CGMthrowaway

Raw milk, anti-vaccine, homeschooling etc used to be solidly the purview of the West Coast liberal. Somewhere along the line it flipped polarity entirely.

All news is politics news now in the US. Didn't used to be like that. (Dear readers, go watch some old 80s-90s TV news broadcasts on youtube if you don't believe me)

Or corporate espionage

I think Elon's big political contributions didn't begin until 2024, so pretty recent.

Do we know who was the largest individual political donor prior to Elon?

> Humanities 10a will tentatively include works by Homer, Sophocles, Sappho, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Mary Shelley, Marx, Kafka, Du Bois, and Morrison.

I had read all of these authors before college, with the exception of Sappho/du Bois - which feel like "modern" additions to a traditional survey - but my school was good about classics and American lit.

What are high school kids assigned to read these days, if not these authors?

Third - a rogue IC that doesn't fully answer to congress or/nor the president

May I suggest tweaking your mental model. Mike Johnson was THE MOST vocal opponent of mass surveillance, he was supposed to be the one to whip a republican congress to finally end Section 702.

Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."

What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)