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.

A Union Card Christmas

I just saw this cartoon on Twitter, thanks to Steve Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times:

It was created by John Miller Baer, a North Dakota civil engineer and agriculturalist who was also a labor cartoonist. He was a member of Congress from 1917 to 1921 and part of an organization called the Nonpartisan League, back when there were populist organizations that realized corporations were the problem, rather than other working people.

Happy Christmas to those who keep it.

A Lesson from 1890

I've mentioned Curt Brown's Minnesota history column before, which runs in the Sunday Star Tribune.

Today's subject was a woman named Mary Weishar, who murdered her husband Frank in 1880 in the southern part of the state. She was convicted and served about nine years, though it sounds like he was a terrible person (at least he was a former mercenary soldier and a "notorious thief," and I am imagining reasons from their home life why she may have felt a need to do it).

But even so, I wouldn't be writing about the column except for one thing: The oldest child of Mary and Frank Weishar, also named Frank, was 10 years old when his father died and his mother went to prison. Despite that, as an adult

[he] became a leading citizen.

He founded the Todd County Tribune, farmed successfully, sired 13 kids, became active in Nonpartisan League politics, served the township and school board, and was an officer at the local creamery. When he died at 60 in 1930, 600 people attended his funeral.

That made me think about how people sometimes think biology is destiny. In this case, that would mean a kid whose father was a mercenary and a thief and whose mother was a murderer would necessarily turn out badly no matter what.

But despite the trauma that young Frank must have lived through, and his implied genes, he became a more exemplary person than many others. Who knows what happened in his life experience as a young person that may have helped him?

Human genetics are not simplistically determined, and when you include the spectrum of environmental variables and human interactions possible, the range of outcomes broadens further.

I know that many people would have written the child Frank off as a lost cause back in 1890, just as they write off all sorts of children today. He stands out as a case of how wrong that kind of thinking can be.
__

Brown's column about Mary Weishar and her son Frank is based on research carried out at the Minnesota History Center by Bruce Taber, their descendant.

Against the Current, in a Bookshop

Ah, used bookstores. One of my favorites in recent years is called Against the Current, and it's in a little storefront on Grand Avenue next to the Macalester College campus. It's perfect for someone who can get overwhelmed easily, because it's small but packed with interesting books and adjacent to other places you need to go, so you can pop in and see what's new.

Covid had put a dent in my visiting until yesterday, when I found the store open once again when I happened to be nearby.

I came away with photos of two 20th-century cover exemplars and four books for my collection. First the two covers:

I was drawn by the cover lettering and the color, but I now know what the Nonpartisan League was, and that it still exists (sort of), and was the reason North Dakota has a state-owned bank. I'm still wondering what its secret purposes were, though.

I was also attracted to this book by the lettering used for the words "Without Practice":

As far as the content goes, I thought it was a joke or a parody, but then I saw that the author had another book that was also about golf, so I guess not! It may not be readable even if you click to enlarge, but the Post-It note reads: "$150 – $200 to $400 online." And that's no joke: 1940 editions of this book, like this one, start at those prices and go up to over a thousand dollars.

Here are the books I brought home. Tim O'Brien was in the window. I haven't read this one:

I loaned a copy of a different Jackson Lears book about the history of advertising to someone back when I was in graduate school and I never got it back. While this isn't the same book, I feel a bit restored:

A classic by the late local thinker and writer Jay Walljasper:

Finally, as I was checking out, my eye fell on this:

After my recent reading of Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses, it jumped into my hand.

 

Christmas Eve of Destruction

Over at The Transportist, transportation engineer and all-around great thinker David Levinson has been sharing the transcripts of a long interview he did recently on the future of transportation. That's one of my pet issues and I've been reading them as they appear each day (today is day 5).

But meanwhile, Donald Trump is tweeting about starting the arms race again. He's ably demonstrating why anyone who voted for him has clearly forgotten (or never knew) the fear of nuclear war we lived under in many decades of the 20th century, but particularly during the early 1980s. Yesterday I read (reread) Tom Shales's Washington Post review of the 1983 TV movie The Day After, and it brought it all back.

Will any of us be here to see if Levinson's predictions about driverless cars come true? I'm not so sure at the moment.

Here's a bit of what Twitter has to say about Trump and nuclear weapons.

