Flips of the Tongue, 2014

Once again, I've accumulated enough flips of the tongue to make a post. I have heard or read all of these: No secondhand reports here. Many are mixed metaphors, while others are malapropisms or eggcorns.

The ship had sailed down that road. Proclaimed by Uni Blake, a pro-fracking representative on the Melissa Harris Perry show.

We're skating on thin ice if we continue on autopilot. As heard on NPR last fall.

It's not UPC to discuss mental institutions. From a comment on minnpost.com. This one might be an autocorrect problem, but funny nonetheless.

A nurse I met, who was wearing a uniform top decorated with friendly Paul Frank monkeys, referred to them as Anne Frank monkeys.

Someone was talking about the golden age of comedy, probably on NPR. The speaker then mentioned Laurel and Hardy, followed by Elvis and Costello.

I recently heard someone say Kamikaze group when Posse Comitatus group was what was intended. (That one is a bit of a Freudian slip.)

And then there was the person who referred to a soldier going AOL (instead of AWOL). I wonder if any CDs were sent out to find him?

At some point during the Senate filibuster last fall, President Obama said the members of the Senate were grinding the gears of government to a halt.

You've got to bring up the white elephants in the room. Spoken by Minneapolis Community and Technical College student Cody Mehlin in a story about Prof Shannon Gibney. That darned colorful elephant and its cousin the heavy gorilla are two of the most mixed-up phrases I've heard, coming up twice before as flips of the tongue and once in a stand-alone post.

This may just be griping and grammar sniping, but I recently had a client who thinks ergo (therefore) is the same thing as e.g. (exempli gratia, which means for example). It took me a while to figure out what s/he was talking about because it just didn't make any sense. (This person also thinks usages of "which" should be proceeded by a semicolon instead of a comma. And that dominate is an adjective synonymous with dominant — the dominate person, for instance. But I should stop grumbling about this.)

Repeat the basic quarry. Clearly, the query must have turned to stone. (From a comment thread.)

Wouldn't it be embarrassing if you didn't know the difference between the slang term Johnson (meaning penis) and John Hancock (meaning signature, as in, "We just need your John Hancock here"). I can't remember what the context was when I encountered this one, but I think it was a person who referred to a penis as a John Hancock, rather than the other way around. Thank goodness. Imagine if someone were to point at a form that needs to be signed and said, "We just need your Johnson here."


More on the pits:

My last post about flips of the tongue listed the misuse of "pit in my stomach." Later, I heard someone else use that expression and checked into how common the usage is. While reading about it, I found this:

At least 'pit in my stomach' and 'hone in on' make sense, and are therefore genuine eggcorns. A few days ago I stumbled on a comment on a blog which said that something 'warmed the cuckolds of my heart'. A Google search confirmed that it wasn't unique. A malapropism, not an eggcorn, of course (and therefore off-topic?) but I couldn't resist sharing it. (commenter Steven F.)

That quote comes from a discussion thread about the writing of Thomas Friedman, which also included this bit of verbal brilliance, masked as a flip of the tongue:

Friedman marches to the tune of a different kettle of fish. (commenter Dan Lufkin)

Past Flips of the Tongue:

December 2007
January 2008
March 2008
June 2008
December 2008
December 2010 
August 2013

BlueSky, September 2025, Part 1

Whew.

The first 15 days of September 2025 on BlueSky were marked by "before the Charlie Kirk shooting/after the Kirk shooting." It sucked up almost all the air in the room. This post doesn't even include all the posts on that topic, since I had a separate post about it three days after it happened (linked below at the appropriate point in time).

Looking through these, it's interesting (in the Minnesota sense) to notice that the main topic just before the shooting was the release of Trump's Jeffrey Epstein birthday letter. That was getting a lot of attention, and re-raising the topic to the top of the news pile again. And then the shooting happened. Hmm. 

I'm not into conspiracies, but that sure was convenient for Trump.

Before the shooting, aside from Epstein, the topics were the military occupation of U.S. cities, including Trump's Apocalypse Now threats on Chicago, the U.S. Navy destroying a Venezuelan boat without provocation or authority, the renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, the ICE raid on the Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, and the firing of a professor (and a number of top administrators) at Texas A&M after a particularly clueless student's ambush. Oh, and it started with the kerfuffle over the Cracker Barrel logo. Remember that? How quaint.

Everything below the line is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance, and quoted from the attributed account.

__

Suddenly "hate speech" is bad. Suddenly "dehumanizing" people is bad. Suddenly "cancel culture" is good. Suddenly words have consequences. The modern American right in 2025, folks.
Mehdi Hasan

I do feel like part of the hatred extended toward Bluesky is a function of preferring to think that the alarm about the state of the country that’s common here is misguided or exaggerated. Dismissing the site as liberal doomers allows you to dismiss those concerns, too.
Philip Bump

Here’s what Charlie Kirk had to say about the First Amendment — seems weird they are desecrating his memory by trying to restrict First Amendment freedoms:


Leah McElrath

free speech: chilled
foreign relations: collapsing
employment: anemic
prices: rising
the stock market: wheeeeee
Micah @rincewind.run

I like when you register for a website and then it takes you to a login page instead of just signing you in. That’s right, good point, I might not have wanted to log in right now. Maybe I signed up today so I could log in sometime, some other day.
Ken Jennings

As I was saying the other day, it's difficult to conceive of anything deserving the name "freedom of speech" that does not, at its core, include the right to insult people
Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social

I’m more used to saying this to people on the Left than people on the Right, but, “hate speech” is not an exception to the First Amendment. “Hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment unless it falls into a traditional established exception.
Pope Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social

If you are looking for where to find Kirk statements, Media Matters has an excellent archive. It's a lot of unhinged nonsense such as claiming Jasmine Crockett wants to eliminate the white population of the US
ArchPundit

Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime:


Williams Institute

I spoke with the NYT Magazine a while ago but have now heard that an editor said they can't quote me because I'm "too liberal" to be a trusted source. You know what's always the first example conservatives use to claim I'm "too liberal"? My work in the 1619 Project, organized by the NYT Magazine.
Kevin M. Kruse

Someone should do a quick count of how many times Chris Rufo has appeared in NYT news copy. They have an archive search API that can be accessed via Python.
jon ben-menachem

The shooter is still alive and turned himself in. Why do they need to “reproduce” it when they can just ask him?
Kevin M. Kruse

They keep on saying that the shooter is not cooperating with them but also that he was motivated by leftist ideologies. Sure sounds like he won't tell them what they want him to say.
Schrödinger's President @darinself.com

What is Kash Patel doing? Why is he going on national television discussing crime scene evidence (!!!) and bragging about the FBI’s brutal interrogation skills (!!!!!)? Am I allowed to criticize his very obvious bungling of Charlie Kirk’s murder investigation, or is that illegal now too
Molly Knight

Democracy dies in whiteness
Jeff Jarvis


Blue Fairylicious Girl @bluesnowflake.bsky.social

I know this is basically a given but, man, sometimes im just....scared, sad, and tired. and tired of being scared, sad, and tired
Barred and Boujee @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social

just so we're clear about what happened today the vice president of the united states of america is encouraging all the right wing nutjobs out there to go on doxxing rampages against american citizens
Tom Tomorrow

"imagine how bad it would be if the fascist government shuts down. that would be so bad" –democrat
Ahhhhh @nerdjpg.com

Removing information about slavery at Harper’s Ferry is like removing information about hydroelectric power at the Hoover Dam. “John Brown went to Harper’s Ferry because he was so infected by the woke mind virus that he had a pathological hatred of states rights.”
Seth Cotlar

I don't know how many times I can say it, or how many ways, but the right's actions *are not caused by the left*. They want power and control. They want to destroy the left, crush its organizing mechanisms, jail its leaders, and rule without opposition. THEY DON'T NEED EXCUSES.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.
jenn m. jackson (they/them)

The president is boasting about how he has shut down boating and fishing in the Caribbean because everyone is afraid that he’ll murder them.
Radley Balko


mar1957.bsky.social

My optimism here is limited, but I really hope centrist institutions like universities and major news organizations understand that the plan is for the government to dismantle them. They do not care if you fire your columnists or discipline staff for accurately quoting Kirk. They just want us all gone.
Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news

The right ignored the murder of the Minnesota House Speaker by a guy who had a hit list of Democrats he was targeting to flip control of the chamber to Republicans. Asked about that assassination today, the president said he didn't know who she was and a Fox host said he didn't care she was killed.
Kevin M. Kruse

JD Vance is doing the Reichstag Fire the right way. by Ezra Klein
NY Times Pitchbot

ive never seen anything like rhetoric coming from the right in the last week, this is absolutely insane and it needs to stop and people in power need to start speaking the fuck up like right the fuck now
Andrew Lawrence

Just like that, history hidden for the white suburban eyes who have better things to do then be bothered by such horrors.
LittleTokyo

