Learning Lessons from Ultra

If you care about the current Republican slide (race?) toward fascism, and you haven't already listened to Rachel Maddow's podcast Ultra, now's the time, since all eight episodes are available. 

It's a look at Nazi infiltration of the U.S. in the 1930s and ’40s, including the U.S. Congress, and how the legal system was stymied in stopping it. It's full of names I (and possibly you) never heard of, but who were prominent at the time. As I wrote earlier, it began by confounding my sense of traditional "Right" and "Left," and that continued with some of the characters in the later episodes.

The final episode reaches its conclusion with the voice of historian Steven Ross, who says:

Whenever somebody says, 'It's time to move on, let's heal and move on' — that's always a mistake. The idea was that these right-wingers ultimately aren't really a danger to America. After the mistrial, in 1945–1946, it would have done this country, I think, real good by saying, you know what, we have known about a left-wing danger in America, but we have never really openly, as a country, discussed right-wing danger.

We need to hold people responsible. People who call on fellow Americans to pick up arms need to be held accountable. And we have never done that in our history, really, for the right wing.

And then Maddow wraps up, telling us that "Fascism happens recurrently" because it has a certain appeal to a certain percentage of the population. "Previous generations of Americans have confronted this same type of threat before us," She says. "And learning what they did gives us some lessons learned about what works and what might not work."

Lundeen and Coughlin

I've listened to the first two episodes of Rachel Maddow's new podcast, "ULTRA," about Nazi influence campaigns and ultra-right-wingers leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II. 

One thing I came away with is a furrowed brow about how weird and confused the two main "characters" of these episodes seem. 

Both Ernest Lundeen, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota who was a member of the Farmer Labor Party, and the reprehensible Father Coughlin ostensibly believed in a lot of things that would be called socialism or even communism today, like state ownership of major parts of the economy. But at the same time, they were virulent antisemites who thought Jewish people were conspiring to run the world. 

I guess they hated banks and bankers (well, okay!), and the only way they could make that make sense was to convince themselves the people running the banks were inhuman. But how many banks were run by Jewish men at that point? It's just so odd. And they had this attitude before they started working with the Nazis, I think, though maybe that's not entirely clear yet in the podcast's telling. 

Despite the fact that I've lived in Minnesota for more than 35 years, I've never heard of Lundeen before. Coughlin, however, is pretty familiar, though I don't think I knew quite how popular he was. He is said to have had 30 million radio listeners at a time when there were only 130 million people in the country (and probably close to half of the population were children, so does that mean half the adults were listening to him, or did they count kids in the ratings?). 

The way FDR managed to finally shut down Coughlin's radio empire — after the U.S. entered World War II — is kind of frightening in a country with supposed freedom of speech and press. But I have to say, I'm glad it happened.

Malmedy, McCarthy, Nazi Symps

The second season of Rachel Maddow's podcast "Ultra" is full of facts I never knew. 

I already said this when I wrote about season one, but once again: As a person born in the late 1950s who thought she knew a fair amount about World War II and the period after it, it surprises me how much I don't know about that era.

So far, four "Ultra" episodes have been released, and I think it could make sense to listen to just numbers 3 and 4 to get the gist of what I'm talking about (though you miss an important precursor without listening to episode 1). Here are the key things that surprised me:

• I've never heard of the Malmedy Massacre, which happened during the Battle of the Bulge.
  
• I didn't know there were war crime trials at Dachau after WWII as well as at Nuremberg.
• I knew the Chicago Tribune was a conservative newspaper, but I didn't know its owner/publisher was part of the pro-Nazi movement during the war... and afterward.
• Like most people my age, I knew about Joseph McCarthy's HUAC activities, but I didn't know about what he did when he first got into the Senate just after war to support the Nazis.

This stuff is hair-raising.

Prequel

I just finished Rachel Maddow's book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. It covers the same ground, in more detail, as the podcast "Ultra," which I wrote about a couple of times last year. So depending on whether you like to read or listen, get your pre-World War II fascism facts, because they surely are applicable today.

One thing I learned from the book that I don't remember hearing in the podcast is that Philip Johnson (yes, the architect Philip Johnson) was a major Nazi fanboy in the 1930s, and pretty much only stopped after Pearl Harbor, when he realized it would wreck his career. Also, that he was a born with a gold spoon in his mouth. 

I also learned more about Huey Long than I knew before, mostly because I have studiously ignored him, which is probably a mistake. I've never read All the King's Men. I know, I know.

The more I hear these days of what the Right appears to have in mind as a way to run a country, the more these words from Hitler, quoted by Maddow, sound familiar. He was speaking about his propaganda goals:

We have to paralyze the will and national unity of [these] and other countries. The great issue was to liberate the world from the poison of democracy, with its degenerating doctrine of liberty and equality (p. 287).

By coincidence, LK Hanson's quote cartoon in the Monday Star Tribune was an appropriate accompaniment:

Walter Liggett

I'm always a bit surprised when I find out about a piece of Minnesota history I've never heard mentioned at all before. I've been here almost 40 years, after all.

That happened when I learned about U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen from Rachel Maddow's podcast Ultra, and it just happened again yesterday.

It started because of a post on streets.mn about quasi-public street signs.

Photo by Wolfie Browender.

See that sign that says Liggett St? 

I posted to BlueSky with an abbreviated know-it-all bit of info on who Liggett was: 

U of Mn regent, dean of the ag college, state RR commissioner, and member of the State Fair's parent organization. He managed the 1890 Fair...which was almost rained out (attended by just 9,000 people). He died in 1909 at age 63 of "tightening of the arteries, caused ... from nervous trouble."

To which one of my BlueSky mutuals replied,

Any relation to Walter Liggett, journalist allegedly killed by Kid Cann?

Dear reader, I had never heard of Walter Liggett, journalist allegedly killed by Kid Cann... or of Kid Cann, for that matter.

Well, it turns out Walter Liggett is more famous than William Liggett of State Fair street sign fame (who was also Walter's father).

Walter Liggett worked for many of the most prominent local daily newspapers in the Twin Cities during World War I, and at some point for the dailies in New York City, including the New York Times. He was also a socialist journalist/activist involved in creating the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota (which is the F-L that's still part of our DFL party... what we call the Democrats in these parts) and its publications. Before and during the Great War, he was active in the Nonpartisan League, which I've mentioned a few times before. 

After 1920, he went to Washington, D.C., to work for a Nonpartisan League candidate who had gotten elected to the Senate. According to his Wikipedia page, he was involved in the efforts to free Sacco and Vanzetti, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series he wrote on the corruption caused by Prohibition, and published a critical biography of Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Walter returned to Minnesota in 1933 and set up a press. After that, the story of what happened to him (as told on his Wikipedia page) is, it appears, drawn from the book his daughter wrote about his killing. He and some others who had helped found the Farmer-Labor party believed there was corruption in the party, involving Jewish gangsters from Minneapolis, and including the populist governor and party-member Floyd B. Olson. Prohibition had just ended and there was money to be made with the legalization of alcohol.

Knowing that Minneapolis has a long history of antisemitism, I found that part a bit eyebrow-raising. Sure, there were some prominent Jewish gangsters in the U.S. in the 1930s, but at first hearing, this sounds more like prejudice than fact. But Kid Cann does sound like the real deal, even though there's some information that Russian interests may also have wanted Walter Liggett dead for messing with insurgent socialism in the U.S.

Walter's papers, organized by his widow and daughter, are held at NYU. His Wikipedia pages says this of his written legacy:

...the literary output of Walter Liggett was simply enormous. He wrote scores upon scores of articles in newspapers and magazines as well as four books.... Unfortunately for posterity, most of his literary output was printed on pulp paper, and very little of it has been digitized.

BlueSky, March 2026 Part 1

The month of March 2026 started as February ended: with the U.S. illegally bombing the hell out of Iran, and Iran firing back. U.S. missiles are now confirmed as destroying a girls' school and killing more than 150 people there with a "double-tap." Despite the killing of their leader, the Iranians have taken advantage of their geography and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments, which is heading the global economy into something like the 1970s oil crisis. 

As I write this, Trump is trying to coerce or cajole the international allies he has alienated into joining his rogue war to reopen the strait and save American gas prices. Pete Hegseth has been ranting and raving to new levels of excess, even for him, committing war crimes by opening his mouth. 

Earlier in the month, Kristi Noem finally resigned as Homeland Security Secretary, taking Corey Lewandowski with her…along with one of the luxury jets, it appeared. The intensity of the DHS/ICE occupation of the Twin Cities abated, or moved into Greater Minnesota where it was less obvious, but people here remain on edge, and the economy is in great disarray. There are still somewhere between 600 and 1,000 invaders left. 

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

I’ve never said this before, but: I do think he’s actually spiraling. The combination of the Iran War and his advancing mortality are pushing him to the edge. His inability to control either is destabilizing him. I just hope he goes before he has a chance to take the rest of us with him.
Leah McElrath

Online gambling will turn "no more than 5% of its users into compulsive gamblers." Current stats show 72 MILLION Americans have a sports-betting app they use at least monthly. That's 3.6 MILLION ruined lives.
Elf M. Sternberg

Sad to see the Ides of March becoming commercialised like this. I really feel like we're losing track of the true spirit of the holiday. It's not about how many knives you can stick in a tyrant all at once, it's about the whole community coming together to stab the tyrant as many times as possible:


A. M. Vincent @vincent.northsky.social

A cycling teammate of mine got knocked down by a car in Oakland and Ryan Coogler pulled his car over to make sure everyone was okay. True story.
Dan Turner @ddt.bsky.social

Do y'all remember before the internet, when people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information? Yeah, it wasn't that.
Oops @vodkula.bsky.social

"An obscure methodological change lowered a key measure of inflation in January, prompting questions about how government statistical agencies produce and report economic data... The bureau provided no public disclosure of the change...
Rachel Maddow

That's a very long way to say that Trump is cooking the inflation numbers.
Peter Gleick

After Trump took a break from commander-in-chiefing for rounds of golf this weekend, he is only five away from having spent a full 365 days of his two terms on the course. 
Philip Bump

The Department of Homeland Security is an expression of authoritarian intent. Any defense of it is an admission that you think some amount of patrolling non-white people is necessary, which is abhorrent.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

A modern classic:


Nissa Mitchell

republicans are in charge of everything and they are getting everything theyve ever wanted and doing everything theyve ever wanted and the world is on fire and the global world order is collapsing. is there a correlation? who can say
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social

Pete Hegseth is openly calling on Trump-friendly oligarchs to take over the media while unshackling the military from the "rules of engagement" he hates so much. What he really wants is a world in which horrors like the school bombing don't ever fully come to light.
Greg Sargent

We have the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled. A truly extraordinary moment. We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. Act like it.
Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social

There's a hauntingly beautiful irony in these morons thinking that carefully crafted American hegemony was actually weak and woke, and they would be the ones who would do Power and Dominance properly, and immediately bringing everything crashing down
Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social

If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.
Timothy Snyder

Excuse me sir,,,


Adam Serwer

Watching a bunch of giant SUVs trying to maneuver around each other at the grocery store parking lot. Why do we need this. Who's having a good time here
Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social