Walking in a nuclear winter wonderland.
lyz lenz

The thing I'm terrified of is him getting to a point where he feels like he has to fire a nuke or seem "weak."
Josh Barro

One reason the nuclear arms race ended: it almost sparked global annihilation in 1983, spooking the US and USSR. (with link to this Vox story)
Max Fisher

Hard to process that the next president is both a conscienceless threat to the republic and also a heartbreakingly weak and sad broken soul.
David Frum

The global warming we should be worried about is the global warming caused by NUCLEAR WEAPONS in the hands of crazy or incompetent leaders!
Donald J. Trump (tweeted on May 7, 2014)

Obamacare is too expensive but building up the power to destroy the earth a kazillion times over is a better use of taxpayer money.
Courtney Milan

Trump wants to expand our nuclear arsenal. I think of my aunt and baby cousin, found burnt in a ditch in Hiroshima. These weapons must go.
George Takei

Boomers just want us to relive their childhood of hiding under desks.
mikesonn

Oh, and also meanwhile, a nonpartisan group called the Electoral Integrity Project has declared North Carolina is no longer a democracy, based on objective criteria used to assess countries around the world:

North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

The screaming inside my head is pretty loud right now. Hard to concentrate enough to write this, but when I think about trying to not think about it, to distract myself with something happy and maybe seasonal, I remember this tweet by a guy named Josh Kalven who wrote about the term "internal emigre" in the age of President 46%. His father, Jamie Kalven wrote these words:

One of the dangers is that people will instead become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillments of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called “internal emigres.”

That is certainly tempting at a time like this: to live one’s life in the wholly private realm, enjoying the company of friends, good food and drink, the pleasures of literature and music, and so on. Privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore.

Thanks (both ironically and seriously) to Jay Smooth for calling my attention to Kalven's tweet.

BlueSky November 2024, Part 2

This, Part 2 of BlueSky for November 2024, begins on November 7, just after the previous round-up left off, and goes through November 19 or so. (Here is Part 1.) 

That date range means it includes "takes" on the election outcome, though I tried to avoid those as much as possible because it was too early. Most of the posts are about Trump's various cabinet and other high-level appointments, or about anticipated effects of policies he or they will implement. As always, the remainder are on my usual topics, with some random silliness and "timeline cleansing" thrown in.

Some of the images that are not related to the election or current political situation have been moved up or down for better visual balance.) Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

__

It’s remarkable that the events of the 2019 Samoa measles outbreak aren’t more widely known:


Adam Kucharski

The entire campaign was Trump going "I am going to screw you over" and voters going "he doesn't mean it." Meanwhile, Harris was saying, "I am going to help you" and they all went, "she doesn't mean it." No fucking idea how you win elections or run a country like this.
Michael Hobbes

When Weber talked about “charismatic authority,” he straight up said there’s some unknowable magic about those kinds of leaders and that seemed very silly to me reading it in 2005.
Compounds Plural

I don’t know how real this male loneliness epidemic shit is but I know it’s a lot easier to have and maintain diverse and fulfilling friendships when you’re not a bigoted piece of shit.
@knilirabaj.bsky.social

Gratifying to see a gay/trans-baiting SOB like Eric Hovde [candidate in Wisconsin] piss away $20 million out of his pocket and get left out of the GOP Senate majority.
Vic Thorstenson

I don’t want to hear anything about where the Harris campaign went wrong. There is literally nothing they could have done to overcome *waves hands about* this. “This” being white supremacy.
Erica M @ericamauter.bsky.social

We are still not going back.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

This front porch is seared into my brain forever. This is the first post I saw when I turned my phone on at 1:45am on November 6.
Christine_Mpls

[Referring to this post from late October:]

Look at this front porch. Really look at it. The entire Pennsylvania town where I canvassed today looked like this. Towns all across America look like this. Fuck macroeconomics. Until the Democrats manage to pass policy that really renews this country, the fascist threat will never go away:


Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Politics and public opinion didn’t suddenly disappear overnight because 3 out of 100 voters switched their votes.
Chris Hayes

I really despise that corporations are not taking more heat for inflation. they knew damn well it’s political poison and would lead to this because they want lower taxes and less regulation . liberals if you are pisses and work in corporate America, probably something to think about
Bryan @bryanformhals.com

I 1000% understand this psychological impulse to lean into the doom, but I spent a lot of years covering these jabronis and it’s not like they *suddenly* got super competent. Part of the con job of Trump and his band of weirdos is this Big Bad Wolf/Bond villain shtick that I have no patience for indulging. They are very bad and are absolutely going to try to do awful and cruel things. But they are not evil geniuses and a lot of them are genuinely idiots.
Chris Hayes