We are in the middle of a reactionary right-wing backlash in the world's richest democracies and the billionaire oligarchs are throwing their money and power behind it. They win by dividing working people, creating in and out groups, and wrecking solidarity. We can't let them win.
Mike McCarthy @itsmccarthy.bsky.social

JD Vance is right that its not a "both sides" problem—it is far and away a right-wing problem and a MAGA problem specifically:


Daniel Gilmore @gilmored85.bsky.social

A family member posted that Charlie Kirk is "this generation’s Paul." As in the Apostle Paul. I just don’t know how to reason with such people.  Nor can I comprehend their world view anymore, though I’ve known them my entire life and we grew up in the same culture.
Atticus Finch @atticus59914029.bsky.social

they're going around and documenting flags that aren't at half-mast for Charlie Kirk
Matt Binder

You “regret” mistakes. [The raid on the Hyundai battery plant] was not a mistake. They deliberately shackled these people and distributed video of them being humiliated. They detained them for days after. What they regret is that, this time, their gleeful anti-immigrant violence wrought negative consequences for the administration.
Radley Balko

"I don't care that he's dead."
"He's not a hero."
"He's a scumbag."
"He shouldn't be celebrated."
No, no. I'm not saying that about Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk said that about George Floyd.
Just in case anyone's interested in what he thought was fair to say about someone who was killed on camera.
Kurt Busiek

ahahahah:


Marisa Kabas

The White House has not released architectural plans for the building or its exact location and has, so far, not submitted the project to the National Capital Planning Commission, the government body that typically reviews plans for changes to federal property in the capital region.
ruggledome.bsky.social

Boston's fed grant to improve safety at key intersections has been cancelled by USDOT because, according to the agency: "DOT's priorities presently include... preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles... [the] project includes several elements that impede vehicle capacity and speed." The USDOT is systematically killing transportation projects that were funded, but that don't prioritize driving. Other projects that are being targeted for defunding are apparently pedestrian and bike improvements in San Diego, NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland, and more...
Yonah Freemark

Use of the word "evil" in official Congressional e-newsletters, over time, by party:


Lindsey Cormack @dcinbox.bsky.social

Cool thing for a politician to say: we must continue Charlie Kirk's work
Firable offense for a journalist: quoting Charlie Kirk to indicate what the work was
Academician Prokhor Zakharov @shake1n1bake.bsky.social

To Stephen Miller, a left radical is anyone who isn’t in favor of a white Christian nation.
@pattho.bsky.social

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.
Radley Balko

I was listening to a story on NPR this morning about the precautions transit riders are taking in the wake of [the Charlotte] murder, and yet millions of people engage in the highly risky activity of driving multiple times a day without a second thought.
Gravel Influencer

"The U.S. agricultural workforce fell by 155,000 — about 7 percent — between March and July, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That tracks with Pew Research Center data that shows total immigrant labor fell by 750,000 from January through July."
ryan cooper

If ICE is mocking legal South Korean detainees with slant-eyed gestures, you'd think (1) Congress should do something and (2) what is this org going to look like in a year?
The Volatile Mermaid
Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social

If you need a little hope this morning — the current tween trend involves decorating clothespins with affirming messages, then clipping them on friends' backpacks when they're not looking. Here are a few that my 11-year-old decorated this weekend:


Jess Calarco

Live your life in such a way that, when you die, people directly quoting you does’t sound like a personal attack on your character.
@ohnoshetwitnt.bsky.social

Honestly Bezos should just hand the op-ed page over to a chatbot trained on Diary of a CEO and Rich Dad Poor Dad since that's clearly what he wants anyway
Gillian Branstetter

Tradcath is just an Evangelical sub-cult that likes vestments and old buildings
Buckets, Buckets fucking everywhere @mrmunchertoyou.bsky.social

If the right *truly* believed Charlie Kirk was a defender of free speech and someone who was fine with dissenting opinions, they wouldn't be engaged in a massive campaign to punish anyone who didn't "mourn him properly." They clearly know all of that is bullshit. Only the media was conned.
Kevin M. Kruse

In North Korea, if you didn't cry adequately on news of Kim Il-Sung's death, you and your family could be punished.
Patrick Chovanec

The free speech crusade will continue until complete conformity and submission are achieved.
Jacob T. Levy

It shouldn't escape notice that Trump explicitly threatened to use *the state* to target anyone he and MAGA scapegoat for Charlie Kirk's murder. We really could see Stephen Miller and Kash Patel use the FBI for 60s-style domestic persecution.
Greg Sargent

Hahaha... #botanists:


Kelly Zamudio @kzutaustin.bsky.social

How do Americans typically react when they hit a paywall on a news site?
1% pay
11% try to get the article for free
32% give up
53% look for info elsewhere
Conrad Hackett

Looks like the ICE presence in  Chicagoland — and I emphasize the “land” part — is purposefully operating in a way as to avoid media coverage. By grabbing people here and there on city edges, outskirts and random suburbs,  they don’t attract activity that generates coverage, let alone protest.
Maureen Herman

The mortgage fraud claim against Lisa Cook is false, per documents obtained by Reuters. Bill Pulte's accusation, the sole pretext Trump used to fire her from the Fed, was that she claimed two homes as primary residence. These docs show she did not.
Aaron Fritschner

I am advocating for you to be killed but I am using my inside voice you must debate me this is called democracy
Hari Kunzru

I hope I can live long enough to see Stephen Miller prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced for his numerous crimes against humanity. I hope we can all see him sniveling and crying as he's taken to prison.
Wajahat Ali

hi, folks. today's tasty timeline treat is a dahlia from the Dahlia Dell:


JBC @johnbcaddell.bsky.social

Do you know what the New York Times said after Malcolm was assassinated... "The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still with his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of that darkness that he spawned, and killed him." The media has precedent for condemnation in the death of public figures. It's just selectively applied. But Malcolm already taught us the media will have you hating the oppressed & loving the oppressor
Clarence Okoh

It’s impossible not to sound at least a little crazy when you accurately describe what’s happening right now.
Leah McElrath

If the GOP wants us to attribute the social media comments of every one of their voters to them, that can be arranged, but I don’t think they’d like it.
Kristin @legaleagle7223.bsky.social

It is weird that the fbi director said “Valhalla” let’s not skip over that
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

When people deserve to be mourned, no one needs to be bullied into doing it.
Secretoriginz

ICE is a loaded weapon, and it has shot the nation in the foot.
Hunter @hunter85.bsky.social

Aside from the stupidity of the [Georgia] raid itself, the treatment of the detainees was appalling. ICE under the leadership of Noem, Homan, and Miller is a weapon of mass humiliation. The goal is to dehumanize and strip people of dignity. It is disgusting. What a way to treat citizens of our allies.
SteveG @trenchdiggr.bsky.social

The extinction impact of the beef industry is immense. Eating even a little bit multiplies a diet’s impact on endangered species:


spencer roberts @unpopularscience.bsky.social

Republicans are talking about "social media" as the cause of political violence because it's a convenient distraction from the fact they refuse to acknowledge that Donald Trump does more than anyone in our country to heighten tensions and incite the crazies
Aaron Rupar

We should be honest abut how "we should just kill them, can we not please just KILL them" lurks barely under the surface of so much respectable discourse on the homeless.
Aaron Bady @zunguzungu.bsky.social

To review: an apparent right wing civil war between white Christian nationalist Groypers and white Christian nationalist college campus activists results in the murder of a leader of the latter; and that will now spark a 1930s-style putsch against liberals by the fascists who run the country.
Joy-Ann Reid

Yes, Charlie Kirk called for Joe Biden’s execution. But he called for it in the right way.
NY Times Pitchbot

We shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which the resources of foreign adversaries (including money to influencers and the creation of online influencer accounts and their associated botnets) are contributing to the inflammatory rhetoric driving division within the US.
Leah McElrath

[The cloud is a] "A pay-as-you-go model that locks organizations into an ever-expanding web of dependencies, cleverly disguised as best practices."
nsagheen.bsky.social


Marion @mawinon.bsky.social

When Charlie Kirk, who put together lists of professors he didn't like so people could target and harass them, used the phrase "free speech," he used it in the same way creationists use "teach the controversy." For Kirk, it was just another way to bludgeon the left and also to promote his propaganda.
Mike the Mad Biologist and Kalanick Professor of Vibe Physics

Elon Musk is trying to violently overthrow the government of the UK and replace it with a far-right racist regime, a fact that will not inform how US elites see him at all
Will Stancil

"When black parents petitioned for desegregated schools during the summer of 1955, for instance, [the local Citizens Council] published the names and publicly called for the petitioners to be placed on an employers' blacklist." Where Charlie Kirk and his fans got some of their ideas...
Joan Walsh