Every now and then, it's worth reminding yourself that every single crisis of Trump 2.0 — the economic downturn, the chaos in our cities, the rising health crisis, the foreign wars — has been a direct result of their own actions. If they'd done nothing at all, they'd be coasting comfortably.
Kevin M. Kruse

I feel like the “are you actually an anti-Zionist or do you just hate Jews” test could easily be also “how do you talk about women that you don’t like”
Samantha Burns @cheesecakechik.bsky.social

More Americans have died in the illegal undeclared Iran War than died during the Afghanistan withdrawal that was portrayed to the American public as a presidency-annulling catastrophe for Joe Biden.
Craig Harrington @craigipedia.bsky.social

Thinking about the circus Republicans invented regarding Benghazi, nails digging into the palm of my fist
rimidar

JFC. Impeach and remove this lawless man, you fools:


Chris Geidner

On this day in 1835, Missouri enacted a law requiring free Black residents to obtain a license to remain in the state. Those who did not faced fines, imprisonment, and expulsion from Missouri.
Equal Justice Initiative

You’re called an expat when you’re rich.
A migrant when you’re poor.
And an illegal when you’re poor and brown.
Matt Gorecki @goreckis.co

1995 is closer to 1965 than to now. You’re welcome
Æ. @aesthr.com

Former US government war crimes lawyer here. Apropos of SecDef's remarks this morning: Denial of quarter—even the declaration of no quarter—is a war crime. And recognized as such by the US Government. From DoD's Manual for Military Commissions.
Brian Finucane

also what an evil idiot. when you do something like that you are saying you want that to be how other countries treat our soldiers. he is betraying the families of the military.
lorin-blue.bsky.social

Hegseth is a sadist. What is he being taught at that church of his?
David Corn

i regret to inform you that with the current trajectory of the right-wing the shelf life of this satire is about 12-18 months:


Craig Johnson

Inside the Department of War are two wolves: 
"We've shut down the Colleges of War because book learnings are woke, gay, and irrelevant to war fighting."
"How come no one told us the Strait is important, there are different kinds of Kurds, Iran is big, and air power historically doesn't win wars?"
Dmitry Grozoubinski @explaintrade.com

If Joe Biden's son-in-law was flying around the Middle East as an unofficial Secretary of State while also working on business deals for his company with the same people he was meeting with on behalf of the US government, I'm pretty sure it would be a bigger story 
scarylawyerguy.bsky.social

it’s unreal how these grown-ass men [the DOGE boys] had no problem destroying untold lives with chatGPT but go crying to a judge when people make fun of them online
Marisa Kabas

Pediatricians are spending half their day debunking podcast grifters. We put an anti-vax activist in charge of HHS. Doctors have to fight snake oil salesmen and the federal government to protect kids. Sabotaging public health to 'own the libs' I guess.
Emerging Crises

Some places mostly serve the neighborhood and it isn't helpful to have an endless stream of motor vehicles running past:


Qagggy!

Minnesotans deserve restitution from ICE's terror campaign. The ICE surge cost Minneapolis $200 million in just one month. That’s before overtime, charter flights, and detention contracts. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize their own trauma.
Ilhan Omar

Someone at the New York Times asked me a couple years ago for an opinion piece on "how to solve the Colorado River water crisis." So I made a nice little write-up on the most obvious answer: charging for water. Once the editorial board saw it, they freaked out and cancelled the piece.
Sarah Taber

When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.
Ambassador Ken Fairfax @portlandken.bsky.social

I feel like it should be more widely unpopular that in the past year we’ve witnessed the creation of an American Stasi required to meet arrest quotas who utilize an AI technology created by a company run by a sweaty raisin of a billionaire who thinks Greta Thunberg is the antichrist.
Seth Cotlar

Happy National Loon Day to all who celebrate:


Joshua Houdek

"Cars are the most absurd means of transport in a city. They are parked 95 per cent of the time. It takes two tonnes to move someone who weighs 70 kilogrammes. And the denser the city, the more absurd it is."
The War on Cars

Capitalism is just basically about getting people addicted to things (gambling, porn, salt/sugar/fat, social media, drugs, etc.) and profiting from it. And our misery continues. Great work everyone. We call drug dealers "criminals" and addiction-sellers "businesses." Seriously, if your business plan is to figure out where people are most vulnerable and then sell them things to feed their addiction, then you're a criminal. Crimes against humanity.
‪Jen Mercieca‬

i am genuinely astonished by how Hegseth speaks exclusively in cliches
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

In the first Trump admin this was how Anthony Scaramucci talked and he was laughed out of his comms job in 11 days. In the second admin this fucking moron has control of the Middle East and really the entire global economy in his hands.
Jean Valjohnfranco @jvjfranco.bsky.social

Fairly clear the GOP is going to try to make the midterms about Muslims. Whipping up hate, starting a war, fear mongering about sleeper cells. The mainstream media is already falling for it. Countdown to NYTimes opeds about the risk of sharia law.
Bryan @bryanformhals.com

:

WORLDWIDE FLAG
Will Stancil

A penchant is when you repeatedly say aloud that you want more pens.
Present & Correct

Epic Fury is so well named. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Patrick Chovanec

The guy who bankrupted casinos has caused the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The team that accidentally invited a reporter to a top secret military discussion was taken by surprise when the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz.
Mark Jacob

Why is every tech ceo the villain from the Lorax
Adam Serwer

Imagine if anthropologists visited a remote village with no grocery store and one restaurant that only served hamburgers and then concluded based on their observations that the villagers prefer hamburgers. That's essentially the discourse surrounding Americans and their relationship to cars.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

Spotted this on a pole behind independence hall. I recently saw someone say they found collage to be the best way to work through things and I didn’t really see it at the time but


@milfparade.bsky.social

A striking feature of Trump and his team is: they somehow imagine a world in which they are the only actors, only ones with power, and whether it's Tehran or Minneapolis are surprised when it turns out others do. There are many kinds of power and many nations with power.
Rebecca Solnit

the stink of gender resentment coming off Silicon Valley has been obvious for a while. these men hate women because they hate being told no.
BeijingPalmer

it took just over a year to get from "I'll lower costs on day one" to "I'm raising prices and it's good, actually"
Aaron Rupar

I absolutely believe that Trump's success since 2015 signals the inevitability of Streamer Politicians and of course Streamer Presidents. Essentially no one in that category can be trusted to understand, say, bombing Iran has an XX% chance of catalyzing a global depression. Maybe this has always been true, but it's clear one of the biggest problems we face in the 21st century is: The Venn diagram of "people who understand material plenty isn't magic but instead depends on a whole world of logistics" and "people with political charisma" has a vanishingly small center.
@slothropsmap.bsky.social

Show me one person on a bike rolling through a stop sign and I’ll show you 100 drivers speeding in an elementary school zone.
Tom Flood


rain-singer.bsky.social

Trump has tremendous difficulty with principled people (even if as with the Iranian regime, the principles are bad). He assumes everyone is a transactional fraud like him. Works well with rich Americans and poorly with idealists of any stripe
Adam Serwer

Driver: 30km/hr is way too slow for our roads!
Also driver: hey cyclist slow down you’re going 20km/hr - You could kill someone!
Tom Flood

Big Tech and Big Media donated some $63 million to a Trump-aligned nonprofit that was set up to help finance Trump's presidential library. Now the nonprofit has disappeared and with it the money. Three guesses on where it's gone.
Tim Karr

I knew that the Department of War shot a missile into a school and killed 175 civilians, mostly children. This is learned today: Secretary of War Hegseth had cut the teams assigned to prevent such tragedies by 90%.
Aaron Sojourner
 

MC Squared

we remain firmly on track for 'republican president leaves the country an omnishambles, next democratic president is punished for not cleaning it up fast enough'
Micah @rincewind.run

Omnishambles is the new polycrisis.
Ben Goldfarb

Erika Kirk has been appointed to the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors. Her listed experience includes real estate, modeling, and a Bible-based streetwear brand. 
Daily Kos

Markwayne Mullen, Trump's new DHS Secretary pick, is one of Congress' most active stock traders. He reportedly entered Congress with $12M and has reportedly grown his wealth to $65M. He's already making shady deals — if he's confirmed, the conflicts of interest can only grow.
Public Citizen

I get almost as many comments about how ugly or fat I am on my workout posts as I did on my posts before I started lifting. I’m not asking for sympathy. I just want to remind Black women that the point isn’t if we are pretty or skinny or not. The point is they want us to not exist.
Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

The US has extremely low fuel taxes compared to other countries. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993. People justify not investing in biking and walking infrastructure because the US is a "users-pay" transportation system. When we've already been subsidizing drivers for decades
Ken McLeod

What if I told you that Transportation is the highest-polluting sector of the American economy? Now what if I told you that ~100% of that is from oil? Now what if I further told you that we can do something about it but mostly aren't even trying?
David Weiskopf

‘Hey’ came before ‘hi,’ and ‘hi' came before ‘hello.’
‘Hi’ is most likely a variant of ‘hey.’
‘Hello’ is not related to either.
Goodbye.
Merriam-Webster

nashville tire service, nashville, tennessee, 1980:


old roadside pics

One fossil fuel crisis costs the UK more than shifting to net zero by 2050. And how many more such crises can we expect in the next 24 years? A great example of how the proper temporal frame clarifies costs and benefits
Thomas Hale

If you're not shocked by the fraction of city space taken up by car parking, you're not paying attention.
David Ho

The stupidity is endless, isn’t it. Iran now holds the world energy economy to ransom and our idiot government didn’t prepare for that at all. And they were going to replace the terrible leader, and they replaced him with a younger version of him who hates us more because Trump killed his family.
Tom Coates

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" but everyone agrees it's fine to continue the atrocity as long as the child is trans
Edith @edithcharles.bsky.social

I'm seriously so fucking sick of people using the e-bikers are lazy trope. And even if you *are* able-bodied and use an e-bike, who the fuck cares? Getting somewhere faster and not all sweaty is fantastic.
Gravel Influencer

If these people think Ebikes are lazy, wait until they learn about cars.
Fietser

Randy Fine is one of the most racist members of Congress, and the fact that he is Jewish makes me deeply ashamed. Denouncing this man and his racism should be the lowest of low bars for every Jewish institution in the US.
Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social

The idea that America isn’t for everyone who wants to be an American is something that makes my blood boil. Posting a photo of yourself as a Congressman smiling next to these words is wicked. It’s antithetical to the concept of America:


Cooper Lund

How much more evidence do we need? The ultra-rich and the governments supporting them will destroy everything for the sake of profit, power and pride. Nothing is precious to them - not human life, not the living world — except their own wealth and status. Our survival depends on resisting them.
George Monbiot

Mandani: Takes care of all NYC residents.
GOP: “He hates America.”
Trump: Iran may kill US citizens, I dunno, shit happens. Where’s my golf club?
GOP: “Is this Jesus?”
Zegs

Who would have guessed that the legal system in America was so fragile that a single crazy president could ignore the whole thing, from the Constitution right down to state laws? Why does the Supreme Court and Congress let this demented moron act like the dictator of a banana republic?
Ashley Zacharias