It seems we are already losing sight of the fact that a handful of billionaires effectively turned our information ecosystem into a Superfund site, no one knows how to clean up the mess, and simply telling the truth and hoping people find it is woefully insufficient
Soraya Nadia McDonald

NFL stats nerd getting it better than every political pundit reading the polling entrails for meaning:


eric gonzalez juenke @egojunk.bsky.social

*That's* the right-wing myth, that radicals have taken over the Democratic party and that centrist and right-leaning men are under attack. If anyone actually believed that political parties should be held responsible for the worst behavior of their supporters, no one would vote Republican.
Michael Hobbes

Before you give up on the future, remember this is already someone's utopia. We can build better.
Sonia Sulaiman

One aspect of the economic situation that I think has not gotten enough attention, is how much the withdrawal of pandemic income-support programs worsened people's material conditions.
JW Mason

"Democratic messaging didn't seem to land this cycle, which is why it's time for a pivot to embrace racism and misogyny" — some asshole, pretty soon
@kevinrowe.bsky.social

I really don't think the analysis about the abortion ballot initiatives is good at all. This mirrors the rest of the analysis of this election. People who voted for 45 voted to enshrine abortion in their own states to protect THEMSELVES. They weren't thinking about reproductive justice for all.
Prisonculture

Walking and biking for transportation means I can pause to notice and appreciate neat-looking leaves on the sidewalk. Look at this one!


LauraGMitchell

I think if someone is looking to hire a plumber and one makes all sorts of unrealistic promises and gives an impossibly low quote and the other charges industry standard and has impeccable Yelp reviews, if that someone goes with the bad plumber it's not really the fault of the good plumber.
Schooley

Here’s what’s wrong with Dems and this whole shithole country: MEN HATE WOMEN. And yes most masculinity IS toxic and that’s why it’s being suggested that we STFU about the problem because MEN DON’T WANT TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM BECAUSE IT IS *THEM*! Dems need to move LEFT and men need to stop being SEXIST TRASH.
TM @tm71.bsky.social

what i found so starkly shocking about the raids of the protest camps in, say, Columbia was that they were brutalizing the children of bankers and ambassadors in the leafy refuges of the ivy league while the political consensus cheered them on. may have been short sighted. ugh. just like obama turning over a turnkey drone striking surveillance state to trump the last time, biden just turned over a state that has advanced the normalization of cracking the heads of anyone who peacefully protests anything
jeff computers featuring minipan and stripey @helldude.bsky.social

It's easy to tune out the news when you can just put on headphones and slip into the warm, eternal embrace of writing about climate change.
Eric Roston

We’re doing some before/after analysis of recent non-separated bike lane projects on residential streets that included speed humps. Full report to come, but this stood out. Speed humps reclaim neighborhood streets from aggressive drivers:


Jascha Franklin-Hodge @jfh01.bsky.social

How did he "broaden his support" in getting two million less votes than he did in 2020? He didn't broaden anything.
bdonnelly

A lot of these suggestions for how Democrats should “tone down” their messaging (which is never actual Democratic Party messaging) read like “Democrats should make my kids start talking to me again”
Louisa @louisathelast.bsky.social

In two months, Trump will stand on the steps of the Capitol that he sent a violent mob to storm 4 years ago, place his hand on a book he has never read, and swear an oath he has previously violated, as administered by the Chief Justice who placed him above the law.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

I mean, you can talk about disaffected young men, culture war issues, Harris' strategy, Israel/Palestine, rebelling fsagainst elites, or whatever else. But there's a pretty compelling Occam's razor explanation that I'm going with until I see some pretty compelling evidence for something else.
Jeff Lazarus

So much of what we think we know about American politics, about the American political order is now gone, or in question. And what replaces it is still so murky.
Angus Johnston

People are interpreting the election results 17 ways to Sunday but the best evidence we have suggests that simply *being a woman* costs a candidate about 3% at the polls, and Harris is on track to underperform Biden by pretty much exactly 3 points.
Jeff Lazarus wants to live in a democracy @jlazarus.bsky.social

I don't think it's a huge ask to wish voters had a basic understanding of recent history, like Trump appointing the justices who ended Roe, a thing he openly bragged about for a long time! Or, you know, that minor matter of attempting to overthrow the government. And yet.
Tom Tomorrow