Very cool that the richest man in human history purchased a social media platform so that he could more efficiently incite vigilante violence
jon ben-menachem

You are being told to stop calling fascist things fascistic (a real thing) by neo-fascists and budding fascists who never stopped blaming migrant caravan invasion (a fake “invasion”) after the bodies weren’t even cold yet after the Tree of Life slaughter. Spare me
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

it’s kind of amazing, what percentage of nick fuentes’ content and posts were about charlie kirk and what a traitor he was, and how much his followers parrot him and call for kirk’s downfall. and that he has just left it all up as he pivoted to mourning him and blaming leftists?
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

It’s all going according to plan:


Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social

I am again stating for the record that women are consistently more in favour of trans rights than men and the whole ~women are being silenced, silenced I tell you~ narrative is pure propaganda
Elle @centristmum.bsky.social

The Dept. of Education has pulled funding for programs in 8 states that support students with both hearing and vision loss. A staffer at one program says he was told the Trump admin. took issue with 2 words on the grant application: “transition" and “privilege."
ProPublica

A friend of mine was on Charlie Kirk's "watch list" of Black professors. She received so many death and rape threats that her university offered her a security detail for the walk to class. This is Kirk's legacy. You would never know it from reading all of these legacy newspaper op-eds about him.
Miles Howard @milesperhoward.bsky.social

Every pundit article: BLUESKY IS A HOTBED OF RADICALIZATION. Majority of posts in my feed: Check out this cool bug/bird/random historical personage I found! Small but vivid minority of posts: Do you think Gritty and Alf are in a polycule or nah?
Kingfisher & Wombat @tkingfisher.com

Kirk didn’t debate out of some spirit of democracy or whatever. He did it to expand the Overton window, so that the humanity of marginalized groups could be seen as being up for debate. His “change my mind” schtick was a sham: he was never, ever willing to change his mind.
Waldo Jaquith

Had Tyler Robinson shot up an elementary school instead and killed dozens of kids, Charlie Kirk, JD Vance and all their kind would have just shrugged and said that's just a way of life, price worthy paying for guns. How do we know? Because that's exactly what they did and said many times before.
accidentalflyer

rikules.bsky.social

The economics of social media are structured such that if you can turn boredom into anger you get money. So retired boomers get turned into spasming rage machines, and every asshole who wants attention and refuses to get a real job has a path to wealth.
Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul

The type of speech most punished in this society is that which consists of telling the truth about how the powerful have harmed you
Leta McCollough Seletzky @letaseletzky.com

Kash Patel’s FBI puts two pounds of methamphetamine in the incinerator at an animal shelter, sending 14 people to the hospital, and exposing some 75 cats and dogs to the narcotic.
southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social

MAGA is not a homogenized group. There are many different elements, and one is a group of radicalized young men who want to burn society down. They see people like Charlie Kirk as weak and complicit and they want to capitalized on the antidemocratic energy Trump and others have normalized.... Most of us who study these things knew, right away, there was a very good chance this was a groyper or accelerationists, all while our politicians and media members lined up to normalize Kirk and blather on about “disagreeing better.” It’s horseshit and detrimental. The story was obvious.
Jared Yates Sexton

One less-highlighted reason that criticism of Charlie Kirk is taken by conservatives as clear desire for/intention to enact political violence is that when conservatives criticize their targets, it is usually with the desire for and intent of enacting violence. So we see: they know words can kill.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

Can’t stop, got heron shit to do:


Alistair Coleman

The cost of car ownership is an enormous cost burden on so many people already struggling. What makes it even worse is that driving is the most dangerous activity people regularly do daily. Cars are expensive, dangerous and environmentally toxic.
Bryan @bryanformhals.com

There are more articles about crime on subway than crime on subway.
Gleb Bahmutov

All men have to do is look up things like shavers or workouts or trucks and the manosphere algorithm opens the fire hose of red pill propaganda. It’s baked in now.
rabbit2rabbit @nibberdoo.bsky.social

If we transported 2025 Charlie Kirk back to 2012 he would have been widely considered the most vile and contemptible human being in politics, worse even than Limbaugh. That he wasn't in 2025 is a testament to how much of a permission structure for gutter racism the right has built.
JB stan account @johnbrownstan.bsky.social

People missing an important point about folks getting fired for whatever they said about Charlie Kirk: Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is “allowed” to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police
Asha Rangappa

Extremist murders by ideology, 2013 to 2022:


Philip Bump

I’ve seen too many describe what Brian Kilmeade’s says with the word ‘euthanize.’ No. What he is describing is murder. He is talking about murdering many innocent people. It is another sign of how dangerous our political times are that this man is a host of show on a major tv network.
Kate Knuth

He was a millionaire social media/pop cult unapologetic propagandist for white christian supremacy
mary-colin @mary-colinchisholm.bsky.social

I was listening to an old Casey Kasem American Top 40 (I find this soothing these days) from 1985 where he told the story of Wendy Carlos, who scored The Shining and Tron, and her journey to becoming trans. Casey got all the pronouns right and it was presented as a slice of life, feel good story
Mike Ryan

Brian Kilmeade is what happens when a junior varsity stormtrooper makes a wish upon a can of bronzer to become a tongue in a world of unlicked boots:


Jesse Duquette

If Republicans were patriotic, Trump and his co-conspirators would be facing impeachment.
@trialrun2024.bsky.social

It really cements Charlie Kirk’s reputation as a hero of free speech when his followers threaten, doxx, and get people fired for not “mourning properly.” (Actually, it underlines what a scam that “free speech” routine was in the first place.)
Charles Johnson @charles.littlegreenfootballs.com

This not a new thought at this point, but one of the most effective ways to break the GOP would be allowing direct-to-consumer car sales and cutting out the dealerships
Kevin A @kba26.bsky.social

Last September Charlie Kirk claimed that Haitian immigrants in Huntsville were "raping your women and hunting you down at night." He said that rural Alabamians faced a future in which Haitian immigrants "will become your masters."
Seth Cotlar

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.
Kate Tuttle @katekilla.bsky.social

Kirk’s approach to “debate,” given his lack of formal education, was peak Dunning-Kruger.
Lasso @scottpal.bsky.social

The flags at half-mast and firing people for criticizing Kirk all look like political and economic elites still pissed everyone protested in 2020 and forced them to have to care about George Floyd, and now they're trying to reverse engineer their own alternative "martyr."
Anders @derzquist.net

One day, nearly 2000 years ago, a cat dashed across some drying tiles, somewhere near Hadrian's Wall. It's immortality of a kind, isn't it?


Dr Rebecca Warren

Brian Kilmeade will not be fired for calling for the murder of American citizens, yet multiple journalists/reporters/teachers lost their job for accurately reporting things Charlie Kirk actually said and stood for. But it’s the “violent left” that’s the problem
Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft.bsky.social

You’re think *you’re* depressed? Try being at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association right now with 5,000 political scientists  presenting their work on the state of democracy, public opinion, and media. They are also drinking heavily.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young

Kind of weird how Roberts declared the VRA preclearance to rest on dated and unfair assumptions about the South and within 15 years the former Confederate states will have effectively eliminated almost every black district within those states.
CavsKermit

I'm fascinated by the constant discourse about the radical left. I'm not saying a radical left doesn't exist but most of what's given that title are basic, reasonable left-of-center folks. Opposing bigotry of all kinds and wanting more economic equity and caring about the environment is not radical.
Peter Flax @pflax1.bsky.social

These conservatives need to stop worrying about people on the left mocking them and start worrying about their fellow right wingers murdering them.
WeirwoodTreeHugger

#InsectThursday. Seen on Tuesday in Gilroy, California:


Harold von Drehle

Charlie Kirk's murder is just the latest example of how our nation's love affair with guns is allowing the Second Amendment to swallow up the First.
Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social

Parasocial relationships weren’t invented by the internet, but they definitely perfected the formula.
Sean Hawkins @yourpalhawkboy.bsky.social

I am having a hard time reconciling "Charlie Kirk was a fierce advocate of open dialogue and free expression" with "we must identify and persecute everyone who is insufficiently mournful"
Gillian Branstetter

There is a clutch of pundits who treat the world like it’s an Ivy League seminar course, mostly because that’s the environment in which they emerged. They think debate and white papers are the pinnacle of political action. They fume at anyone who approaches politics in any other way.
Philip Bump

The Trump administration’s move to classify birth control as abortifacients is utterly batshit science and completely predictable policy. It will have devastating outcomes
Matthew L Reznicek @drreznicek.bsky.social

Incredible. Trump drags the reputation of a highly regarded economist, first Black woman to be a Fed gov, thru the mud claiming she committed mortgage fraud. But the documents his appointee to run Fannie and Freddie got for him and that he said showed fraud don’t actually say that.
Joyce White Vance

So it looks like the shooter essentially took out a load-bearing piece of fascist infrastructure which is why every institution is reacting like a state leader got shot. Because functionally, he was. Which is telling me that the fascist bench is incredibly shallow.
Null convention


I'm Not Really Mary Poppins

Goldenrods are powerhouse plants. First, edible shoots for humans and deer in the spring. Next, a host for more species of caterpillar than any other North American genus of herbs. Then, as an incredible pollinator plant, as you see here. Finally for the finches who feast on seeds.
Eli's Native Plants

What centrist libs can't seem to internalize is that the US contains a large, longstanding, well-funded political movement that *wants political violence and authoritarianism*. It does not need to be provoked in any way in order to pursue those goals.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

there's a weird feedback loop where the media's reaction to kirk's death pushes you to speak more ill of the dead than you otherwise would because it's the only reasonable response to the simpering praise they're heaping on him
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

The Nation pulls NO punches: "There's no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign. Refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”
Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com

__________________________________

I posted on Friday, September 12, with the first three days of posts about the Charlie Kirk shooting and its aftermath.