I’ve been photographing anti-ICE and related yard/window/tree/street signs around Minneapolis. The variety of commercial and especially handmade signs is amazing, as is the urge for people to let their neighbors know they care and are furious in ways big and small. Batch #3:


Wendy @hyssop.bsky.social

On the one-year anniversary of his detention by federal authorities, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and First Lady Rama Duwaji welcomed Mahmoud Khalil, his wife Noor, and their baby boy, Deen, to Gracie Mansion to break the fast together.
Yashar Ali

love how we killed the old, frail anti-nuke ayatollah just to have him replaced with his young, healthy son who wants nukes and who just had his father, mother, wife, and child murdered on the same day by his mortal enemy. surely this will bring peace to the region
doom boy

It's not a productive trend, but with every passing day I think I get more hung up on how massive the contrast was in 2024 and how easy the choice should've been for voters. And I get angrier and angrier about the people who muddied that contrast and the people who chose to vote for *this.*
Alex Schieferdecker

Still crazy that the president’s lawyer spent two days with Ghislaine Maxwell, she “cleared” him of wrongdoing and was almost immediately transferred to a more pleasant prison and nobody in the administration will explain it and the media acts like two large dots are just impossible to connect.
Schooley

I’ve been photographing anti-ICE and related yard/window/tree/street signs around Minneapolis. The variety of commercial and especially handmade signs is amazing, as is the urge for people to let their neighbors know they care and are furious in ways big and small. Batch #4:


Wendy @hyssop.bsky.social

I wonder what percentage of Americans know that the CIA helped overthrow a democracy in Iran in 1953, installing a brutal dictator who tortured and murdered people. Republicans keep citing the 1979 Islamic Revolution as if that was the start of  U.S.-Iran hostilities. Go back 26 years earlier.
Mark Jacob

Now that everyone’s paying attention to global energy markets and effects of faraway events on prices and decision-making, is it a good time to talk about the indirect land use effects of dedicating cropland to biofuel production or nah?
Richard Waite

Just like the Covid crisis switched the entire world to Zoom and work from home, a lasting Iran oil crisis should switch the entire world to electrification. Impeach and remove Donald Trump and use the Defense Production Act to make affordable electric cars and charging systems everywhere.
Eric Holthaus

Also known as "using insider knowledge for war profiteering":


Mrs. Betty Bowers

I don't know if anyone even cares about crime statistics. They go up, need more police. They go down, police are juking the stats, and we still need more police. They hit historic lows, the problem is that people don't FEEL safe.
Jessica Pishko

A consistent theme across the discourse is that people simply do not appreciate the baseline destructiveness and horror of war. The basic tools of military action are things that would be horrific crimes in civilian life. A war crime is an act so egregious  that it stands out against that background. Somehow we never have that conversation honestly before we go to war.
spherical-cow.bsky.social

I feel that every news headline should be "Convicted rapist and internationally wanted war criminal together launch illegal war to bring about armageddon in order to prevent the world from uncovering their global pedophile sex-trafficking ring."
Sigrid Ellis

Every time a woman runs for president I hear that she’s too emotional and unstable to make wartime decisions, unlike the men in charge who make really reasonable decisions like bombing kids to death, starting water wars, and poisoning the entire planet
Kat Tenbarge

Wheel ruts worn into the roads of ancient Pompeii made by the passage of wagons and carts some 2,000+ years ago. A reminder to modern visitors of ancient traffic which flowed through busy Pompeian streets. Photo by me:


Alison Fisk

Americans think nearly half of social media users post toxic/fake content. the actual number is closer to 3-7%. a small group of highly active users produces most of the harmful posts, but the misperception itself makes people feel worse about the state of the U.S 
Rachel Cohen Booth

Wow — as first spotted by @BadFoxGraphics on X, Fox & Friends this morning used *old footage of a previous dignified transfer* to mislead their audience about the fact that Trump wore a baseball cap during the one yesterday
Aaron Rupar

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.
Boze the Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social

In 2013 Aaron Swartz committed suicide for facing 35 years in prison for mass downloading scientific articles. 13 years later, Meta is almost getting away with an infraction orders of magnitude larger. The law didn't change.
Tiago Peixoto @tiago.skewed.de

What could possibly explain the intensity of Western interest, over the past century and more, in this region?


George Monbiot

I really just can't get into the headspace of people who think:
1) Jesus is coming back in the immediate future
2) He's gonna give us a high five for making the bombs that blew up Bethlehem and give us a pony 
3) So better explode some more shit real good to expedite the process
Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social

christians looking for jesus in every war we start, every missile we fire, every conquering despot we crown, and never in the one place jesus promised he could be found: among the poor, the starving, the oppressed.
tyler huckabutt @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social

Shout out to everybody else who grew up with very intense rapture anxiety and then now people want it to happen on purpose is a mainstream opinion and not just the weirdos in your church and family. It sucks!
Ophie Dokie

would jesus not be mad if you kill a bunch of people to bring him back. is it okay if its to bring jesus back, i'm not up on all the rules i confess
shaun @shaunvids.bsky.social

Folks...this picture of Linda Hamilton and Bryan Cranston from an episode of MURDER SHE WROTE. I didn't think it was possible for two people to look this 1986:


Bill Smiley @neokefka99.bsky.social

a lot of discussion about how "cosmopolitan" urban dwellers are, but a really under-discussed trend is the homogenization of culture across *rural* areas of the USA — replacement of once-distinct regional cultures with generic "redneck" accent and culture, regional religions with evanglicalism etc
mtsw

every incumbent party on the planet got walloped and Harris/Dems did better than almost all of them. she overperformed in swing states where she campaigned heavily compared to the rest of the country. she absolutely could have run a better campaign (Gaza!) but I don’t know if it would have been enough
Micah @rincewind.run

One of my theories is that lots of us (me included) spend a lot of time thinking about what Harris could have done better because it's more comfortable to think about that than the fact that for tens of millions the moral black hole of Trump is what they explicitly wanted.
Glonzo In Exile

I know it’s not worth it but my god the GOP freakout over the Afghanistan withdrawal compared to how they talk about Iran, what’s it like to have no fixed opinions at all
Dave Levitan

One thing I feel ought to be discussed more is the fact that basically all rural and suburban places in the US are subsidized by cities. They resent cities. They insult cities. They elect politicians who abuse cities. But none of them could survive without cities.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Anti-Suffragette postcard, ca. 1910s. Happy International Women's Day, bicycle friends!


Cool Bike Art

One aspect of the federal occupation of the Twin Cities and our resistance to it that I find notable is the utter solidarity Indigenous Minnesotans have shown with their immigrant neighbors. Among other things it shows the difference between anti-colonial struggle and being ‘anti-immigration’.
Normies Say ¡Chinga la migra! @soupgoodfood.bsky.social

For those who have forgotten the past 40 years:
Tax cuts for the rich...don’t trickle down
Boosting military spending...doesn’t bring peace
Slashing regulations...doesn’t create jobs
Folks, we’ve seen this all before.
Robert Reich

A good rule of thumb is that a carbon tax of $1 per metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions would raise gasoline prices about 1 cent. So a 43 cent increase in the price of gas is equivalent to a carbon war tax of $43 per metric ton of GHGs.
Costa Samaras

When men's workload is automated, it's genius; when women's workload is automated it's a character flaw and morally questionable.
Joyful Song @jlw779.bsky.social

The word “tattoo” has two distinct meanings, with two distinct etymologies. The first, meaning skin art, comes from Polynesian. The second, meaning a military drumbeat, comes from the Dutch.
Mignon Fogarty @grammargirl.bsky.social

fancy chicken dishes!


Jen Mercieca

The thing about the anti-Christ is, everyone following him is pretty sure he’s the Christ.
Patrick Chovanec

A year-long investigation into the Hyperloop found … “The truth was far simpler, far dumber, and far more prescient: Musk and his lieutenants truly had no idea what they were doing.”
Clive Thompson

At an event last night I said "If the word hope doesn't work for you try, 'Never fucking surrender.'" The word hope seems too sunny to a lot of people, but the heart of it as I'm interested in it is: we make the future in the present, if we show up, and that never surrender part.
Rebecca Solnit

Endlessly grim to me how facile and empty these peoples' visions of the New World Order are; they're tearing up fifty years of international agreements and progress and imperfect stumbling towards the possibility of a better world and all they want out of it is to be a gangster petrostate.
Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social

Something that speaks to a sudden decline in our society is the amount of people I’ve seen lately approaching stop signs and then going right through them like “nope, don’t believe in this anymore!”
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

Portrait of Alexander Calder and his family in Paris, 1954:


Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social

The people who think punk shouldn't be political and the people who think scifi shouldn't be political should all get an island together and never talk to the rest of us ever again
Daddy Rex @katyrex.meatjacker.social

The real insanity isn’t how much oil prices have spiked, it’s that we’re still burning oil for energy.
David Ho

SHOULD THE U.S BLOT OUT THE SUN AND USHER IN AN AGE OF ETERNAL DARKNESS? –Gallup 2/20/26-3/5/26 
NO: 41%
YES: 38% 
UNSURE: 21%
Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social

There's one country headed toward "total collapse" and at this point it doesn't seem like it's Iran.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

If other people's children are fair targets in war, then so are yours.
Prisonculture

The Expense:


Tom Flood

A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment. 
Max Boot

23 year old Ruben Ray Martinez’s last words? “I’m sorry sir.” ICE shot him 3 times and killed him.
Renee Good’s last words? “It’s ok I’m not mad”. 
Alex Pretti’s last words? “Are you ok?”
These are the people DHS calls domestic terrorists. Threats. Aggressors. 
Abolish ICE
Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social

Cheap oil is not your birthright. Living your life behind the wheel is an utter waste. Your car is your master.
MaryMM

Congrats to everyone who voted for Trump and a Republican Congress "for the economy." This is what you get, a sputtering job creation engine that can't make progress like before and keeps rolling backwards:


Max Kennerly

Imagine all the cool, fast trains we could have with the billions we spend on bombs.
Katelyn Burns

the Austin mass shooter was a Tesla employee who assaulted a coworker during a company-allowed prayer break late last year. the company refused to give the victim her assailant's name so she could press charges, and he went on to become a mass shooter
e.w. niedermeyer

ICE agents trained to lie all the time assume everyone is lying all the time.
Robert Stribley @stribs.bsky.social

One of the best of all time. “You’re not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.” Wish we had come up with that one:


Urban Truth Collective

I am not trying to do the whole "everything's a distraction" thing, but the DOJ holding onto specific allegations about Trump assaulting a minor and releasing them after a war against Iran has taken center stage is, uh... noteworthy timing.
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

this is not incidental! to be a liberal/pluralist of any kind requires accepting that other people will see things differently than you do and that you have no sanctified monopoly on the One Truth. this is what illiberals hate about liberalism. it’s the starting point for many.\
elias isquith