Americans are looking powerfully into tariffs now that the election is over:


Denny Carter

Still wild to me how the conservative vision of masculinity isn't just toxic, it's *only* the toxic parts. Zero sense of duty, responsibility, stoicism, manning up, taking things on the chin, protecting the weak, etc, etc. Just endless whining, entitlement, and abuse of others.
Max Kennerly

It's terrible to cheer on the demise of other people just because of their ignorance and folly. Black Americans vote the way that we do because we know this country's worst impulses; others don't believe it. They'll have to see for themselves, and no, I don't rejoice in their FAFO. It's a tragedy.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

kinda curious as to what happens when someone ineligible by the plain text of the constitution to be president is sworn in. like does that void it or something?
Jason Smith @newqueuelure.bsky.social

at 12:01pm on 20 January 2025 the constitution becomes null and void due to internal contradiction (tell your friends)
Jason Smith @newqueuelure.bsky.social

Toxicologist here for any fluoride concerns! The amount of fluoride added to water to prevent tooth decay is so minuscule that — no matter your age, size, or health status — you would die from water poisoning long before you could ever even start getting toxicity from fluoride. Fluoridated water is safe
Ryan Marino, MD

To me: Trump's orders have no force of law. And when SCOTUS says they do, you shrug and say “nope” and then the cold constitutional crisis goes hot. But it would take a brave blue state to do it. And I don’t believe it’ll happen.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

it is not my job to say what a political party should or should not be doing. it is my job to tell the truth, and the truth is that a lot of people willingly abandoned their faculties to make a bad, destructive choice. as long as journalists and pundits act as if they are amateur political strategists and not people trying to understand and tell the truth about the world, they are going to take the implicit view that voters can never be wrong, which then demands endless explanation of their morally blameless choice
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

"When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed." –Rebecca Solnit
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

Won’t be surprised if the birth rate drops even more dramatically now. Intentionally having children while Trump (or any Republican) is POTUS seems like not a good idea.
Carrie @bellatrixcrawley.bsky.social

Good morning:


Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul

Who will pick the crops if we deport the immigrants? It’ll be the same people, but sourced through private detention companies that take all the wages and return the immigrants to their indefinite holding cages overnight. Chattel slavery, back again.
Alex Wild

just want to note that zero republicans in my life have reached out since tuesday to try and find common ground
@pnutsmama.bsky.social

If she won, the win would never be big enough. Since she lost, everything is about what she didn’t do. But again, I look at Republicans and I ask: What did they do right? And there’s nothing there.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also going away, so junk fees and extortionate overdraft fees are on their way back too.
daniel sieradski @self.agency

Harris voters voted thinking, "I don't like X, but the alternative is worse"
Trump voters voted thinking, "He says the economy is bad, which is what I think. I don't care about that other stuff"
Proud Anselmo

In the aftermath of a disaster, most people respond not with greed or violence, but with courage and compassion. Tackling the climate crisis and growing democracy require both, regardless of whether the federal government is working to advance or obstruct these goals.
Bob Kopp

i think people half remember learning something about inflation in Germany leading to the Nazis and have decided saying inflation is a good excuse for their fascism
Big Fat Bartolo's Colon

But here is the real kicker: This man is disqualified from holding office under our own Constitution. I do not have to view him as legitimate regardless of whether voting had fuckery afoot or not.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

Reason, Noah Smith, etc. are citing an exit poll showing 65% of Native Americans voted Trump. It's nonsense. Reservations aren't included in exit polling. It's a tiny sample (about 200) of self-identified Native Americans at non-reservation sites.
Radley Balko

Here are some nice mushrooms:


lukelukeluke

I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.
lastpositivist.bsky.social

I am pretty sure when right-wingers say, "elite" they just mean people who they are resentful of. Like, they call people who serve them coffee elites.
Unbreakable Peter @loki1001.bsky.social

Compared to 2020, Trump’s coalition was “older, wealthier, and about equally white.” And yet, conventional wisdom is quickly coalescing around ideas of a working-class revolution, racial realignment, and young men’s “crisis of masculinity.” The punditry doesn’t care about what really happened.
Thomas Zimmer

My fellow neurodivergents, can we agree that blenders are the worst kitchen appliance? Machines for covering everything in your kitchen with goop. No way to spin that as a rebellion against elites unless you define it out of existence
scoops @scoopsstp.bsky.social