Everything below is from before the Kirk shooting.

__________________________________

Maybe having all our nerves so shaken at all times to the point that our bodies can’t function is a bad thing. I’m starting to think it’s not healthy to be forced to live like this.
Brianna Nicole Pail @pailbn.bsky.social

If car commercials were honest, they'd look like this:


American Fietser

E.P.A. to Stop Collecting Emissions Data From Polluters
Jill R @summergirljkr.bsky.social

Millions of people have expertise grounded entirely in the systems being replaced. As disruption happens, that expertise loses value, fast—and no one wants to be on the receiving end of a "rapid repricing" in their career.
Alex Steffen

There was actually no reason we had to turn the average pickup truck into a dangerous tank.*
*except for auto industry greed and toxic masculinity
Elle @biknmusicmama.bsky.social

We live in terror of the dumb as shit crowd.
The Alternate Historian

There are so many levels to this dystopia but there's one common theme here, and it's pretty scary that "nihilistic clout-chasing" is perhaps the central American value at this moment in time.
Insipid Twaddle

Awful: Sen Tim Kaine reached out to numerous GOP Senators to ask them to join his letter laying out basic questions for Trump about drug boat bombing, Senate staffer tells me. Zero Rs agreed.
Greg Sargent

There is not a single Republican Senator who cares about this country.  It's all craven self-interest, self-protection, and grift. None are capable of shame, but they should be ashamed of themselves.
weather and noise @notthattherese.bsky.social

On this day in 1966, 250 Black students were attacked for trying to integrate schools in Grenada, Mississippi. Twelve years after Brown v. Board, the city maintained fully segregated schools.
Equal Justice Initiative

In my experience, courage is usually the product of love and/or solidarity. When we are deeply invested in each other, we are more likely to take risks that we wouldn't take out of mere principle, or for the sake of people we feel disconnected from. Our alienation mass produces cowardice.
@mskellymhayes.bsky.social

- you clean up that banksy?
- sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked:


The Author, Séamas O'Reilly

As Trump’s health fails, he inflicts sickness and disease on all of America. Why?—as punishment for his own mortality?
ghiseldamanifesto.bsky.social

It's wild how much of political press was bullied into pretending that Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump was a hoax, when it represents one of the best ROIs in history
Scott Lemieux @lemieuxlgm.bsky.social

An incredibly disturbing tweet from Stephen Miller twelve hours ago. He purports to identify a "depraved," "malicious" "ideology" but doesn't name it. He describes it as an amorphous evil defined by its opposition to anything he likes. And anything he likes is sunny and good. Goebbels would approve.
Adam Keiper

We're close to reaching a chilling moment; the first time in history where the single largest group of people arrested by ICE in the interior and held in detention are people with no criminal record. The gap is now down to fewer than 300 people.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

"Vance didn't even try to claim a rationale for bombing that boat...he effectively asserted that the existence of drug smuggling anywhere authorizes the president to kill anyone he wants to."
Greg Sargent

"0.3 per cent of the world’s land area – yes, just the land – would be needed to meet the current energy demand from solar alone, which is LESS THAN THE CURRENT LAND FOOTPRINT OF FOSSIL FUEL INFRASTRUCTURE."
Yellow Dot Studios @weareyellowdot.bsky.social

Photo of an artist's photo-reference morgue. A really nice one. Before the Magic Electric Internet, artists and cartoonists had to create their own Google Images, by clipping photos out of magazines and filing them according to topic. I had a morgue until the mid-1990s. Not as good as this one:


Derf Backderf

Gerrymandering is a form of voter suppression. Voters in gerrymandered states find out quickly that their vote doesn’t count toward their representation, so they become apathetic.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

On this day in 1963, white students began to withdraw from the newly integrated Tuskegee High School in Alabama to avoid attending school with Black students. Within one week, all 275 white students had stopped attending the school.
Equal Justice Initiative

Conservatives are obsessed with indoctrination because they ***believe in*** and ***practice*** indoctrination. Those of use on the left (especially in education) are against indoctrination; it is often why we teach.
PL Thomas EdD

“In the 1970s,…guns and abortion became the defining constitutional issues in…American politics. On the left, abortion came to mean freedom and guns murder; on the right, guns came to mean freedom and abortion murder. That none of [this] can withstand scrutiny has not seemed to matter.” -Jill Lenore
RBmpls

The Texas A&M tape can be paired with countless memoirs of Red Guards calling out teachers for deviation from Great Leader Thought during Cultural Revolution catastrophe. "According to Our President, this is illegal." Cancellations at West Point (Tom Hanks!) and US Air Force Academy. The Cultural Revolution is the parallel.
James Fallows

It's unclear to me how one can teach any social science in Texas under these conditions.
Kevin Banda

Professors can no longer talk about “gender” — but it’s fine to lust after, objectify, and exploit pre-pubescent and underage girls in Trump’s America:


Brooke Newman

Texas A&M has 79,000 students across all its programs, as a matter of interest. That’s more than every Ivy League undergrad college combined.
CHOAM Nomsky @samthielman.com

Yeah, but nobody on the NYT masthead went there, so who cares, right?
Kevin M. Kruse

The Atlantic and NYT lost their minds if there was so much as a trigger warning in classes. Now, professors and Deans are being fired for a class that discussed the existence of trans people and those same publications are quiet. It was never about free speech.
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net

It’s pretty clear President Trump raped children and should be in federal prison but instead he’s running the country and murdering civilians in international waters. I don’t know any plainer way to say it. Euphemisms aren’t helpful here.
Qagggy!

Recent research shows that the potential of both carbon capture and storage and ecosystem restoration to mitigate climate change have been greatly over-estimated. It is not going to be possible to suck all that carbon out of the sky once it's up there. We have onlu one option: stop burning stuff
Dr Charlie Gardner

very well


 @lucavi.bsky.social

I decline to give SCOTUS — or the academic and cultural institutions and people who have made it what it is now — any benefit of doubt or of cleverly constructed arguments in these matters.... SCOTUS, the Federalist Society, the entire academic and intellectual infrastructure that brought us here:  they're nothing but pretentious Trumpers. At least the guy in the MAGA hat and "fuck your feelings" t-shirt is honest about who he is. These people are not.... One day the Trumpists will fall. Something has to emerge from that. I'd prefer it be an honest and accountable rule of law, one actually run on principles and not on luxury motor homes, rather on the whim of some other group of strongmen.
Pope Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social

Remember, we’ll never get a good sense of what people will do under safe conditions, by watching what some are willing to do under unsafe conditions. Building smart mobility is about supporting the choices we need more people to make, by providing smart, safe, enjoyable infrastructure for them.
Brent Toderian

New numbers show ICE is devouring US law enforcement: 1 in 5 US marshals, 1 in 5 FBI agents, half of all DEA agents, and over two-thirds of all ATF agents are now assigned to ICE enforcement. These are agencies with critical jobs they're now NOT doing.
Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social

i'm not sure this is shocking but it is astounding. as he says, we have a dea and an atf for a reason. we seem to have gotten out of those businesses altogether.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social


Mike Luckovich

There are two reasons the Democratic Party became as strong as it did—labor and civil rights. And there is one reason the party has been weakened—wealthy conservative bigots abandoning the Republican Party to push and bribe their way into the Democratic Party and immediately demand fealty.
Cheryl Lynn Eaton

Kavanaugh in 2023 in the argument on Biden’s loan forgiveness: “Some of the biggest mistakes in the Court’s history were deferring to assertions of executive emergency power. Some of the finest moments in the Court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power.”
Matthew Stiegler

The US president trafficked and raped underage girls, the evidence is overwhelming, everyone knows it, and this country's elites and institutions are so broken, so insular, so decadent that we can't even bring ourselves to state it clearly, much less do anything about it. Contemptible and pathetic.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion, after getting $1.2 trillion richer over the past year alone. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is getting squeezed by tariffs and high prices for groceries, utilities, and health care. The system is broken.
Robert Reich