Logging on to tell you that the Mayo Clinic's annual profit is equal to Hennepin County Medical Center's entire operating revenue. However can we find the money to save our bedrock safety net hospital? 
Eric Harris Bernstein

move slow and repair things
George @hannahtempler.com

it's insane that my country's current position is that, if we don't like the leader of a sovereign nation, not only do we get to kill them we get to pick their successor
post malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social

“War-a-Lago” By Barry Blitt at The New Yorker:


Carl Quintanilla

"I sexually exploited a now-dead employee and also I've got God on speed-dial and he always does what I want" is quite the self-portrait. Of right-wing Christianity. And evangelical entitlement. And then he stepped down, realizing that even if his sock-puppet God obediently forgave him, the voters might not.
Rebecca Solnit

Wars are extremely hard things to justify. It is intrinsic to what they are that they tend to death, destruction, and misery. Given this and some knowledge of history, one's default attitude towards powerful people purporting to do the world some great benefit by war should be extreme scepticism.
lastpositivist.bsky.social

unembarrassed enthusiasm about learning new things is genuinely the best way to live
Naomi Alderman

I remember Republicans telling me that it's absurd to call Trump a Nazi because he has no interest in initiating wars of conquest.
Patrick Chovanec

"Millennial Nazi whose only way to understand the world comes from a pastiche of blockbuster films and video games," is really becoming a defining aesthetic of our era.
Ned Richardson-Little @historyned.bsky.social


Anton Bitel @antbit.projectedfigures.com

one google data center in virginia 
two million gallons of water per day
information only released under court order and risk of contempt
jae holzman @jael.bsky.social

They know that many people in the US will accept the killing of civilians overseas but will draw the line at high gas prices.
Prisonculture

It's been so common for ICE to not return personal items of folks they abducted and detained that I believe there is either some sort of memo or expectation shared among agents to purposely discard or steal from people detained. 
Nate Pentz

The 1973 oil embargo was seismic event that sent shocks through the US economic, political, and social infrastructure. It contributed to the demise of the domestic auto industry, the beginning of the homelessness epidemic, and the rise of neoliberalism. This could be bigger.
Leah McElrath

Kristi Noem going out praising herself for her courageous public service when all she did was steal our money and lie to America and brutalize the vulnerable and screw her boyfriend is pretty much the exit from DHS I expected of her. It is very important she eventually go to prison
Seth Abramson

Appreciate the clarity:


Maladroithe

private equity reading this like "I smell an opportunity to improve operational efficiency!"
e.w. niedermeyer

"Autonomous Vehicles almost by definition lower the friction and costs associated with driving ... And we already know, from the last century-plus of experience in the US, what happens when we make driving easier: We will get more of it. And more concrete and asphalt infrastructure to accommodate it." 
Urban Truth Collective

ICE has arrested and detained a Nashville journalist who reported stories critical of ICE. She’s married to a U.S. citizen and has been seeking asylum here after fleeing death threats in Colombia because of her journalism there. They’ve already sent her to Louisiana.
Radley Balko

someone was saying they thought maple syrup just came out of the tree, and it’s funny because we have a story about this in ojibwe. like, the syrup used to come out that way but people got lazy and fat so the creator thinned it out into sap so we wouldn’t take it for granted
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

I can't think of anyone in this administration whom I don't want fired.
David Ho

If war crimes Barbie does get fired it’s gonna be because she violated the most important part of the oath to the mad king: never center yourself more than you center him.
Tinman 2.0 contre la caste @bcmfietser.bsky.social

Historian here, history first time as tragedy the second time as farce:


Manisha Sinha @profmsinha.bsky.social

WTF even IS "autopen"? Is this just some bullshit notion that the Right created, and media organizations just use the word without challenge? I swear, I'm so tired of being subjected to projection fantasies of the Right while real people are getting killed and disappeared.
Bob Alberti @a1batross.bsky.social

Conservatives think their rights are violated when they simply notice other people. Their ideology is incompatible with community.
Red sky at night

It’ll still be the Stephen Miller DHS, who cares who the sock puppet is
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

Remind me: when you bomb an elementary school, lure the survivors into a false sense of safety, and then bomb the survivors, leaving behind dozens and dozens of dead school children... are you the good guys?
David Roberts @volts.wtf

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

Happy World Book Day!


Matchbloc

the running theme of like 3/4ths of the content on my feed right now is just ten different examples of Kristi Noem being juuuuuust smart enough to answer "how dare you" instead of "no" when she's lying
Claire Willett

"retail theft" is such a spectacular lie of post-pandemic reality-creation. it gave cover for companies to expand the surveillance state, raise their prices, and close stores in slightly less profitable areas, conveniently turning the actual solution (hire more employees) into a total non sequitur
sarah zedig @hmsnofun.bsky.social

When will [X climate impact] reach a tipping point? “We can say 20 to 30 years. It’s enough time that any normal politician can think: ‘Not my problem,’ but it’s not enough time for someone who’s aged any less than 60 to ignore it.” The temporal paradox of climate breakdown
Dr Charlie Gardner

We went from making up reasons like "weapons of mass destruction" to you know what, fuck it we don't need to even lie, the president "had a feeling" that they pose a threat so we just bomb them so we can. A country doing this can't expect peace inside.
Timnit Gebru

We identified 12 shootings by federal agents that led to the deaths or injuries of citizens and immigrants since Sept. Nearly every time, the Trump admin blamed the injured and dead. Experts say this apparent lack of accountability demands that local authorities step up to investigate federal agents.
ProPublica

Seen today in my neighborhood:


Naomi Kritzer

At some point you realize the actual difference between human civilization and everything else is paperwork and thus the bureaucrat really is the most important person.
Airship Chronos

Anyone saying Iran is a bunch of "crazed religious fanatics" should give Pete Hegseth a quick listen.
Tea Pain

Modern Republican position is that the Redcoats acted properly at the Boston Massacre
Avocadoplex

The design of the Constitution divided war-making authority between Congress and the executive to prevent a president to take the country to war by themselves for any petty or self-serving reason. You know, like a king would. 
Adam Serwer

Remember: nothing is allowed to happen in the USA unless it makes a wealthy person even wealthier right away. Healthcare, the arts, firefighting, science, whatever — if a rich white man isn't seeing a quarterly profit from it, there's absolutely no point in doing it.
Bob Alberti @a1batross.bsky.social

it's funny how fast criticism of "virtue signaling" degenerated into just despising virtue outright
ponder @ponder.ooo

Nothing says Urban Village like 8 stories of building, 6’ of sidewalk, 4’ of plantings, and 6 lanes of Rainier:


pwalchtaylor.bsky.social

Hello police I heard about your policy to intervene in my time of need. Sorry we can only intervene in cases where we see it happening, and that won't be possible because we have another policy that says we have to avert our eyes.
Wedge LIVE!™

This cartoonishly childish Hegseth persona is an insult to the American military, the American people, the Iranian people, and just about everybody affected by this war. It is absolutely incredible, in the literal sense, that this man is at the hinge of the chain of command in this spiraling war.
Elizabeth N. Saunders

I think most Americans assume that there IS a legal path to citizenship that a lot of undocumented people simply don’t want to go through, and I think now people are discovering that there isn’t! And they think there should be.
Sarah @harrietvane.bsky.social

Polymarket has created a betting market on the use of nuclear weapons. Everyone involved in this should be put in prison for life.
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net

Every single aspect of this Iran war is the stupidest fucking thing ever, and completely on brand for Trump. This is the sort of thing many people have been worried he was going to do ever since he got elected the first time. The guardrails held him back then but they're gone now.
J. Sam Drolet

ABOLISH ICE:


Sean Lim 

yeah the damage a single bad billionaire can do wildly outstrips any positive impact even a theoretically ideal billionaire can have. more, I think that the kind of person you need to be to become a billionaire tends to select for the worst outcomes in all but the rarest of cases
Micah @rincewind.run

On this day in 1921, a white lynch mob hunting a Black man saw a different Black man walking down a road and killed him instead. The mob claimed mistaken identity and faced no punishment.
Equal Justice Initiative

Sometimes I think about the gazillions of dollars we spend on always being ready to murder people around the world at a moment's notice while slashing food stamps and school budgets. And then I think about all the times I've been told that pacifism is "unrealistic."
Sam Bergman @violanorth.bsky.social

What just happened in Dallas County [on election day] is one of the most blatant voter suppression operations I've ever seen—and it happened in a *primary*. In March. Imagine November.
Eliza Orlins

We need more moral leadership in this country, and less political leadership. I don't mean preachers. I mean people who serve as a quiet example in our everyday lives, of what doing the right thing looks like.
Patrick Chovanec

We need more murals by Chuck U:


snackerü

I think it is important to understand that this war can't be argued against in the rational terms many people are trying to understand and navigate it. This is a war started to kick off the apocalypse. Every decision and action should be viewed through that lens.
Sarah Tuttle @niais.bsky.social

My opinion: Jamelle Bouie is the best national political columnist in America. This doesn’t mean he is always right or you always need to agree with him. But he consistently elevates the form. Conservatives and liberals who make deranged personal attacks on him just make themselves look bad.
Jonathan Ladd

The US is forever proclaiming that this or that region will be better off without this or that bad guy, all the while drenching those regions in bombs, fire, and the ashes of innocents. I don't want Congressional authorization for any of that; I want mass realization of it.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

I'm rapidly coming around to the position that I don't trust anyone who wants to outsource their humanity, call me a Luddite, go ahead
Sarah Goodyear

The resemblance to David Ellison is still uncanny:


Steve M. @stevemnomoremister.bsky.social

American traffic "engineers" would learn more from walking and biking to get a sense of how safe streets feel, than looking at statistics. If everyone else avoids a street because drivers are overwhelmingly dangerous, and thereby avoids being hit, that does not make it safe.
Politics of Cars @thismachinekillsfascists.bike

I’m a broken record on this but Trump’s entire plan was clearly “kick them in the face, collect praise from Twitter, walk away.” From his perspective it’s always worked before. It seemingly never occurred to them that they may not be able to walk away.
Will Stancil

As it is with our clothing, so it is with our names. We can have trans rights, bodily autonomy, gender nonconformity, and freedom of expression, or we can have none of these things. There’s no third option.
Angus Johnston

As the case of "JD" Vance illustrates, it's not an act that is being treated as a crime. It is a category of people who are being treated as a crime.
Nothings Monstered

Wearing my coping hoodie:


David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

sometimes I just have to stop and think, wait. did I really see a video of RFK working out and then taking a cold plunge in his blue jeans while drinking raw milk? with kid rock?? did trump really go off on a two minute tangent about his fucking drapes in the middle of a presser about the war?
Tom Tomorrow

People will live in neighborhoods where all the houses are over $600k, send their kids to private schools, primarily socialize with other moderately wealthy people... and then tell a lefty person who makes $48k on blue sky that they live in a bubble.
Wes Burdine

whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Rich white people have a religious faith that the world is supposed to work for them without them bothering to understand how the world works.
Carl Nyberg

Calling AI "slop" has been one of the most effective instances of the public rebranding a product and it pisses them off:


Steven Santos

you can have a dinner that celebrates the First Amendment or a dinner that features Donald Trump but you cannot have both
Jamison Foser

who you gonna believe, 30 or 40 women that all independently have the same story, or 1 or 2 horrible men?
Mind Goblin @slartibartfast34.bsky.social

The top 1% in America now hoard $55.8 trillion — more than the GDP of the United States and China combined.
More Perfect Union

The Roberts Court's position is that if you deserved justice or due process you would be rich.
Adam Serwer

the media-war machine was at peak performance during the first gulf war under hw bush and was firing on all cannons from 9/11 to the end of 2006. the press didn't want to hear about peacenik hippies opposing war. they wanted their war porn and bush/cheney gave it to them like the best drug dealers.
Oliver Willis

From the crew at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis on Saturday! 