“voters revolted against elites” DOES NOT MAKE SENSE unless we are using bespoke definitions of “elite”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

An example of how words have no meaning: Ohio voters replaced Sherrod Brown with a car dealer chain owner and blockchain investor with numerous wage theft complaints against him and $100+ million in wealth.
Jonathan Cohn

imagine how little the national corporate press would care about watergate if it happened today lol
Greg Pak

I'll be honest: if you'd told me that Harris was going to lose all 7 swing states, no way I'd have believed that Dems would have held the Senate seats in at least 4 of the 5 of those states that had Senate elections.
Josh Chafetz

Nothing more important to remember than every democratic president is a smol bean bound by the constraints of the office who can defeated by the merest whisper of lack of confidence while every republican president is an unstoppable titan to whom rules never apply. That's Just The Way It Is.
Kelsey Atherton

TAKE NOTE: In the conversation about better city-building, one of my goals moving forward on this and other platforms, and in my overall political and media discourse, is to take back the phrase “common sense” from those who badly want it to mean “ignoring evidence-based reality.”
Brent Toderian

I reported on this when I was still a reporter. Called every school where this was a rumor and only found one instance of cat litter being in schools. And you will be fucking furious when you learn why.


Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

Not an expert, but something tells me asking drivers to drive responsibly might not actually be working.
Tom Flood

This narrative that the Democrats ignored the working class is really aggravating. Be specific. You’re talking about the white working class because the Black working class understood the stakes of this election just fine.
Roxane Gay

The impending damage Trump 2.0 will do to the public services is one of the most disturbing and potentially long lasting threats. (Alongside a set of truly frightening possibilities for changes in US foreign policy.)
Jesse D. Jenkins

I’m all for the Democrats embracing populism and ditching neoliberalism. I just want someone to explain how that works in a post-Citizens United environment. Dem populist hero Sherrod Brown was beaten by a Mercedes dealer in Ohio because he was swamped by crypto super pac cash.
Lydia Polgreen

The way people use “elites” usually means “Black and Jew-coded conspiracy of the decadent bourgeoisie against the true working volk and their billionaire avatars.” I wonder if there’s a word for political tendencies that adopt that frame.
Ned Resnikoff

the problem with saying we need a “Joe Rogan for the left” is that Rogan was not a creation of conservatives. he was a regular guy who became conservative because he’s very stupid.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

You could tax the billionaires—just the billionaires—at a level that *leaves all of the billionaires as billionaires* and give a rebate to every taxpayer of $30k. That's *fucking wild*
Pwnallthethings

Finding out that Lake Superior "Never gives up its dead" because it's so cold that the colonies of bacteria that decompose corpses can't survive in it so those bodies never fill up with gas and surface, all because I looked up the lyrics of a 1976 folk song, is what the internet should be more like.
Judge Anon

TURN THIS UP!


Angelia @imangelia.bsky.social

this is an extremely important reminder – remember that Trump kicked off his last administration with the Muslim Ban. this time will be far worse, immediately, to send the message that resistance is futile. it isn’t
Micah @rincewind.run

Realizing I’m going to probably spend the next two weeks or so writing on why each of the embarrassment of embarrassments that Trump appoints is their own particular flavor of terrible and/or unqualified
Hayes Brown

If you are a Democrat who is spending time attacking Kamala Harris or her campaign rather than focusing on the fight ahead, you aren't helping anyone.
Marc Elias

People will be like "Oh! These trans people want outrageous things!" and the "outrageous things" are literally just
• legal protections against discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, public accommodations, etc
• the ability to update identity documents to accurately reflect name/gender
Parker Molloy

Hey, remember the Elian Gonzalez saga? Remember how much righteous anger there was in Republican circles over this image of one (1) armed federal agent taking custody of (1) undocumented minor in order to reunite him with his father? These are the images Republicans will soon be celebrating:


Kevin M. Kruse

There are five words that might help you survive what's coming: "I don't recognize your authority." Even if you can't say them out loud, you can keep saying them inside your own head.
Charlie Jane Anders

We are going to see some significant stress tests of federalism in the coming years. It may surprise you to know that the GOP is much more flexible* on the topic than they had previously indicated.