It took nearly a century for Congress to enact legislation to enforce the 15th Amendment. It may take conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court only a little more than a decade to fully eviscerate that law — the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Marc Elias

Russians dropped a glide bomb on elderly people who were waiting in line for their pensions. More than 20 dead. Please. Don’t look away and don’t be silent. This is all I could ask for.
Mira of Kyiv @reshetz.bsky.social

The new John Roberts portrait just dropped:


Jen Taub

All the Constitutional scholars etc... can yell at me if they want but this Supreme Court is illegitimate and everyone who disagrees with whatever they say should ignore their edicts. That's my *solution* - they can try to enforce their own orders.
Prisonculture

Shreveport, LA, the largest city in Speaker Mike Johnson's district, has a murder rate more than twice Chicago's, and a crime rate considerably higher than both the state and national average. And Johnson isn't calling for the military to invade it. One of many ways we know this isn't about crime.
Nicholas Grossman

We’re quite deep within the Singularity right now, though it’s turned out be the Singularity of Stupid (SoS), which effectively prevents the original concept of the Singularity from happening.
William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social

It’s only been eight months and we are already at “yield to the troops.”
Helen Kennedy

Americans are going to have to get comfortable with the idea that to actually stop fascism from completely destroying the country they are going to have to endure massive short term changes to their status quo and understand they will be asked to do things they never imagined.
Karl (sad trombone noise enthusiast) @brainnotonyet.bsky.social

It turns out that protecting hate speech did not create the conditions to protect other kinds of speech; instead, it protected hate and allowed hate movements to take over all the institutions of that might have defended the rest of us.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

I crocheted Patti Smith’s Horses cover:


@lindsaynicolle.bsky.social

The stuff Jeffrey Epstein’s friends felt comfortable saying and drawing in grotesque detail with their names attached knowing they would not face consequences is the kind of thing I think of when I think about rape culture and how sexual violence against girls and young women is actually glorified
Kat Tenbarge

Congressional Democrats can’t decide if they should cut a deal with the pedophile dictator who is trying to militarily invade their cities. Seems like a fairly obvious choice to me, but what do I know.
Max Berger

Gorsuch and Barrett sit in stolen seats. Kavanaugh is a drunken credibly accused rapist whose debts were mysteriously laid off. Thomas and Alito take bribes from billionaires. And Robert ignores the law to appease Trump. The current Supreme Court is illegitimate. All these rulings must be reversed.
David Slack

If you were the equivalent of a billionaire when Jesus was born you could spend $1,000 per day, never make another dime, and still have another 715 years to go. It's laughable to think one person should have that much wealth.
The Stinky Cheese Man

Tangent: if you had a company worth $1 trillion and you wanted to bankrupt it by losing $1 million a day starting when Jesus was born, we’d still have another thousand years to wait for the company to go bankrupt. I like trying to understand quantity through allegory. Or story.
GetGhandi

Has the NYT ever wondered what the very poor people of NYC think about anything?
Veronica Schanoes

If you think that due process only applies to citizens then ask yourself what you would do if someone accused you of being a non citizen. Either we all have due process or no one does.  The Constitution affords the former. SCOTUS has unleashed the latter.
Sean Casten


Clara Jeffery

I don't know exactly how and when we'll get there, but there will come a time when the Roberts Court era and especially from ~2024 onward becomes treated as an irredeemably tainted anti-canon, when citing them as a favorable precedent joins the ranks of invoking Dred Scott, Plessey, or Korematsu.
Andy Craig

We are destroying the most powerful and successful democracy and economy in human history in order to placate a bunch of open neo-Nazis and bigots who have rallied behind Jeffrey Epstein's best friend.
Will Stancil

At this point abolishing ICE and reforming the Supreme Court have to be non-negotiables for every 2028 Democrat.
Santiago Mayer

one thing which is patently obvious about the Supreme Court right now is that it is using the shadow docket to avoid making precedents that a future Democrat might be able to use, while nonetheless giving Donald Trump everything he wants -- at least in part because if the did not, he'd do it anyway.
tocharian spongebart eatpants @theophite.bsky.social

The conservative Supreme Court justices actually take an oath to support and defend white supremacy.
50501: The People’s Movement

I hate these fuckers on the Supreme Court so much I'm almost consumed by it.
ElieNYC


Atti 17.11

Some numbers:
- Most Americans are women.
- Via the Census, about 60 million Americans are in a household that includes a daughter.
- Every American, or human being, should be appalled and disgusted by this.
It would take only 4 GOP Senators, or 6 to 7 Representatives, to save the country.
James Fallows

If Dennis Hastert, Roy Moore, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump had all been Democrats, the party would've been hounded out of existence.
Kevin M. Kruse

To put this into context, the judicial warrant for the search at the Hyundai plant named just four people. Relying on that warrant, ICE detained nearly 500 people. DHS admitted that included U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and people lawfully here on visas.
Max Kennerly

what a humiliating way for don jr. to find out his dad sends birthday cards.
Molly Knight

I guess it was smart of the Supreme Court to release its most racist decision since Plessy on the same day it was confirmed that Trump used his signature in the place of a vagina in his pedophile love letter/birthday card. I'll admit, I can't top that.
ElieNYC

New discovery: During excavations at the Roman fort in Schramberg-Waldmössingen, a Roman workshop for the production of hobnails for the caligae (boots) of Roman soldiers was discovered:


Nina Willburger @drnwillburger.bsky.social

Everyone has their own sense of when things went completely off the rails, but my mind returns again and again to the founding of Fox News in the late 90s. Naked RW propaganda plopped itself down alongside legitimate journalism and everyone just accepted it. Everything else has followed from that.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I got my bank account put on hold for 2 days for a 12 dollar transaction where Google pay glitched out for a sec...a whole predator/sex trafficker got a billion from JPMorgan while crimson flags were flapping everywhere about his ass.
Maj @lif3asmaj.bsky.social

A refusal to seriously address racism is why everyone is here. I don't know what to tell you.
Prisonculture

Climate change is an economic emergency, part 1000: More than $1 trillion in US wages has been lost to wildfire smoke alone in the past 5 years.
Mark Gongloff

“we will not fund a government that is turning its military on its own citizens” seems like a pretty easy message [for Democrats to use] to me
functional moron @fiveburger.bsky.social

After everyone finally agreed that the Iraq war was a debacle, the people who had been against it from the beginning were still treated as unserious and the late converts continued to dominate future discourses. Have to find a way out of that trap going forward
Jon Phillips @jowiph.bsky.social

Cartoon:


billbramhall.bsky.social

Good morning! This is your occasional depressing reminder that - in addition to all of the other horrible things — Musk, Trump, and some asshole who goes by "Big Balls" have certainly stolen our personal information — SSNs, addresses, birthdays, tax filings, health records, and all the rest.
Chris Dwan @somershade.bsky.social

"It is no exaggeration to say that each of us remains in far greater constant danger from microbial enemies than from human ones. What will it take to convince us that short of a thermonuclear war, or the slow moving tsunami of climate change, the greatest threat we face to our national security and a way of life is an invasion of deadly microbes?" Prologue from The Big One by Michael Osterholm and Mark Olshaker
Nietifa Van Suiker @lukewanderer.bsky.social

If Hyundai was using business visitor visas to send people to the U.S. on assignments that technically should have required work visas, the rational thing to do would be to contact them and tell them to stop, not swoop in and drag everyone off in chains. Especially if it’s related to a major new investment project that you’re trying to encourage (because it will create lots of US jobs), not shut down. Oh, and then you go and release a video of them being dragged off like enemy prisoners of war.
Patrick Chovanec

“I am SO an American!”, summer 1949, New York, by John Vachon. “YOU BET, Sonny … No Matter What Your Race Or Religion! FIGHT Racial and Religious Hate”:


Colin Smith

If it’s run for profit, then it’s profiting off of … us. When I hear that the post office lost money, I think this: Good. We already paid for it. Why on earth should it make even more money from us? Who would keep the money? Would we see it?
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

In 2019, 70% of Republicans said science has had a mostly positive effect on society. A few years later, fewer than half of Republicans (47%) said so.
Conrad Hackett

oh that’s just because woke ideological capture and cancel culture corrupted all the academic institutions —jon haidt probably
dr. caitlin m. green

cool that it takes seven months, troops in the streets and a belated Ezra Klein op ed for centrists to finally, maybe start figuring out that we're not in kansas anymore toto
Tom Tomorrow

i don’t think even the most rabid AI haters on bluesky really get the sheer gravity of how we’ve bet the farm on something that has to be godlike to compensate for everything else we’re throwing away
@aelkus.bsky.social

Just like anti-vaxers, people who dislike immigrants are a weird terrible fringe group and we should treat them like the weird terrible fringe group they are.
Tea Berry-Blue