Matt McNeil Show

The reason administrations since Carter left the Iran regime in place was an adversarial but contained stable state was preferable to a failed one in that region especially. Otherwise you’ve got an inferno that stretches from Turkey to the Gulf to the Caucasus to Pakistan/Afghanistan.
Andrew Otis Weiss @thatweissguy.bsky.social

The president who used AI to make a video of himself as a crowned fighter pilot bombing the American people with shit wants you to trust him with unlimited access to AI-operated killing machines that operate without human supervision and that are inherently unreliable. ...
Peter Norton

About every 57k miles driven by Musk’s robotaxis, one gets into a wreck. That’s four times the rate of humans.
dell cameron

“Rabbit Rabbit.” Iranian tile with two rabbits, two snakes and a tortoise:


Dianne Sherman

For my entire life, one of the core principles of global relations, so simple that a 10yo could grasp it, has been "just make sure that a region-consuming war doesn't pop off in the Middle East." And now we've deliberately started one, just for funsies.
Sam Bergman @violanorth.bsky.social

Bicycle parking takes parking space away from one vehicle. Vehicle parking takes living space from hundreds of people. One is more controversial than the other.
Natalia Barbour

I’m actually not sure we can come back from “prediction markets for war crimes,” as a society. I think this might be it for us.
Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social

A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else. We mustn’t let this war do so.
Robert Reich

People will argue you need nukes to deter aggression, but having allies willing to defend you works just as well, if not better. This is why multinational alliances/federations/unions are better (and probably cheaper) than weapons of mass destruction.
The Alternate Historian

If you think empathy is a bad thing, you’re almost certainly a bad person.
Brent Toderian

Timeless:


Urban Truth Collective

It just can’t be said enough that for months the federal government waged war on the people of Minnesota, kidnapping them off the streets, driving families into hiding, and killing 2 of people. And if you cannot call that out or state that clearly, you’re not one of us. You’re one of them.
Wes Burdine

BlueSky April 2025, Part 2

And now the second half of April 2025 in reverse chronological order, which means it starts with April 30 and goes backward to about April 15. Here's the first half of the month.

Yesterday, I left off in the midst of Trump's illegal renditioning of people to El Salvador and kidnapping student visa-holders. The financial implosion from Trump's tariffs continued. The Trump administration began dismantling AmeriCorps and took on Harvard (and other universities), and it finally got some push back on that. Elon Musk's bizarre need to breed a crew of sons with surrogates he recruits online was exposed further. Public opinion on Trump's actions became increasingly negative, sometimes reaching levels as low as the bubonic plague.

As usual, I have moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

___

RFK Jr. is a disgusting liar. This is psychotic. He claimed today that "during the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking, and for sex, and for slavery"—and that there are "300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration." This is complete bullshit.
Adam Keiper

Why are fewer women using AI than men? Because if I wanted someone to confidently make up answers to my questions I would simply ask a man
Laura Jedeed

I could be wrong about this but I really think most Americans do not want to be forced to “do their own research” about food and drug and product safety and would rather that the government agencies that have been sorting that all out for them for decades not be obliterated in the name of “efficiency.


Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” –A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic
Emily St. John Mandel

Howard Lutnick: "It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. We let the auto plants go overseas."
Aaron Rupar

This is the future Lutnick has planned for you and your kids. For his kids? Well, Lutnick appointed his sons Brandon and Kyle, ages 27 and 28, CEOs of the investment firm he led, overseeing 14,000 employees. I’m sure he did an extensive search and they were the most qualified.
Sherrilyn Ifill

I just want one reporter, ONE, to say “there’s a lot more evidence that you are a rapist than Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.”
Jon Cryer @mrjoncryer.bsky.social

I am sick and god damn tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing. The media is complicit in accepting fantastical nonsense - both in the numbers put out by OpenAI and the silly jobs created by Anthropic - and it has to stop. Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. The tech and business media must change their ways, or risk repeating these cycles forever. Generative AI is a remarkable con — a just-good-enough simulacrum of human expression to get it past the gatekeepers in finance and the media, knowing that neither will apply a second gear of critical thinking beyond "huh guess we're doing AI now." It's a disgrace. It's blatantly obvious that generative AI is a bubble. The returns and products just aren't there, and yet the media compliantly prints whatever OpenAI wants, even when it's insane things such as "they'll make $3bn from an agent product that barely exists in 2025."
Ed Zitron

"Your health records will be on the block chain."
"Everyone will live in the Metaverse."
"All art will be NFTs."
"Generative AI will replace the need for humans."
We need to reckon with the reality that the tech industry no longer creates things that anyone wants.
Ashley Lynch

Considering there are still dupes out there going, "he just wants to prevent chronic disease!" I feel the need to point out that RFK Jr. has been working on these issues for decades and has not bothered to learn the most elementary facts about how vaccines or the government work.
Michael Hobbes

Cartoon with caption by my buddy @jackhauen.bsky.social:


Gabrielle Drolet

We made a deliberate choice as a nation, until now, not to have a police state. We siloed off federal data and put in place laws, regulations, policies and internal norms to prevent the federal government from putting together everything it knows about you into one place. Trump is ending all that.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

The speed with which Congress not having the power of the purse, law and the Constitution be damned, has been normalized by the press is the most terrifying thing to me.
Dan Murphy @bungdan.bsky.social

They will try to distract us from things that are horrible with things that are ridiculous.
Bethany Albertson @albertsonb2.bsky.social

My question is whether Judge Hannah Dugan will still be allowed to hear cases while the case against her plays out. Because if she gets suspended, that becomes a pretty convenient way for Trump to purge the entire judicial system of anyone who doesn't show fealty.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

We got our answer. Dugan is suspended.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

Using uniformed military as political backdrops causes the public to consider them political forces, a dangerous thing in a free society.
Kori Schake

gretchen whitmer completely misreading the moment and tanking her presidential hopes in the span of a few weeks caught me a bit off guard. never followed her too closely but it seemed that she was normal and even savvy. if you’re a Dem doing “anti-woke” posturing you’re an idiot, but at least there’s a logic to it. if you’re *speaking at Trump rallies* I really don’t know what to say
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

It's fun to remember how Republicans insisted Biden wasn't running his own White House and then hear Trump assert in an interview: "I'm not the one making this decision."
Kevin M. Kruse

#BuffaloNYProtest:


Country Over Party @crazyheart007.bsky.social

whining out loud during a televised interview that the reporter should let you lie because they owe you for the interview is pretty wild
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social

Harriet Tubman [supposedly revered today] would have been dragged on social media based on how people are. Accused of supporting *violence* due to her close friendship with John Brown and her history of de-arresting enslaved people. Accused of being a religious *zealot* Accused of being a grifter because she was ALWAYS fundraising... LOL.. the list is long.
Prisonculture

There's tons of evidence that Trump genuinely thinks that F-35s are literally invisible.
Michael Paulauski @mike10010100.bsky.social

And that asylum seekers came from insane asylums.
Radley Balko

Car supremacy is kind of a fascinating tic of conservative ideology to me: They can only conceive of liberty within the structures of the status quo. Driving in a dense city is *theoretical* freedom but in practice it’s oppression. Meaningful freedom is walking, biking and regular public transit.
Michael Hobbes

Also see: healthcare. Private healthcare is *theoretically* more free in that there are more options (for the wealthy), but *functionally* worse for more people. It's slight of hand.
Atalanta @atalantadoll.bsky.social

Dems bend over backwards to appease farmers and what do they get out of it? They are a small minority of people who are generally the most reactionary right wingers in the country. They back plans like Trump's tariffs with the knowledge that they will get a gov handout to mitigate their suffering.
The Alternate Historian

The U.S. Secretary of Transportation hates the greatest public transit system in the United States.  That explains a lot.
davidrlurie

As usual every US economic graph is just another way of telling you when Reagan was elected.


Phineas

Clay Jackson, a Texas lawyer, provided basic legal advice to an immigrant family fearing deportation. Then, two officers visited him at his home, accusing him of "obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation." Then, after speaking publicly, he was fired from his job at a Fortune 500 company
Judd Legum

The entire legal community is being threatened into de facto abolishing the US system of legal representation
Jake Grumbach

Economists now saying the average—AVERAGE—annual hit American households will face because of Trump’s trade war will be $5,000!!
Clara Jeffery

I see the already historically unpopular president is exploring how to get the military involved in “assisting” local law enforcement just a few weeks before the real shortages caused by his inept economic policy start hitting. Probably nothing to worry about.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social

The price of racism? Was your freedom. Was it worth it?
Sydette The Dreaded Gorgon @blackamazon.bsky.social

Just about everyone in Trump’s circle is profoundly evil and corrupt, and yet Stephen Miller somehow always manages to make the rest of them look like amateurs.
Brent Toderian

A small harbinger of spring:


Olivia When

Fully on board with dems running for office promising to reinstate fired federal employees and jail this administration’s various criminals, but let’s go ahead and add “we will seize by eminent domain any national parkland sold to developers”
Dennis B. Hooper

randomly watching a documentary about led zeppelin and TIL: jimmy page and john paul jones were session musicians for the shirley bassey goldfinger theme.
Tom Tomorrow

Streets are not “closed” when they’re free of cars; they’re car free. They’re safer. They’re full of people. They aren’t “closed.” Language matters.
@fulllanefemme.bsky.social

Preparing for severe weather events and for public health crises have a great deal in common. Both are largely lose-lose propositions from a PR perspective. Which is a huge fucking problem! Prepare and avoid? You're accused of over-reacting. Fail to prepare and disaster? Why didn't you do more?!
Tinman contra la caste @bcmfietser.bsky.social

Wherever there’s a Black woman with an opinion, there’s a white man with a beard waiting to tell her she’s wrong.
Ally Henny

Now that his polling is underwater on every issue across the board I’m looking forward to seeing what the fallback position is for the Sensible Centrists whose argument was, “You shouldn’t oppose him on this, he’s got public opinion on his side!” (My money is on “OK, oppose him, but Not Like That.”)
Tim Carvell

Trump is cancelling the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment. I don't want to hear one word about "cancel culture" from the right wing ever again.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Billionaires ramped up support for Trump in 2024 and are now watching their fortunes plummet (-7.4% already). Not surprising for a GOP admin—it's history repeating itself. The billionaires who attended Trump's inauguration are faring even worse—they are down a combined $194B YTD, a 17.5% haircut:


Adam Bonica

We talk a lot about social media radicalizing the population but it's been far more efficient at radicalizing public figures. Humans are not designed for the amount of feedback being a public figure on social media provides. Whether it's praise or criticism, receiving an avalanche of nonstop attention is profoundly corrosive to your brain.
Michael Hobbes

It's why social media has, if anything, had a profoundly anti-social effect on society. It only works if everyone is a 'reasonable person.' Sadly, that isn't the case; add in commercial and other nefarious interests, and the resulting cocktail is most likely psychological poison.
Equiton Press

there are some days where i have more people mad at me online than my ancestors would have had mad at them in their entire lives. there is functionally no difference between this and being cursed by a witch
@cait.bsky.social

Serious question: What is the non-sociopathic policy argument for eliminating FEMA?
David Roberts @volts.wtf

It’s so funny that conservatives and billionaires have convinced themselves  their ideas are unfairly discriminated against—even though almost all media in the US is corporate owned. Meanwhile, Marxism is so genuinely absent from US discourse that most Americans can’t even define it.
Max Berger

I will never not be bitter over the fact that Minneapolis had a massive street car system in the first half of the 1900s that ultimately got shut down in the 1950s.
Audrey, friend of eggbug @audreydog.online

Eternally ashamed of my gender and my generation:


David Roberts @volts.wtf

ICE is now asserting it's a federal crime for bystanders to request that masked people in plain clothes show identification as they're handcuffing folks and stuffing them into unmarked vans.
Jèf Uphoff

Another frame constricting our imagination is the belief that if one names a problem one must also have a solution to propose. This incentivizes ignoring problems or falling back on cliches.
Jeff Sharlet
 
You can’t say criminals don’t deserve due process when due process is the thing that decides if they're criminals. Otherwise you're just kidnapping people you don't like.
God @godpod.bsky.social

NEW: Trump on Wednesday quietly pardoned Paul Walczak, a healthcare executive sentenced just 2 weeks ago for tax crimes. His mother and sister had played a role in an unrelated  scheme to publicize Ashley Biden’s stolen diary ahead of the 2020 election.
Ken Vogel

Let’s start with the basics:


George Takei

Vance's Easter visit to Rome clogged its streets with a 40-vehicle entourage. He also demanded the Coliseum be closed so he and his family could tour it alone. Tourists who properly booked slots in advance got screwed. He's apparently the first to make that demand. Then he didn't bother to show up.
Radley Balko

It's not just Vance – the sense of unearned entitlement is a defining feature of this administration. People who know their careers are built on a grift respond by self-righteously demanding deference and respect. "Did you even say thank you?"
Don Moynihan

Since Trump told us that we have millions of dangerous criminals here, it's really pathetic that he's wasting taxpayer dollars deporting a 2 year old.
Dean Baker

It is not lost on me that a man who attended the funeral of Pope Francis also deported a child with metastatic cancer, innocent people to a gulag, and feels not one shred of  remorse about either.
Anthea Butler

Reminder that words matter. You can’t “deport” a US citizen. You might be kidnapping, disappearing, exiling, expelling, illegally removing, etc., but you’re not “deporting” a US citizen.
Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social

Steel yourself for the “that toddler with cancer was no angel” takes that are coming
Costa Samaras

Aside – Has anyone asked him a question in the last two months that doesn't start with a preliminary "HUHH?!?" before he can actually answer the question?
The Wet Tank Tops

Mendocino Coast rhododendrons on a beautiful drizzly Friday evening:


Megan P @megawatts.bsky.social

According to three members of Congress, Rumeysa Ozturk has been repeatedly denied access to her lawyer, refused asthma medication despite attacks, forced to endure extreme temperatures, and denied religious accommodations. Her ‘crime’? An oped in a school newspaper.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb

The Trump administration is literally kidnapping and torturing people.
Judd Taylor

Under German law, if a person is determined to have worked at a death camp, that individual can be charged as an accessory to murder for every single person ever killed in that camp during their time there. A 94 year old man was convicted in 2016 for 170,000 murders. Just something to think about.
Alice @nolas-socks.bsky.social

Two things are true. This is the country we have always lived in. This is what it has always been like for millions of people. It's nevertheless worse now.
Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social

Donald Trump turned due process into a four-year circus and then as President decided others weren’t worthy of it.
altNOAA

Shanghai-to-Beijing high-speed rail, 50 trips a day, takes 4 hours and 15 minutes, and runs roughly the same distance as NYC to Chicago or Seattle to San Francisco or Atlanta to Houston. Construction began in 2008 and was completed by 2011. (Can you imagine?)
Bill Lindeke

"waste, fraud and abuse" is one of the great pieces of propaganda in the last 25 years. It's astonishing how the mainstream media just repeats it over and over again with absolutely no seeming awareness that it's just propaganda used to attack the social safety net.
Bryan @bryanformhals.com

PhD Timeline:


Randall Munroe @xkcd.com

Texas bookstores erupt over a new censorship bill that would allow a parent to sue them if their child reads a book with a sex scene or LGBTQ+ characters. So-called "harmful to minors" laws are being introduced across the country to force censorship of libraries, schools, bookstores and websites.
Mike Stabile

New NYT/Siena Poll:
—Trump's approval rating is 42% vs. 54% disapprove
—59% of voters think Trump's 2nd term in office is "scary"
—54% say Trump is "exceeding the powers available to him"
—Trump has negative approval in all policy areas

SIENA POLL
Yonah Freemark

It’s pretty hilarious how unless your baby is clad head to toe in pink and purple (and no other colors) everyone just assumes it’s a boy
Ned Resnikoff

I've ended up on cradle catholic tiktok and the overwhelming vibe is : evangelical converts are in it for the aesthetics. Exact quote: i get it it's beautiful churches very aesthetically pleasing,  you know, coming from people worshiping in shopping malls
Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com

i feel like trumpcoin, and the fact that we never talk about it, is pretty emblematic of the way the press refuses to grapple with trump. it exists in order to pay him bribes. it expressly gives you political access. it does not pretend to have a licit motive. it was a one-day scandal.
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social
 
Let's say Harris won last year and Vance was holding 10k-20k person rallies where he railed against left-wing "oligarchy." Would the common wisdom be that this was crazy and a waste of time? Or would we be seeing NYT op-eds and A1s about what "oligarchy" is and why the GOP base was on fire about it?
Dave Weigel

When someone is that bad at their ostensible goal, it's good to think about how their stated goal might not really be their goal. DOGE has never been about "saving money." It has been about preventing government from working.
Jonathan Cohn

It's only in a broken unhappy nation that you have to think about the president many times a day. On top of everything else, narcissists are just...exhausting
Bill McKibben

The fertility rate has been declining in the US for over a decade, and we’re currently below the ‘replacement rate’. But Americans are still having more babies than the Europeans and Chinese:


Steve Rattner

Federal agents did not have a warrant when they arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student who had been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, according to court documents.
The Washington Post

Maddow: 88% of the country says no, no, he cannot defy a supreme court ruling. Only 9% say yes he can. And you know, it's not the same thing. But I should mention that 9% is also the proportion of Americans who told yougov this week that they have a favorable view of the black plague
Acyn

How can someone who deliberately posted classified material on Signal — including to family members and a journalist — lecture people about leaks? Plus they are career professionals whereas he’s a career clown. He has lost any vestige of moral authority or integrity that he may have had.
Dr Keith Wilson

BREAKING: The Interior Department just used a fake “energy emergency” to greenlight gas and mining projects on public lands. It’s a lie. There is no energy emergency. This is a giveaway to big oil.
Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com

Today Trump ordered DOJ to investigate ActBlue, which is payment processing platform for basically every progressive organization in the US. Trump is ordering DOJ to disrupt the opposition party. Yesterday Trump personally got $10s of millions in cash from untraceable foreigners in new crypto scheme
David Rothschild @davmicrot.bsky.social

People sometimes ask "what are the crimes" and let me tell y'all, as a lawyer, that intentionally copying, altering, destroying, or disrupting government computer systems is super-duper illegal if you don't have a spotless paper trail authorizing it, which none of these DOGE people do.
Max Kennerly

my endorsement for any democratic presidential candidate who promises to send the entire DOGE team to prison
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

For Easter, a Roman metal brooch in the shape of a rabbit (or hare), with traces of its original enamel decoration still adding a splash of colour. Animal-themed jewelry was popular in the Roman world, especially brooches:


Dr Jo Ball @drjeball.bsky.social

Americans (likely voters, to be precise) support impeachment by 52% in our most recent survey. This includes 55% of independents. And the plot thickens when you look at how they responded to other questions...
Anat Shenker-Osorio @anatosaurus.bsky.social

People keep voting for sociopaths because what they want from government is impossible and only liars would promise it to them
bdonnelly

Well, no surprise here: A new study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI) found that women are 2X as likely to die during pregnancy in states with abortion bans. Twice as likely. Meanwhile, maternal mortality in pro-choice states fell 21%.
Jessica Valenti

It’s almost like putting politicians in charge of women’s healthcare was…bad actually?
Aubrey Hirsch

Maybe before we start talking about whether AI systems deserve "human rights" we do a better job of guaranteeing those rights to, well, all humans.
Peter Gleick

make america healthy again is all about eating more fast food and making lists of queer and autistic people but does not include cheaper or free healthcare which is interesting
onion person @junlper.beer

biggest divide in american politics is not between left or right. its between people who believe adulthood requires self-discipline and those who do not
@aelkus.bsky.social

As we build more pedestrian spaces, I am begging American DOTs to learn Row of Bollard Technology™. Stop making excuses. Figure out how to install and maintain it. Don't wait for someone to be killed or injured:


Qagggy!