*Whichever approach achieves their desired results.
Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me

Here’s one of my main takeaways: the point of governing is to make people’s lives better, but the point of politics – especially campaigns – is to give people a story about who to blame for things sucking. It’s a real mistake to confuse one for the other, as I have often done!
Chris Hayes

Biden won the 2020 popular vote by 4.5 points. Trump has likely won the 2024 popular vote by less than 1 point. If Trump is "who we are now," then Biden is who we were a short time ago, and I don't think either claim is particularly useful.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

The public: The media is falling apart.
Journalists: We need unions to protect our jobs.
The public: Our schools are falling apart.
Teachers: We need unions to protect our jobs.
The Atlantic magazine: Good news! We've built an AI tool to replace journalists and teachers at the same time!
Annalee Newitz

This election is so painfully mundane in poli sci terms:
-An incumbent party being defeated in the face of public economic discontent
-An authoritarian capitalizing on discontent to return to office, paying less of a price than we might hope at the ballot box because the public has other priorities
Brendan Nyhan

This is the best election victory for Republicans since 1988, which was an actual landslide. People have memory-holed just how long it's been. Obama did better than this in both 2008 and 2012! Republicans haven't even won the popular vote in 20 years before this.
William Adler @williamadler78.bsky.social

We know FOR SURE that there are huge pollution, climate, health, equity, and public/personal cost consequences connected to continued car dependency from all the highway, road-widening and parking CONSTRUCTION supporting more vehicles, whether they are EV or not. This siphons $ from better solutions:


Brent Toderian

Eleanor Rigby
Peeling bananas with feet as she swings through the trees
Like chimpanzees
Left her enclosure
Where they were breeding their half human hybrids with apes
They've all escaped
Mike. @dumbmike.bsky.social

We solved so many problems so well that most people don’t know that they were ever problems, and so their base assumption is that this is the natural order of the world when it’s actually a fragile system held up by an expansive administrative state…which millions just voted to dismantle.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

It’s not remarked upon all that much, but the fact that a man – a *republican* candidate! – can twice win the presidency on an openly anti-constitutional platform is probably the main biggest change in US politics in my lifetime. If you’re under 30, I’m not sure it’s possible to understand the degree to which, in the politics of the US right, religious fealty to the constitution and a wholesale hatred of Russia were articles of faith without squinting quite hard. Both those things have gone through a full 180° in a generation.
Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social

The symbol of this incoming administration should be a cheerfully painted tiny coffin
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

It's #RoseWednesday:


Fahrul @roellatief.bsky.social

Ask yerselves:
1. "Do all road users deserve to be safe on all surface streets of Minneapolis?"
2. "What percentage of public land is the correct percentage to devote to the convenience and comfort of those who get around town in the second-leading cause of death in children?"
MPLS Bike Wrath

hey @profgabriele.com this is the new nominee for defense secretary:


David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Oh great. This is even worse than I thought. And I thought it was pretty bad.
Melissa Ryckman @missoularedhead.bsky.social

An antivax secdef is crazy. Nothing has killed more soldiers in the history of human civilization than disease.
Adam Serwer

the thing to note about the Elon “Department of Government Efficiency” thing is that the Government Accountability Office already exists and serves this basic function. the problem is that it’s largely serious and nonpartisan. they’re trying to build their own hyper-ideological version of it.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

morning moment of beauty in the the autumn garden:


kms @karmso.bsky.social

listen, the only way trump can force congress to adjourn if it is not already planning to adjourn is if he sends men with guns. and if that happens the game is already over.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

"All capitalists want capitalism for the masses and socialism for the super rich elites. That's kind of the definition of capitalism in my honest opinion." –David Graeber
David Graeber Institute

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida to serve as his attorney general.
CNN

The Department of Justice isn't within 100 feet of a school, is it?
The Daily Show

I’m starting to understand what it must have been like when Caligula made his horse a senator.
Heather in Chicago @heatherk.bsky.social

As a child of the 80s, this is not how I imagined the Russian takeover of America
Willy Lee (they/them) @advicepig.bsky.social

Am I the only one who didn't know Matt Gaetz was even a lawyer?
Marc Elias

There isn’t going to be a lot of ideological coherence to this administration except stupid and cruel
bill @bill-of-lefts.bsky.social

I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding and these two radicalized egomaniacs will continue to get along swimmingly forever:


Taylor Lorenz

When I was a kid, people in my teachers' and parents' generation, who'd fought Nazis and the Axis in WW II, knew 'but the trains ran on time' as shorthand for Italy's embrace of fascism. For our time, counterpart would be 'but a dozen eggs cost so much.'
James Fallows

darkly funny that the end result of QAanon was making a pedophile in charge of law enforcement
America's Lounge Singer @krang.bsky.social

