August 1, 2026 - Week in Review

It was a bit of a bleak week. A brutally busy week at work (planning for the start of the new fiscal year) kept my head down, but I had a few things queued up.

Sunday, July 26: A music post, Eric Gales does a ripping medley of Hendrix, Bach and the mighty Led Zep:

Music: Eric Gales doing his thang

Eric Gale brings da’ FIRE. A medley for the ages.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Monday, July 27: Back to the Backlash series, this time, I dig deeper into an industrial grade motherfucker, Judge Leander Perez from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana.

This Fucking Guy: Leander Perez

Wilson hid behind appointees. Mississippi hid behind file cabinets. Leander Perez didn’t hide behind anything, he ran two Louisiana parishes like a personal kingdom, built a snake-infested prison out of spite, and got excommunicated for being too much even for the Catholic Church.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Wednesday, July 27: In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education, there were skirmishes, and some pretty heinous racist fuckers doing their best to keep Black Americans in their place, and out of places that Whites liked to be. Like state colleges and shit.

This was long and slow, but what really put integration into high gear was the IRS beginning to pull tax exempt status from institutions that remained segregated. So, yay IRS?

The IRS Did More for Secularism Than Any Court Ruling

Turns out you don’t need barbed wire and a snake dungeon to fight integration. You just need a church, a tax exemption, and about eight years to find a better word for what you’re actually defending. The IRS didn’t create the religious right. It just gave it a reason to organize.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Thursday, July 30: There had been a low-grade kerfuffle all week as Substack decided to partner with the good folks at Pangram (narrator: they were not good folks) to give readers a button to push to scan any post or note to see if it was AI.

Ostensibly, this was because the founders (Chris Best in particular) were concerned about "Claudefishing" and the AI Slop fest that is LinkedIn.

The notes? well they were a buzzin' with anger and ire on both sides. I took a read of it from my perch as a long-time product manager in tech, and dashed off a post for my Product Management newslett3er, The Product Bistro:

The IRS Did More for Secularism Than Any Court Ruling

Turns out you don’t need barbed wire and a snake dungeon to fight integration. You just need a church, a tax exemption, and about eight years to find a better word for what you’re actually defending. The IRS didn’t create the religious right. It just gave it a reason to organize.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

Friday, July 31: I finish what I am going to post for the whole series on the backlash. Frankly, I have been down some really fucked up rabbit holes on the failure of Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era south, the lynchings, the institutionalized racist fuckery, how fucking awful Mississippi was (and still is), and how much of the story of the Civil Rights era wasn't a series of singular events like I learned in my US history courses, but instead it was a long, bloody shit-show.

This last post was a dive into the turbulent 60's, post Civil Rights act signing, and the rise of two factions of radical leftists, The Weathermen and The Black Panther Party.

Same Fire, Different Fuel

The Panthers were a civil rights answer to police violence. The Weathermen were a Vietnam answer to a war that wouldn’t end. Everyone keeps mashing them into one story. That mashing isn’t an accident, and it erases exactly what each group was actually responding to.

Sweaty's CornerGeoff Anderson

The full backlash series can be found here:

The Backlash Machine - Sweaty’s Corner

The Backlash Machne, a series tracing a hundred-plus years of the same recurring move: American institutions — progressive and reactionary alike — managing racial hierarchy through mechanisms diffuse and technocratic enough that nobody involved ever quite has to say the quiet part. Sovereignty commissions, segregation academies, COINTELPRO, and the rest of the machine are coming.

Sweaty's Corner

I will probably leave it here. I started to dig into some Reconstruction era fuckery (Sons of the American Revolution, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy) and frankly, like a teen aged girl in the 2010's, I can't even.

A quick check on from The Shitpost Dude (note: sometimes Substack doesn't like links from Ghost, so if you get an error, just edit the URL and remove everything to the right of the ampersand)

I had the misfortune to click on a post on The Bulwark by Mona Charen, and she really had some fucked up shit to say about the waves of DSA candidates. It is pretty fucking rich if you remember the shit she wrote in the Obama era. That is some pot calling the kettle black shit, and some tone-deafness, and the Dude wasn't gonna let that shit slide:

Three Thousand Years of Beautiful Tradition, Starting Tuesday

Nobody polices a faith harder than the guy who just joined it. A look at the alarm genre that discovered its own side’s problems suspiciously on schedule.”

The Dude ShitpostsJeffery Lebowski

That's all for this week.