I'd say more precisely that we have people going all in on the idea that self-discipline is about having what it takes to dunk your head in a bowl of ice water every morning rather than having what it takes to treat someone different from you like a human being.
Osita Nwanevu

Gandhi listed the sins as:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
Paul Lee @paulytheism.bsky.social

I discuss this with students by pointing out the enduring gender gap in crime, which doesn’t (for some reason) lead us to deny due process to *men* on the grounds they’re an extra-dangerous group. As it shouldn’t! But in our quest to identify and incapacitate problem groups, it’s never them.
Roco Foucault

When Fox smears Abrego Garcia as MS-13 while citing a murder committed by a different migrant, they're only making the case for giving him due process stronger. The whole point of due process is to determine who is guilty of such crimes and who isn't!
Greg Sargent

U.S. could face millions of measles cases over the next 25 years if vaccination rates drop 10 percent, according to new research.
Kins @kinsleyayay.bsky.social

Trump’s 100 day job approval polling is worse than any other president in the last 50 years by a minimum -10. It’s incredible that Republicans and business leaders continue to fall all over themselves to appease such a historically incompetent and epically unpopular leader.
feminist next door @emrazz.bsky.social

Number of elected Republicans standing up for the fundamental principle of due process for all:  0.0.
The Massachusetts Spy

‘Bee-eautiful’ gold pendant from Bronze Age Malia, Crete. Usually said to represent a pair of bees placing a drop of honey into a honeycomb. A delightful piece of Minoan jewellery inspired by nature 3,800 years ago! Heraklion Archaeological Museum:


Alison Fisk

Toxicologist here! Eliminating dyes will improve the health of zero Americans. Current synthetic food dyes are not causing health problems, and are often times used because they are actually safer than natural food dyes. Reminder that guns are the #1 cause of death of children but we are going to ban food dyes.
Ryan Marino, MD

Guns are the #1 cause of childhood death in the United States; cars are #2; and we have increasing evidence that air pollution in childhood might be a major source of early death (and dementia) in adulthood. The Trump admin is cancelling and attacking the best efforts to limit each of those
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

"they are going to end cancer research and kill its top scientists" is the kind of thing that would get you laughed out of the writer's room on saturday morning cartoons and it is literally what's happening
Micah @rincewind.run

No transphobe has ever been able to explain to me why a man would pretend to be a woman in order to abuse and harass women in women-only spaces when cis men abuse and harasses us in the street, in our workplaces, in our homes and literally everywhere else without consequence
Charlotte @charlottor.bsky.social

my plan to get people to start having more kids? make climate change worse. abolish the department of education. also milk is poison
Ahhhhh @nerdjpg.com

Any measure to “persuade” young women to get married and get pregnant that isn’t “because it makes them happy” is a measure to coerce, entrap, and control. It’s rape culture, and it’s dehumanizing as fuck.
feminist next door @emrazz.bsky.social

Our goldenseal plant is finally old enough to flower! And not all of them even flower:


splodinvark

A thought for all the city council members making decisions on bike lanes and parking: If after saying, "I'm all for safety" your next word is, "but" — consider that you may not be "all for safety."
Warren Wells, AICP

Still wrapping my head around a President with 34 felony convictions snatching people off the street if they have a speeding ticket on their record.
Schooley

It's like people in this administration read Leviathan and thought government should also make life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
David Ho

"While anyone can repost an article, researching and writing is hard work that requires time and money. Before you deride 'mainstream media,' note that it is *no longer the mainstream.* It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficulty." –Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Jeff Sharlet

i think it is bad that among the most influential people in government are the monomaniacal adherents of a millenarian tech cult
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Really need journalists to push back on bullshit [like Homan saying Abrego Garcia] "got more due process than Laken Riley got." When they say this, just ask them point blank: "Are you saying that because one Latino man committed a murder, another Latino man deserves a life sentence? Do you think all Latino men interchangeable?"
Radley Balko

If Laken Riley had been murdered by an abusive boyfriend, which happens about 3 times every day, MAGAs wouldn’t even know her name.
Bob-Parker54

Or in a mass shooting. Or from a complicated pregnancy.
kristibjork.bsky.social

“Experts estimate that drones of all types now contribute to about 70% to 80% of military casualties on both sides.”
Bill Lindeke

White folks commit most of the crimes in the USA. Just to be safe, maybe we should round up white folks and send them off to prisons in foreign countries without a hearing. If u think this is absurd, it's no different than doing the same to folks with brown skin, tattoos, or who speak Spanish.
The March Hare @therealmarchhare.bsky.social

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength":


Alex Steffen

So basically our core biomedical agenda has gone from cancer and heart disease research with major investments in alzheimers/dementia research to jacking up the sperm count of teenage males and a new wild goose for the 'hidden causes' of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

Someone on Threads noticed you can type any random sentence into Google, then add “meaning” afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase **you just made up**.
Greg Jenner

The Trump admin is demanding universities institute anti-mask laws for student protesters, holding the schools’ funding as a ransom, while sending secret police in balaclavas to disappear immigrants
Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias.bsky.social

Trump placidly presiding over the largest measles outbreak in 25 years, with no end in sight.
Rachel Maddow

In the late 19th century and before widespread pasteurization, many children under the age of five died of TB from the milk of infected cows. In the 1930s when Iowa mandated tubercular testing of cows, farmers staged riots to prevent scientists entering farms, in some cases prompting martial law
@scoopsstp.bsky.social

I'm listening to argument in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the conservative Christian attack on books with LGBTQ characters in elementary schools, and it is impossible to overstate how contemptuous Sam Alito is of the idea of treating LGBTQ people with respect. He is a rank homophobe. Nancy Mace in a robe.
Jay Willis

As part of the GOP effort to heat up the world beyond survivability, the US Commerce Department has announced plans to impose tariffs of up to 3,521% on imports of solar panels from Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Goal: Crush universities
Need a policy tool: Civil Rights Act Title VI gives tools to stop funding to universities if they violate someone's civil rights.
Need a violation to allege: Use the Jews!
Using us as a wedge to attack free speech & inquiry does not protect us.
Aaron Sojourner

And it doesn’t even work this way! Title VI only allows revoking the funds of the discriminatory program being federally funded, not the entire institution. And it requires due process
before funds can be halted: a charge, presenting evidence, opportunity to defend and appeal, etc.
David Brody
 
Two headlines in the New York Times today:


StrictlyChristo

If I see another article about birth rates that refuses to grapple with the way having children systematically disadvantages women I swear to god. There is no mystery. Stop pretending there is. We’ve got to do away with credulity for nonsense.
Deva Woodly @devawo.bsky.social

Of the people who have ever lived to age 65, 2/3 are alive today! We've added many years to our lives, not enough life to those years! Some cities are great: Barcelona. Olders go out, are AND feel SAFE. Laugh. Walk. Bike. Chat. Play. Are ALIVE! Cities should make it easier to live Older, Healthier, Happier.
Gil Penalosa

The conservative movement has turned against reality on every scientific issue of our time, from gun violence to climate change to epidemiology. If campuses are ideologically homogenous, it's not because academia has ostracized conservatives. It's because conservatives have ostracized academia. When Republicans take power do they expand "viewpoint diversity"? No. They purge scientists, delete data and promote their own mediocre minds. If you support Trump you are signaling membership in a movement that *hates* science, science is not obligated to pretend otherwise.
Michael Hobbes

This is deranged. Jan. 6 defendants were repped by one of the best public defender offices in the U.S. They were more likely to be released pretrial & got comparatively light sentences. SCOTUS threw out a bunch of convictions, which almost never happens. They got gold-plated due process!


Radley Balko

The MAGA rage won’t be confined to foreigners. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow. It’s never far from “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” to “the enemy within.”
Thomas Zimmer

Vance didn't convert to Roman Catholicism, he converted to the American Protestant idea of Roman Catholicism. Viewed through that lens he kind of makes sense
Jer @jerandom.bsky.social

Trump and Musk kill Americorps. Why waste money helping people?
Diane Ravitch

These are the things my mom texts me:


Miranda Yaver

When troops get killed because of Hegseth, no one will know since they will bury the story.
Carmela @carmelacruz.bsky.social

I think the only thing more pathetic than being a fascist is being a fascist nepo baby of another fascist
Kate Barrett @thewaether.bsky.social

Touching grass is not enough I need to get stuck in a hollow log
lukelukeluke

Alito releasing an opinion on Easter showing that if he had his druthers he would happily allow the regime to imprison and rendition political undesirables to foreign prisons is exactly the kind of Christian I believe him to be.
Haydon @haydonmp.bsky.social

Will always bother me that Christianity took a holiday celebrating joyous sex and common fecundity and made it into a holiday about a torturous death and esoteric metaphysics. An interesting and creative conversion but a loss in many ways too.
Leah McElrath

I am tired of people acting like Vice-President Kamala Harris didn’t have targeted, pragmatic policies to address just about every damn thing people seem to be mad about.
Eric Lee @ericleeacts.bsky.social

They are very concerned:


Rob @stpaulbikescum.bsky.social

If Jesus had focused more on kitchen table issues and less on unpopular outcasts like lepers and prostitutes, he might have won more support from white working-class Judeans.
New York Times Pitchbot

“When somebody gets pushed onto a subway track in New York City, that is national news,” Litman says. But “on any day there are people who are injured or killed in road rage incidents, and that is local news.”
Will Jones

Some people who never had a real problem in their lives got annoyed by some college kids and decided they must embark on a campaign to save civilization. Now masked men armed to the teeth are going to raid churches on Easter. Congrats guys! Amazing fucking work you did there.
The Alternate Historian

I really have a huge problem with the use of “DEI rollback” because it implies that DEI has made significant impact and there’s any kind of argument to suggest imbalance. But all we have is hurt white feelings and delusion.
Frankie Huang @ourobororoboruo.bsky.social

April 19, 1775 (1 a.m.): Capt. John Parker of the Lexington militia receives word that the British regulars are marching toward the town on their way to Concord. The 46-year-old farmer, mechanic and veteran of the French and Indian War quickly assembles about 130 fighters on the town green. Parker, 46 is "a stout, large framed man of medium height," with a long face—and ailing from tuberculosis that will leave him dead in a matter of months.
250 Years Ago News

WSJ: No confidence. Worst April since the Great Depression:


Howard French @hofrench.bsky.social

Meeting with the victim of one crime to rationalize keeping a man accused of no crime in prison is an evil thing to do.
Patrick Chovanec

Dystopia is the AARP advising older Americans about how to live in a police state
Don Moynihan

I am old enough to remember when a movie character said "PAPERS PLEASE" it was a universally understood signifier of an evil regime
Tom Tomorrow

What if Elon is the first autistic person RFK has ever actually met and that’s why he assumes we don’t pay taxes or go on dates
@gonebabygone.bsky.social

If you’re changing the definition of human rights, it means you plan on violating people’s human rights:


Melanie D’Arrigo @darrigomelanie.bsky.social

The government isn't doing universities a favor by channeling federal funding through them. It's using a private entity to realize public goals, to accomplish things that benefit the entire nation. You'd think conservatives who call for privatization all the time would grasp that.
Kevin M. Kruse

Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants. the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever. they aren’t going into universities’ endowments. they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research
Maya Sen

I, for one, think the median congressional Democrat should be to the left of David Brooks.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

Reminder that Americans can sign up for Canadian food recall alerts at the website below. We have pretty rigorous standards and share a lot of the same food as the US, so it’s a good back up option for when the FDA decides not to disclose (or for if trump cuts their funding)
Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social

Shark Tank ranks among the most tone-deaf TV Shows on the air right now. People pitching billionaires for small amounts of funding for things mostly made in China.
quick13

Thirsty Iris:


Rick Smith @rick8437.bsky.social

A personal pet peeve: Politicians and car owners who talk about “cyclists” as though they’re a distinct human species. In reality, urban cyclists are just regular folks who decided to travel by bike. Many, many more people will make that decision if a city provides high-quality infrastructure.
David Zipper

“Constitutional crisis” is really not an adequate term to describe an aggressive effort to undo every government achievement of the past century
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

The CFPB is one of those things where like, virtually every single person in the United States would support its existence if they were told the truth about what it is/does. Or used to do, I guess.
Sam Biddle

The remarkable resilience being shown by some of our judges and courts just shines a spotlight on the cowardly silence of the legislative branch.
Peter Gleick

I really would like people to not focus on 2026, but to realize that the way things are going in America, there won't be elections in 2026, or 2028.
Anthea Butler

oh there aren’t any true fascists
well but there are so few fascists
well but they aren’t ALL fascists
how can you say “fascist” about millions of people
ok they do talk fascist but they can’t act fascist
ok maybe they can but I’m sure they won’t
you saying “fascist” made them be fascist
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