The first known use of singular “they” is so old that not only does it pre-date singular “you,” it wasn’t even spelled with a “th.” When William and the Werewolf, in 1375 CE, used singular “they,” it was spelled with a Thorn:


Dr. Frizzle @swilua.bsky.social

Vivek's "plan" is to get rid of funding for:
—Veterans' health care
—Funding for research into new medical treatments
—Foreign embassies
—Affordable housing programs like Housing Choice Vouchers & public housing
—Head Start
—NOAA
—Drinking water revolving funds
etc.
Yonah Freemark

If you give a shit about urban planning and transit you should expect no funding from the feds for the next 4 years and you should entirely focus your advocacy on state and local politicians. You should also try to build community as best as you can to save people from rightwing media
Alan Fisher @alanthefisher.bsky.social

thinking about Matt Gaetz saying abortion rights protestors are fat and ugly, and shouldn't worry about needing an abortion. "Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb," he said in 2022
Rachel Cohen

Taking back the phrase “common sense” from those who badly want it to mean “ignoring evidence-based reality” is something that’s needed in almost every area, from medicine to politics to … culture.
Robert Kowalenko @rob-kowa.bsky.social

Another common sense position: the whole Me Too movement proved definitively that there are many quieter and easier ways for men to assault women rather than pretend to become part of an oppressed minority just so they can enter a women's bathroom.
The Alternate Historian

Trump is basically appointing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This guy is Pestilence:


Brent Toderian

I'm a tolerant person but it's 2024 and everyone knows about climate change, and if you sit there in your car idling for half an hour and it's not a literal matter of life or death like you're keeping warm in a blizzard, then I vote we get to destroy your car with our heavy artillery of choice.
Antony Ingram

Good advice for troubled times: use cash to pay for a burner phone. Get a prepaid credit card and use it to pay for whatever you use the phone to do. Use public wifi/a vpn from home if you are Doing Things. Go private. Otherwise use Signal.
Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social

People who say they care about women’s and girls’ sports are noticeably quiet about how eliminating the Department of Education would end federal oversight of Title IX enforcement of the equal existence of women’s and girls’ sports
Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social

Watching 47 assume the Presidency feels like watching an angry Godzilla raze a city. Lord have mercy.
Jennifer Mendelsohn

Things make a lot more sense when you realize Trump and his gaggle of idiots are intended to lesser the standing of the United States, meltdown the economy while liberating capitalism from centralized control, and finish off federal regulatory power.
Jared Yates Sexton

The pending dismantling of our regulatory system has me thinking about an insight from a book I reviewed a while back: For almost all of human history, average life expectancy was capped at ∼35 years. We invented all kinds of clever things, but even for the rich, this didn't budge. What changed?
Brooke Jarvis

$65 to $250 billion in benefits annually from decarbonization, seems good? Anyway EPA’s whole annual budget is like $9 billion
Costa Samaras

Hegseth has a goddamn Jerusalem Cross tattoo on his chest. So we are all entirely clear, this symbolizes exactly what it says: Christian military conquest of Jerusalem, not some orderly resolution of the Israel-Hamas war
Tom Pepinsky

this guy being named as Secretary of Defense feels like the sort of thing we should remember when the attacks on DEI and various Black and brown professionals / defenses of "meritocracy" and stray Dr. King quotes ramp up:


Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

appointing a guantanamo bay prison guard to be secretary of defense who is totally unqualified except for writing a book that's like "let's do more war crimes." donald the dove strikes again
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

*Trump slapping the side of the Cabinet* “You would not believe how many sex offenders can fit in this baby.”
Missing The Point @missingthept.bsky.social

blah blah blah i don't want to be in a place where everyone thinks like me blah blah. shut up thats exactly what i want. a place where everyone hates the cops, agrees that fascism is bad, and thinks that it's our moral obligation to protect people and the land. we can disagree on strategy
Ashley Fairbanks @ziibiing.com

We should be building versions of this on neighborhood corners across the country:


Jason Cox @jasoncoxnc.bsky.social

I don't want to sound alarmist or anything, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to skip FBI background checks and bury congressional ethics reports about nominees to the most important posts in the federal government.
Kevin M. Kruse

It’s nuts that having a Black president one time drove white people this crazy.
Akilah Hughes

