, and y'all are powerful and mighty. And bless y'all. Thank y'all so much."

Surely there was a different cast photo to pick.

Hello! I’m the reporter who has been tracking citizens detained by immigration agents. And last night, I noticed something: A lot of them were at the State of the Union, including a number of whom I’ve written about. Their stories should be known:

Lisa Rubin explains how journalists have figured out the DOJ has withheld documents containing accusations of sexual assault against Donald Trump from their Epstein files releases

EXCLUSIVE: An NPR investigation finds the public database of Epstein files is missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations against President Trump. Other documents that mention Trump have been taken down (and some restored). npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-…

This is Rodney Taylor, a disabled double amputee who’s been imprisoned by ICE for a year. He was about to get new prosthetic legs when he was kidnapped… and they won’t let him have them. His health is declining & there’s been almost no media coverage. No protests. No noise.

The history books quietly bypassed is that Barack Obama, during the most pressure-saturated nights of his presidency, would retreat alone to the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence — not to strategize, not to take calls, but to handwrite personal letters to ten ordinary American citizens every single night, a practice he maintained with almost monastic devotion across all eight years, selecting the letters himself from the 40,000 that arrived daily at the White House, and his longtime correspondence director Fiona Reese confirmed that Obama would often weep privately while reading certain letters, folding them carefully before writing responses so personally detailed and emotionally present that recipients frequently described the experience of receiving them as the most significant moment of their lives, with one Ohio steelworker writing back to say that Obama's letter had physically stopped him from making a decision that would have permanently altered his family's future. What makes this practice almost unbearably moving is the detail that surfaced later — Obama never used a computer for these letters, always a black felt-tip pen, always legal yellow paper first as a draft, always rewritten onto White House stationery by hand a second time, because he believed, as he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in a rare private conversation later recounted in her 2018 work, that the physical act of pressing pen to paper forced a quality of attention that typing simply could not replicate, a philosophy rooted in his years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004 where he developed the conviction that democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering rather than processing it from behind the insulating distance of institutions and screens."

Bald eagles getting lead poisoning from eating bullets is unfortunately just about the most American thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life

Just so we’re clear… Howard Lutnik is the *architect* of Trump’s tariff plan. He’s the one who pushed Trump on these. And at the EXACT SAME TIME that he was doing this, Lutnik’s sons **who he appointed to take over his bank** were betting the tariffs would be struck down and buying up refund rights at $0.25 on the dollar. And now the government owes companies refunds… and depending on how many refund slips they are holding, the Lutnik’s bank could make BILLIONS of dollars. There’s nothing else I can say about this that won’t catch me a permaban

Keith Porter family saying goodbye. One of the victims of ice out celebrating New Year’s Eve in LA.. say his name. Do not forget him.. also do not forget the latest victim Dr.Linda Davis.

Totally illegal.

This is Linda Davis, a special education teacher who was killed in a car crash involving ICE agents The agents didn’t render aid. She was minutes from her school and bled to death in her car. They didn’t offer aid to Renee Good or Alex Pretti either. Say her name too.

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

I’m praying for Congresswoman Lucy McBath, today. Her son, Jordan Davis should be celebrating his 31st birthday today. Instead, his life was taken at 17. He was a teenager with dreams, laughter, and a future ahead of him who never reached adulthood. His death remains a painful reminder of how quickly gun violence can steal possibility and silence promise. We remember Jordan Davis today and recommit ourselves to the work of love, justice, and nonviolence.

Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most uncompromising figures of Reconstruction, driven by a belief that the United States had a moral obligation to rebuild the South on entirely new foundations after the Civil War. As a leader of the Republicans in Congress, he argued that simply ending slavery wasn’t enough true justice required dismantling the old planter aristocracy that had built its power on human bondage. His proposal to confiscate the estates of leading Confederates and redistribute the land to formerly enslaved people and poor farmers was rooted in his conviction that economic independence was essential for genuine freedom. Stevens also pushed for sweeping civil rights protections, including equal education and full citizenship for Black Americans, at a time when many in Congress resisted such ideas. Though his land‑redistribution plan never passed, his influence helped shape the 14th Amendment and the broader Reconstruction agenda. Even his opponents acknowledged his fierce consistency: he believed that a nation that had tolerated slavery owed more than symbolic change. His legacy is complicated but unmistakable, he fought for a version of America that was far more egalitarian than most of his contemporaries were willing to imagine. #archaeohistories