What the Republicans are doing is PROPAGANDA, not messaging.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Republicans talking about cities with racist disdain doesn’t spawn any media think pieces but if anyone from a city questions the motives of a rural voter, get them to a fainting couch.
Dave Zaffrann

Bob Dylan on the bus:


Chris Steller

At every turn they're removing all the safeguards -- *all* of them. Disease, cybersecurity, financial and banking protections, housing, disability, inequity, social security, environmental, alliances with other nations, all of this and everything else. A willful and cruel dismantling of government.
Chuck Wendig

“People call [the antiscience movement] ‘misinformation’ or ‘the infodemic’ as tho it’s just random junk out there on the Internet or social media, and it’s not— it’s organized, it’s well-financed, and it’s politically motivated.” —Dr. Peter Hotez
Brent Toderian

Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, saw his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier. Rather than calling for vengeance, since immigrating to the U.S., he has delivered 100+ lectures extolling empathy as key to a resolution in the Middle East. He is a practicing Buddhist, he said.
Jennie Coughlin

JK Rowling, like Musk, demonstrates why the ultra-wealthy cannot be allowed to be so: because they use their wealth to buy the world they want to live in
Abby IRL @popeguilty.bsky.social

“The human being is not an enemy. The enemy is fear, segregation and ignorance.” The words of Mohsen Mahdawi, arrested at his citizenship interview.  The values he expresses are what the USA was supposed to be about, pre-Trump.
Karrie Jacobs @karrieurbanist.bsky.social

People love to talk about how renewable energy will leave coal miners (and thus Appalachia) behind, ignoring the ways they’re already being left behind by the same people who oppose green energy. The “regulatory state” is vital for mine workers and their families.
Emily M

yes, we should build on federal land, but the best way to do that is by building on top of VA parking lots, post offices, and other federal land in already-built up areas rather than just going deeper into exurban sprawl. here’s the VA parking lot in the Bronx just a short walk from the subway:


Sam @samd.bsky.social

At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if we got an executive order announcing a “purge”
Mary Annaïse Heglar

it's hard to find a motivation for DOGE other than 'hatred of the good.' these are bad people fundamentally envious or un-understanding of the idea that you might work or give for others, and attempting to punish it.
BeijingPalmer

imagine how fox would cover it if the biggest obama donor led a baby-making cult
Oliver Willis

Elon using the social media platform he owns to DM random women with the promises of financial rewards to have his children so he can create a compound filled with women in Texas is the sort of thing that sounds like it should be a QAnon conspiracy instead of being a real story from WSJ.
James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social

As I’ve been saying for years, Trump’s pronouns are me/me/me/me/me/me/me.  Everything is always about him.  He has no consideration or empathy for anyone else, and no principles or values other than what’s best for him.
George Conway

If they’re arguing that Harvard hasn’t done enough “in the public interest” to deserve tax exempt status, wait until they get a look at evangelical megachurches!
Kevin M. Kruse

nothing says Make America Healthy Again like stopping the data collection of drug side effects
Rachel Cohen

Remember when only a few Republicans were actively working for Russia? I miss those days.
Gary Bunker @andysocial.com

how the white house press corps hasn't lit up karoline leavitt is beyond me. they're going to replace you with brett swastika of the keto-rahowa podcast at the drop of a hat anyway, you might as well earn it instead of taking it like little worms, writhing in the most prestigious career filth
muscular baby jeb lund @mobute.bsky.social

I went to the Tate Modern yesterday. In the Rothko room with all the Serious Art Connoisseurs there was a ~5 year old kid who walked up to each painting, pointed at it and shouted 'RECTANGLE' at each one in turn, then left the room:


Jon Walmsley @arghzombies.com

In 90 years of social security, we have never had a check bounce or be late, but they want you to believe the system is broken.
Bennie Thompson

It works. The government here largely works. Because we are so spoiled by how well it works, we are letting a fool convince us it is broken.
Tressie McMillan Cottom

Now there's a memorable stat! "Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined."
Jesse D. Jenkins

When American citizens have to worry about returning to their own country from travel abroad, you ain’t living in a free republic.
Tea Pain @teapainusa.bsky.social

The ridiculous part of Trump's boneheaded effort to reindustrialize America is that without unions, manufacturing jobs are not good jobs
Dean Baker

What have Republicans done for the rest us? Defunded our schools and roads and hospitals and post offices and social safety nets…and for what? To send tax cuts to billionaires. Wake up, friends. They hate us. They laugh at us. The loathe us.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

Someone learned a lesson:


Oregon @oregonthedm.bsky.social

It is time for Democrats to go on the attack, and take away tax-exempt status for every church that unabashedly campaigned for Trump. Take off the gloves, start to destroy the opposing institutions that fund the fascist movement.
Anil Dash

The President of Harvard (student body of 21,278 in 2023) was made to resign over a plagiarism accusation that made front page news. The arrest and indictment of Pastor Robert Morris of Gateway Dallas Church (weekly attendance 25,805 in 2023) for sexually assaulting a 12 year old did not.
Queerhawk @alwaysadorecats.bsky.social

Basic Netflix—$100/year
Spotify Premium—$150/year
Xbox Game Pass—$180/year
NOAA—$21/year for the average US taxpayer
Elizabeth Smith @eeeeelizzzzz.bsky.social

The way Bukele was treated in the oval vs. Zelenskyy is all you need to know.
Karly Kingsley

Defamation law applies to press secretaries too, yes?
Erin Maye Quade

They all laughed as they spoke of an untried man, tortured in a cell with no way out, no hope of justice. From the comfort of a gilded room, wrapped in luxury and power, they laughed. These are not men. These are monsters.
Miss Cami


Chris Hauck

Good news moment: the fruit and nut trees I planted in the last major global meltdown ('20) are starting to bear in time for the 2025 global meltdown
Sarah Taber

The year is 2025. Your right to control your own body has been replaced by incredible breakthroughs in female space tourism.
L O L G O P

I am once again begging people to realize that the law is words on paper and is not self executing. "That's illegal" is not and has never been synonymous with "that's impossible" or "that can't be done." "That's illegal" means "you might get in trouble for that depending on who you are.
Sheryl Weikal (The Leftist Lawyer)

It's genuinely hard to express to sort of normal not politically plugged in non-lawyers *how* lawless the Trump administration is, and I think that's some part of the problem. You sound like you're hyperventilating, but it's just a flat description of what is going on.
Raffi Melkonian @rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social

Remember that Trump’s own undocumented workers — oh yeah, his businesses have hired and exploited the same folks he’s demonized for political gain — paid more in taxes than he did
Gabe Ortíz @tusk81.bsky.social

The right: take over universities, rewrite curriculum, force everyone to study christofascist ideology.
The left: STEM STEM STEM (but only the stuff you can apply we actually don’t care about abstract math lol that’s practically poetry)
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Don't forget business
Dr. Cara Berg Powers @clbergpowers.bsky.social

I will go to my grave believing that the undergraduate business degree is the most one of the most damaging things to happen to higher education.
John Halloran @profhalloran.bsky.social

Once widespread, smoking is now uncommon in Great Britain:


Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev

"These guys are so clearly guilty of terrorism we couldn't run the risk of basic due process." Sure, sure.
Kevin M. Kruse

This administration is one step away from conducting drone strikes on people in the US.
David Ho

Some stats from 100 days in on congestion pricing:
- Complaints about car-honking are down 70%
- The Holland Tunnel has 65% fewer delays at rush hour;  time to get thru it is down 48%
- 6 million fewer cars
- Half as many traffic-related injuries
- 1.5 million more visitors to BIDs year over year
Amanda Litman

scammers are using LLMs to take up all the slots in community college courses in San Diego as part of a financial aid scam. Hard to see a way this doesn't eventually kill remote learning for these colleges. Huge deadweight loss generated by LLMs.
mtsw

“We are going to deport Italians with tattoos of tribal symbols or a family member’s name on suspicion of ties to The Mafia” would be just as credible, which is to say not at all
Hayes Brown

Trump ordered his DOJ to investigate 2 innocent people who criticized him. That is impeachable.
He has kidnapped people from American Soil with no due process. That is impeachable.
He is defying courts. That is impeachable.
There is nothing about this administration that is constitutional.
Common Sense Matters

I'm gonna need all the blue states to stop focusing on whether or not Canada still likes YOU because YOU are a good one and start fucking recognizing this *entire* country is going off a cliff. No, Canada does not like any of us! AS THEY SHOULD NOT! leave them alone, we got our own shit to focus on!
Bree @mostlybree.kitrocha.com


Bill Garrison

Harvard is very rich and they aren't the only institution pushing back against trump. Michigan State has been pushing back a lot but they aren't "fancy" so they get less attention.
Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com

DOGE is a criminal conspiracy to defraud the people of the United States
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I will say this - EVERYONE with power seems to be desperately hoping that unpopularity does the work that consequences need to do
Andrew Tobolowsky @andytobo.bsky.social

Trump pretends to love coal but his administration has been systematically attacking coal miners by slashing health programs, killing regulations, and closing mine safety offices. Meanwhile, one in 20 Appalachian coal miners has the most severe form of black lung
Kim Kelly

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
Sam Halpert

I gotta say, “women are going to space” sounds a lot nicer than “the ultra rich are taking hyper-polluting joyrides to space while the planet descends into climate chaos”
Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social

Legal permanent resident of the U.S., showing up to apply for citizenship, with no allegations of criminal activity, is arrested and detained by masked police. This is fascism, and that is not a word I use lightly.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

What do these corporations have in common?
Netflix
Ford
Tesla
T-Mobile
Duke Energy
DISH Network
Metlife
Dominion Energy
United States Steel
In recent years, they all paid their execs more than they paid in taxes. This is what a corporate-rigged system looks like.
Robert Reich

Pretty striking that Trump and Republicans are prepared to destroy our university system, ostensibly in the name of combatting antisemitism, but when there is a blatant act of antisemitism, threatening the life of a Jewish governor, Trump can't bring himself to say a word.
Dean Baker

🚀🚀


Jon Cooper

““Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because...of regulations.This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods, the water that you drink, how you get to work safely and whether you’re safe in your workplace.”
PM2.5 Kills ~9 Million People Worldwide Annually @tkovach.bsky.social

The simple lesson is – however bad you think it will get, you are wrong. Why? Because you are a normal human and they are criminally insane, deranged psychopaths.
Andy Fraser

Someone once said NextDoor is the social network for dogs if they could type. It’s always “what’s that noise?” and “who’s that stranger?” which is exactly what I imagine my dogs would text other neighborhood dogs.
Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social

We've reached the point in our descent into fascism where the Jewish governor's house getting firebombed on Passover by a guy trying to bash his head in with a sledgehammer is overshadowed by the story of the President saying he wants to build foreign gulags for US citizens.
Max Berger

I demand viewpoint diversity in the nation's police forces. From now on, every city has to hire 40% liberals.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

We traded Europe for a guy that builds concentration camps for profit:


Ron Filipkowski