Another way of looking at this chart is that everything being done by the government is to keep 73% of self-identified Republicans, and virtually no one else, "satisfied, happy or thrilled":


Adam Weinstein

Vaccines are battle training for your immune system. If you could give it intel on the enemy, why would you withhold that? Give me ALL the vaccines! I want to be prepared for everything!
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

We cannot solve the climate crisis without demand-side solutions! The IPCC is crystal clear: changing what we demand and how we live could reduce global emissions by 40–70% by 2050. This is not a marginal add-on. It must be at the heart of climate policy
Kristian Steensen Nielsen

People really, really want to avoid cognitive dissonance or facing the prospect of changing their beliefs, I suppose
Forge Enjoyer @forgeenjoyer.bsky.social

I think I would take reactionary centrists more seriously if they could cite one (1) example of progressives pushing for social change the *right* way -- using just the right slogans, supporting just the right policies, protesting in just the right fashion. One strongly suspects -- ok, *I* strongly suspect -- that the battles for social justice they approve of are "the ones that are over." When the progress is achieved, normalized, when it becomes something Proper People Like Us believe, that's when they sign on.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Highest level of support since Gallup started asking this question a quarter century ago"


Jake Grumbach

I don’t think anyone younger than 30 would truly understand how much actual news there was and how fast it was pre-internet.
@saralovesyou.bsky.social

People ought to start noticing that MAHA ignores three major killers... Alcohol, cigarettes, and guns. Why? It's fine to have a goal to make people healthy, but shouldn't we emphasize what is really killing them?
Timothy McBride

It's become very clear that US political, media, and financial elites felt much more *personal* anger and disgust toward Biden and Harris than they ever have toward Trump. They might acknowledge Trump is "bad" in some abstract sense, but he doesn't *bother* them as much as Biden did. There's no way to measure this so no one who matters will ever acknowledge it, but you can feel it. You can tell. Biden filled them with disgust and fury. Their condescension toward him was towering, dripping, omnipresent. Even those opposed to Trump are no-so-secretly thrilled and titillated by him. This is an old and very familiar dynamic, this relationship between US elites and the parties, but like everything else these days, it's become more naked and obvious, less subtext. Dem consultants out there saying "voters won't care unless it affects their daily life" even as we are living through an extended nationwide hysteria about trans girls in high school sports, an issue which affects literally maybe a dozen Americans.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Signs bearing President Trump’s name have gone up at major construction projects. They were financed by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law which he passionately opposed ahead of its passage.
The New York Times

If I didn’t know better I’d think that their goal was to turn the armed forces into a bunch of roid-addled cokeheads with a willingness to commit atrocities against civilians while simultaneously hobbling our actual military capabilities against hostile peer competitors.
Judith Butlerian Jihad @lessdismalsci.bsky.social

Normal fucking country:


unraveled @unraveledpress.com

Still trying to understand the Hyundai ICE raid. Supposedly a months-long investigation that... picked up people here on visas, permanent residents, and U.S. citizens? I also haven't seen anyone charged under 8 USC §1324a for hiring undocumented employees.
Max Kennerly

Any time you're faced with anti e-bike opinions, keep in mind that the goal is getting more people out of cars.  It's about transportation, not recreation or fitness, although strictly speaking all kinds of bikes accomplish those brilliantly.
Speed limit 20 @marymm.bsky.social

“The school drop-off ritual is a powerful curriculum, teaching kids that they are packages to be delivered and picked up, and that they require constant adult supervision”
angela @amoridesabike.bsky.social

The Founders who wrote and passed the legal language "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" actually meant "Congress shall mandate a national religion, and it's 21st century evangelicalism mixed with some catholic converts," they just accidentally wrote something else.
Nicholas Grossman

Next time, they mean to make sure that the Ashli Babbitts have guns.
Patrick Chovanec

the swiss government is out here supporting nearly zero-energy car-light mixed use ecodistricts full of affordable and middle class housing... with schools, daycare, abundant open space and transit connections. and this is what the  villainous imbeciles in our government believe:


Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

A tenet of Fascism is keep repeating lies and people will become so confused about what is the truth that they’ll start to believe them. We all have a responsibility to keep repeating the truth in the face of politically-motivated lying. Don’t just roll your eyes, speak up.
Trish Greenhalgh

We couldn’t possibly be in a worse information environment for what’s happening. Which is probably, in part, why it’s happening.
dan sinker

The thing about investing in public transit is that it *scales* — the more people use it, the better it gets. For everyone. Whereas the more cars there are, the *worse* everything about driving gets. Traffic. Parking. Ever noticed that in just about every car ad it’s alone on the road? Yeah.]
Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social

TIL we don’t know who started calling Earth “Earth”
@wstafrican.bsky.social

If we cannot all be on the same page that the sitting president threatening to invade a US city is fascist dictator shit then truly I do not know what to do.
Technology Connections @techconnectify.bsky.social

My god…


Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

The lack of mainstream coverage of regular huge protests reminds me of a talk from a Twitter employees who explained that they had to drop BLM off the Trending Tags section because otherwise it would have been there permanently. The modern media environment has no appetite for sustained movements.
Aram Zucker-Scharff @chronotope.aramzs.xyz

the vice president usually only endorses war crimes in secret memos so i feel like this is a big step forward for us
dell cameron

The National Guard at your kitchen table is a kitchen table issue.
Lindsay Beyerstein

Immigrants are a social good, anti-immigrant propaganda is basically all lies, and any approach to the "problem" that doesn't start form those two points is worthless
Aaron Bady @zunguzungu.bsky.social

They say familiar surroundings are important for dementia patients, so it makes since that they're doing everything they can to recreate the tackiness of Mar-a-Lago to calm down President Sundown O'Bruisehands. I bet they start forcing the Cabinet to get shitty plastic surgery next.
Kevin M. Kruse

No one has been able to invent a technological innovation that is better for learning than simply reading books and getting together in small groups to talk about them.
Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social

I pour a glass of water inside the walls of my neighbor’s house everyday so they can enjoy some nice mushrooms in their living room
lukelukeluke

i put my pants on like everybody else, by putting my legs in holes till i run out of options
@imwintersmom.bsky.social

I refuse to get used to this:


Gillian Branstetter

Cleta Mitchell — the Trump whisperer on all things elections — thinks President Donald Trump may declare a national emergency to allow him to take control of national elections.
Marc Elias

Tennessee boy here. The south is full of unofficial sundown towns, klan conclaves, and MAGAts. The Southern Strategy never stopped being implemented and the Democrats copied it, which is why both parties moved right (and the Republicans moved all the way to fascism).
VagabondVisions

The south is an incredible place that has been rendered a hell hole on purpose by the legacy of the Klan. It’s documented history!
Mrs. Kleinschmidt @comradeluanne.bsky.social

The candidate that has motivated and excited previous non-voters the most over the past decade is Trump. Part of the reason Tammy Baldwin won her Senate race in WI despite Trump winning the state is like, 30k people who *only* voted for Trump, and left the rest blank.
whoops, excuse me. oh man, my bad.

The fact that, in the New York City Mayors race, you can have 2 candidates as obviously corrupt and horrible as Cuomo and Adams, and still have so many folks expressing concern about a “socialist” in the race, just shows how successful the anti-socialism psy-op by the U.S. right wing has been.
Brent Toderian

even classifying a 1.5 percent popular vote loss as a "wipeout" is moving the goalposts, if you're talking about what "people" want. unless deep down inside you think that some kinds of voters are more authentic representative of the "people" than others. it's an electoral *catastrophe* because the Republicans are ravening fascists, but that again does not license any conclusions about "people"
Matt Weiner

The president of the United States just declared war, actual military war, not a metaphorical one, on a major American city, and one governed by his political opponents. In any other period, this would be impeachment-worthy:


Mehdi Hasan

I keep typing words and then deleting them because none of them are sufficient to capture how utterly fucked up and unacceptable this is. And yet it won't move a single Republican to give a damn.
Radley Balko

There is exactly one crime defined in the U.S. Constitution: treason. The first definition is levying war against the United States. Trump is explicitly threatening that. U.S. soldiers are not only permitted, they are *obliged* to refuse an order to commit treason.
Paul Gowder

I know one person who needs to hear this, but the robert duvall character in apocalypse now was meant to be seen as an absolute fucking lunatic
Tom Tomorrow

So today we've had Trump threatening Chicago with the "Department of WAR" and Vance saying he doesn't give a shit about committing war crimes. Got it. Okay.
Nicholas Slayton

Let the record show that the first thing the new "Department of War" did was threaten to invade an American city.
Patrick Chovanec

Gosh, can you imagine what would have happened if Schumer had allowed the government to shut down earlier in the year? What a disaster our country would be right now!
Andres @andres4ny.social.ridetrans.it.ap.brid.gy


Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social

Hegseth's insistence that 'Department of War' fake-name-change is about 'warriors' and 'warfighters' is the dumbest s*** I think I have ever heard. The guys that created the Department of Defense in 1947 — in NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN — had done more warfighting than Trump's entire cabinet put together.
Bret Devereaux

the real glory of world war two was that it involved a warrior cult being ground down and beaten to a pulp by people who would rather have been doing something else.
Jamie K @crumpsalljamie.bsky.social

The FBI uses a lot of shitty people as cooperators and informants but Trump is a great example of someone they wouldn’t use — a pathologically narcissistic braggart who could never keep a secret or maintain focus.  It would be like asking the Trix rabbit to wear a wire.
Pope Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social

There is no compromise policy Democrats can offer Republicans to make them act normal on this issue. We simply have to state the basic reality — immigrants contribute to our country in myriad ways — and fight for it. I don't know how so many journalists convinced themselves this isn't an option.
Michael Hobbes

Elon Musk’s $1T pay package, if he eventually gets it, would exceed the GOP’s Medicaid cuts. It’s about $3,000 per American. It’s enough to buy all of the real estate in a number of states. It’s about the size of the annual Defense budget.
Steven T. Dennis

Any company offering a $1T pay package to their CEO is not a serious company and their board should be summarily fired, ridiculed, and banned from a boardroom or corporate officer position in perpetuity. Looking at you, Tesla.
Skepticon @skepticonprime.bsky.social

Tesla’s value is entirely fake and at this point is a conspiracy to funnel as much of the world’s wealth to a single otherwise useless man of no notable skills or talent but who creates outsized harm.
Tyler King

But, you know, Zelenskyy not wearing a suit was deeply disrespectful of the office…


Joe Patrice

The thing to remember about the latest dismal jobs numbers is that they were compiled by someone who knew he had to please Donald to keep his job. The *real* numbers must be abysmal.
Mrs. Betty Bowers

David Brooks' whole niche is convincing well-to-do liberal-leaning people that it's okay to vote Republican so long as they're doing it more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger.
Tamara Keel @tamslick.bsky.social

New research finds that 1 in 5 drivers near school zones is distracted. Most were using their phones; some were fiddling with their cars' infotainment systems. Drivers of big SUVs and pickups were more prone to be distracted.
David Zipper

ICE snipers is just not a thing I want to see ever anywhere
Meredith Shiner

A decade ago, the Heritage Foundation went full meltdown about how Obama was an imperial president when he had issued about the same number of executive orders -- though he had reached it after six years, not six months.
Kevin M. Kruse

The country is so poorly run we can’t receive packages from overseas anymore, and I’m not sure it makes the top 10 of the administration’s dumbest, unforced errors
Stan Veuger

here's a fact in that report: the budget for building and maintaining military installations annually is about the same as NASA.
Costa Samaras

I like how the defense here is that trump is a snitch for the deep state who didn’t provide any helpful evidence to bring down a notorious pedophile
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

You hear transportation engineers (especially for state DOTs) say stuff like, "People want to drive. We're not in the business of social engineering." Honey, your profession has socially engineered our society since the 1950s. It's time to invest more fairly across transportation modes
Alessandro Rigolon

this checks out:


Catbus @hayao.lol

Reminder: At the start of his legal career, RFK Jr. failed the bar, was forced out as a D.A., and got arrested for heroin. Without the Kennedy name, that story ends there.
God @thegodpodcast.com

It's so bizarre how CEOs of consumer-facing companies act like Donald Trump is the most popular President ever, who won in a landslide victory, and who they cross at the risk of a widespread public backlash.
Patrick Chovanec

idk, man, of all the trump excuses you could conjure up out of thin air, i do not think "trump was actually an FBI informant" is really the best one you want to run with, because it opens up all kinds of questions you really don't want to try to make up answers to.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Important to remember that everyone involved in renaming the DoD to the Department of War is afraid to take the subway.
Roberto Baldwin @strngwys.bsky.social

As a driver, the only law you can break and have a ~100% chance of being caught is "parking in a street sweeping zone." Literally everything else, (e.g. texting, red light running, speeding, failure to yield, blocking a bike lane) your chance of a citation is somewhere between 0-1%. An alien, learning this, would come to the (mis)understanding that blocking street sweeping is the *worst thing* you could do with a car. Rather, it's the only thing we've actually designed a competent system around.
Warren Wells, AICP

“there is definitely a big scandal here, but it involves Bill Pulte, not Lisa Cook. The media really need to take notice,” writes Dean Baker.
Pete Tucker
 
I have more in common with any and every immigrant than I do with any billionaire and the fix to social security (which the undocumented pay into and cannot draw from) is to remove the wage cap on paying into it, clean simple beneficial redistributive and doesn't make second-class non-citizens.
Kelsey Atherton

Call it Anti-Industrial Policy: we need is a suite of policies to nudge Americans to own and operate more little public-facing businesses. Speciality shops. Six-seater bars. Esoteric services. Restaurants serving two or three dishes. It would lower overall productivity and increase quality of life:


M. Nolan Gray

If our capitalist system has resulted in a concerted effort by fascist billionaires, pedophilic politicians, and war criminals to destroy democracy and replace it with white supremacist, religious nationalist totalitarianism, then our system is rotten to the core, and maybe it’s time we redesign it.
50501: The People’s Movement

Only That Guy could manage offending both the North and South Korean governments in the same week.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social

A platform where Jamelle Bouie is one of the most influential and respected people is one that is going to cause discomfort for a certain kind of liberal (or person who thinks they are liberal). Yes, Bouie is black, but what these people really reject is strong criticism of America's status quo.
Perry Bacon

But Bouie's is not an I-hate-America criticism. He (and the great majority of us here) very clearly loves this country and its people and cares about it, but knows we have massive work to do and rails against a continuing history of injustice. Modern progressive patriotism.
Patrick Frawley @geisty.bsky.social

Bouie also reads something other than twitter and airport books, and that alone makes him more intellectually robust than the typical pundit.
@haredurer.bsky.social

Trump take Canadian tourists: Fewer Canadians traveling Maine Turnpike this summer. The average daily volume of Canadian motorists paying cash at tollbooths from May through August fell 43%
Joe Sudbay

Minneapolis is great. I’m standing in line at a coffee shop this morning and in the same line is a woman in a hijab, an older woman with brightly dyed purple hair and gorgeous beaded jewelry, and a Buddhist monk in full robes (but also wearing Uggs). I feel like I should have dressed up!
RK @rohtweets.bsky.social

I think that any big tech company that walks away from AI will have celebrations like the end of Return of the Jedi. Is anyone having fun? Does anyone *really* like this? It all feels so strained, so distant. Even the people who love AI talk about it like someone has their family captive. It’s sad!
Ed Zitron

I think the fact that SCOTUS doesn’t think we’re in a constitutional crisis is a big part of the constitutional crisis.
Patrick Chovanec

Twitter is owned by a neo-Nazi, the LA Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are owned by pro-Trump billionaires, and CBS News will soon be run by a far-right Likud extremist.  American media still has a liberal bias problem.
NY Times Pitchbot


Tom Warren @realtack.bsky.social

I'm going to posit, as a political rule, that if a Supreme Court Justice has to go on the record to explain why you are not currently in a constitutional crisis, you are definitely currently in a constitutional crisis
Zach Rabiroff

"Freedom" only applies to weaponry. We can't have people running around making their own medical decisions by consulting medical experts and their own physicians.
Spacely Sprockets

Summary executions of people at sea violate the law, the Constitution, and every concept of morality. We have enough Navy to board and search any vessels suspected of illegal activity.
Maybe if Trump did not have our military raking leaves in DC they could do that.
Michael A. Shea

Also the amount of resources taken up for free with the promise that “this is the future” is mind boggling. Data centers that use more energy than cities; electricity bills for regular families subsidizing companies worth billions; copyrighted works fed into an endless data maw without compensation
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

If there were a “Department of War” it would obviously be very very small when we aren’t at war, right?
Chris Hayes

I don't think it's actually possible to have a coherent abundance movement that includes both people who want to reinvigorate American cities and people who want to militarily occupy them and disappear large numbers of their residents into camps.
Ned Resnikoff

Innovation makes useful things smaller and smaller. Overconsumption makes things bigger and bigger (and more dangerous with bigger costs and consequences). Bigger vehicles and larger homes for fewer people is not progress. HT @fietsprofessor for graphic


Brent Toderian

i think people would be less interested in “raw milk” if we called it “poop milk” or “shit milk”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Hilarious – the Louisiana Gov and Senators are now asking Trump to federalize the Guard to take over New Orleans like supplicant subjects should. Let's remember. The Gov can do this any day of the week. That's what the Guard is. A state militia. Asking Trump to federalize them is some weird GOP kink.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

Zohran wants universal childcare for everyone in this city and I hear people who NEED this asking 'OK but how will he pay for this?' I'm like 'bitch I haven't heard your ridiculous ass ask ONCE how the city is paying 11 BILLION A YEAR FOR COPS.' NOT ONCE. So damn demagogued.
Prisonculture

surely we can come up with something better for 7 billion people than being lorded over by a bunch of plundering elderly murder and torture enthusiasts who whisper to each other about printing spare organs so they can immiserate others in perpetuity
Soraya Nadia McDonald

I’ve studied US drone strikes, I wrote a book called “Drones and Terrorism,” and this Caribbean strike is different. Lethal fire at a non-threatening target in a non-hostile environment on purpose when other means, such as capture, were easily doable, and without even attempting a legal rationale.
Nicholas Grossman

America, 2025:


Patrick Chovanec

Just blatant crimes against humanity that should be prosecuted in the Hague and people just shrug. Absolutely wild times we're living in.
Pedaling Professor

One thing we don't talk about enough IMO is how Elon Musk came to DC, destroyed foreign aid, and then oopsied back to his little companies. An estimated 450,000 people have already died because of this!
Melody Schreiber

In 1912, 99% of Black Americans in the US had been born here, while only 60% of whites.
K. Ward Cummings

Nobody is “grooming” your kids to be gay or trans but people ARE grooming them to be Nazis.
The Volatile Mermaid @ohnoshetwitnt.bsky.social

"All Americans have equal rights" is a concept so foreign to today's Republican Party that they think a Democrat saying as much is a major gaffe.
Kevin M. Kruse

If Mississippi white people voted like they do in Ohio there would be a democratic trifecta. I have told people this and watch them squirm btw.
JGregoryCincy @tehlasercat.bsky.social

An Aug. 29 policy statement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency, will from now on bar nonpartisan groups such as the League of Women Voters from offering voter registration services at the end of naturalization ceremonies.
Walter Olson

It’s insane that “Free Palestine” gets treated as antisemitism, but “America is not a universal nation” is not. I’ll tell you what: as an American Jew, I feel much more threatened by White Christian nationalism than I do by Palestinian liberation.
Max Berger

If there’s one thing that I have learned from engaging with primary sources, it is that people in the past weren’t smarter or more principled than we are today they just weren’t drowned in omnipresent propaganda and/or prosperous enough to be detached from material conditions. And honestly, where they were locked into propaganda (ie: the antebellum South), they demonstrated the same rationalization and lack of critical thinking that we see today.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

hakeem jeffries has expressed more willingness to work with donald j. trump than mamdani
tocharian spongebart eatpants @theophite.bsky.social

Trigger warning. “In crashes, SUVs are more likely to strike vital organs in the core of adults’ bodies and heads of children. Hitting pedestrians above their center of gravity means they’re more likely to be knocked forward and down and then be driven over.” Plus more likely to hit in the 1st place:


Brent Toderian

100 VICTIMS is astounding. Even more astounding, that's less than 10% of Epstein and Maxwell's victims.
LOLGOP @thefarce.org

So our military just bombed a boat in international waters and extrajudicially killed suspected drug traffickers without so much as a conversation, let alone a trial?
Then posted it on social media? And we’re all supposed to just trust their account?
The Tennessee Holler

In the aftermath of Emmett Till's lynching, white supremacists called for federal troops to invade and occupy Chicago. "If the federal government intervenes in the interests of law enforcement anywhere, it should start in Chicago, crime capital extraordinary."
Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social

40% of Republicans think the COVID vaccine killed more people than the COVID virus. One in four believe that QAnon is real. No matter how far they radicalize, we are told over and over again that the people being rude to them are the problem.
Michael Hobbes

Also, Jeffries is propping up a series of dangerous fictions — Trump sincerely wants to help Americans, legislation is still how we get things done, Trump will work to us to do that — that only provide cover for Trump. Trump's clearly pushed Congress aside! So say it! And fucking act like it!
Kevin M. Kruse

Someone gets shot in a city where millions of people live and it requires military occupation. Children get shot in a school and its a big old shrug.
The Alternate Historian

Always remember it's low-wage employers, not low-wage workers.
Speed limit 20 @marymm.bsky.social

BREAKING: The Pentagon has authorized up to 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges. This is a blatant expansion of military power into a civilian judicial process, a dangerous erosion of the separation between the two. Every day, we inch closer to fascism.
Krassensteins

Pritzker: When did we become a country where it's okay for the president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything, especially something we don't want? Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as normal?
Acyn

The spray-painted gold ornamentation is spreading like a cancer:


Clara Jeffery

Can you imagine if Biden had sent, say, the  California National Guard to Idaho to quell some Cliven Bundy-like situation?
Radley Balko

I know, I know, but: The president of the US saying, literally, "we're going in" in reference to sending the military to an American city for no reason beyond terrorizing the local population should be the most immediately impeachable shit imaginable
Dave Levitan

The president is sending the military to control American cities and if you're a reporter who's framing that illegal power grab as "pushing the boundaries of constitutionality" or "acting boldly to fight crime" or whatever, please go find another line of work where you won't get us all killed.
Kevin M. Kruse

Parallels between Trump and AI are endless. Both overpromise, underdeliver. They put people out of jobs. They lie and steal constantly. They think they know way more than they do. Both backed by techbro billionaires. Neither are any fucking good at their job. And everywhere you turn, there they are.
Chuck Wendig

FOX BUSINESS: “My goodness. $5 BILLION. Eye-popping numbers… crypto-friendly legislation coming from the president who is in turn cashing in on crypto. A conflict of interest.” Even Fox sees how insanely corrupt Trump’s crypto grift is.
The Tennessee Holler

The next Democratic president should declare that the National Emergencies Act and Article II of the Constitution allow him to:
• admit D.C. and Puerto Rico as states
• abolish ICE
• grant citizenship to any immigrant
• disband the 5th Circuit
• expand the Supreme Court
Seriously: Why the hell not?
Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social

Trump isn't an all-powerful dictator so much as an exhausting toddler running through your house ripping things down from shelves and turning over furniture
Tom Tomorrow

I think we need to stop saying that people hate crime. They like punishment. There are clear ways to reduce crime that involve systemic investment in communities but we avoid doing that in favor of ever more militarized policing because too many people in power like punishment.
Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com

Anyway...Dems need to break out of the impulse to see 200 white people protesting against Covid restrictions as "the voice of the people which we must heed" while seeing 10X as many people protesting racist police violence as "a niche special interest group that's out of step with real Americans."
Seth Cotlar

"Doc, I'm overweight and depressed."
"Say more."
"Well, I pig out at every meal. I drink most nights. I walk maybe 2,000 steps a day, tops. I don't lift or exert myself ever. I sleep maybe six hours tops each night. I see friends maybe every other week..."
"You know what your problem is? Seed oils."
M. Nolan Gray

I'm sorry, but genetic engineering is getting out of hand:


Harry Turtledove

1. "I know the $45 billion we gave to ICE for new prisons, violent abductions, and violations of due process, are evil and unnecessary. But we can't say 'Defund ICE!' That's bad messaging, because the people that don't care about immigrants don't like it!
2. "We can't say 'Defund the police!"
Mekka Okereke @mekka.mekka-tech.com

Good for Illinois. Strong anti-SLAPPs laws are what gives the First Amendment its teeth. What good is the right of free speech if it takes years of litigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a defendant out of a case?
Jeff Lewis

For nearly two years, I have wondered why Israel has not been asked how many Palestinian deaths are a proportionate response to the 1195 Israeli civilians killed
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Donald Trump is the executive producer of every news show in America
Matt Negrin

People obsessed with this country's "heritage" are violently opposed to ever actually addressing its real heritage, so all they're left with are consumerism and symbols chosen for their plausible deniability. Imagine claiming the Cracker Barrel logo as your birthright.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

So many evils trace back to Reagan. "as mass homelessness surged across the United States, the Reagan administration made a concerted effort to shape public perception of the crisis. Officials downplayed its severity while muddying its root causes."
doug m. @misunderstruck.bsky.social

Voting Rights vs Gun Rights: What’s More Important to Americans. Which do you think is more important?


Brilliant Maps

As right-wing oligarchs were buying up mainstream and social media, the mistake everyone else made was thinking that these purchases were based on a normal assessment of value. Remember when Elon Musk “overpayed” for Twitter? They understood that controlling the message and narrative is priceless.
Brent Toderian

A key difference between people on bikes and those in cars is that people on bikes are usually happy to see others riding bikes, whereas those in cars often rage at other people in cars.
David Ho

Mass shooters since 2018 who were transgender, total of 4.
Mass shooters since 2018 who were not transgender, total of more than 4,000.  
Transgender folks are 1.0% of the population and they make up less than 0.1% of the mass shooters.
Matthew Dowd