I am old enough to remember the terror of children I knew personally who were consigned to life inside an "iron lung," because of polio infections in the days before effective, mandatory vaccines. RFK Jr is old enough to remember that too. So is man who appointed him.
James Fallows

When Obama nominated Tom Daschle – a congressional leader with three decades of experience working on federal health care policies – to be HHS secretary, the senator had to withdraw because a donor provided him with a car. If only he'd beheaded a whale!
Kevin M. Kruse

As someone with a friend group that’s like 50%+ autistic, it’s really fucked up to see people ready to jettison life-saving medicine like vaccines because they get it into their heads that it somehow causes autism. That’s worse than dying?? Is it???
Louisa @louisathelast.bsky.social

Trump's Pentagon pick:
1. Was a Guantánamo prison guard
2. Sympathized with the Nazis in Charlottesville
3. Has a bunch of white supremacist/Christian nationalist tattoos
4. Wants to fire the Joint Chiefs chairman because he's Black
5. Loves war crimes
What could go wrong?
Jonathan M. Katz @katzonearth.bsky.social

The more magazine covers like this, the closer we get to when Trump turns on Musk:


Leah McElrath

imagine tearing down the foundational principles of this democratic republic in service to Donald Trump's nomination of Matt Gaetz, two of the most repulsive men ever to have walked the earth
Tom Tomorrow

The Onion should buy Elsevier next
MadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social

From a friend: “Someone I know had a meeting with a Trump agriculture transition team member. This person said surely you’re not going to impose tariffs on food imports. He responded why wouldn’t we? And my person said: because about 30% of the food Americans regularly consume cannot be grown here and this will cause widespread food shortages (think coffee, cacao beans, many fruits and veggies, especially off-season and tropical). The Trump transition team member said: “maybe Americans shouldn’t eat those foods.”
Fred Wellman @fpwellman.bsky.social

"A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter."


ryan cooper

A Washington Post review of Pete Hegseth’s writing shows he rejected steps to integrate women and transgender troops across the military, and called for a “crusade” to protect “Judeo-Christian” values.
The Washington Post

1) The term “Judeo-Christian” first appeared in the 19th century, in the context of trying to convert Jews to Christianity.
2) It’s Islamaphobic
3) Most Jewish advances (Talmud, law, etc) developed under not-Christian rule, that’s usually sucked for us
4) The Crusaders mass-murdered Jews.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social

Every single time someone says “Judeo-Christian” the sentence would be more accurately phrased if they just said “Christian.” It’s some weird appropriative fig leaf.
Naomi Alderman

What an achievement vaccines are. What a monument to our love for each other it is to stare straight into the face of something as horrific and unstoppable as smallpox or measles or polio or cervical cancer and say “You know what, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
Hank Green

I'm genuinely terrified of a polio outbreak now, because that shit could evolve and would have to create a new vaccine.
Dog/catpetter @tomboyrespect.bsky.social

Had a flash premonition of myself in a year, arguing online with a Jacobin editor who wants to say that jackboots and camp guards are part of the working class.
Moira Donegan

Love this map! It shows the grades of the streets in order to help pedestrians and cyclists plan their routes (from Queenstown, New Zealand):


Jason Thorne

Everyone likes post-apocalyptic fiction because you don’t have to go to work anymore
Lostcatdog

Me: what’s that black bird with the red on its wings called
Bird watcher: that’s a red winged blackbird
Me: holy shit
lukelukeluke

Matt Gaetz will be the very first cabinet appointee in history who will plead the 5th during his Senate confirmation hearings.
Robert M @rdm23.bsky.social

We're not going to terraform Mars, but we're doing a good job of venusforming Earth.
Peter Gleick

If you wouldn’t tolerate some random stranger shrieking in your ear about how minorities deserve to suffer or about how vaccines cause mega-autism, then why would you tolerate it on social media? Block the miserable assholes. Remove them from your sight. Be at peace.
Faine Greenwood

Apparently Trump is awarding three of the top positions in the DOJ to the defense attorneys who served him in his cases over the past year or two. He figured it was the least he could do since there was no way he was going to pay them!
KittyKatGirl @mary1kathy.bsky.social

1981: If libs warn trickle-down will wreck the middle class, call them Commies.
2024: If trickle-down has wrecked the middle class, blame Libs.
John Fugelsang

Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%)...decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).
Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social

Western media will surely attack China for doing too much to save the planet.
Daniel Chomsky

It already sort of does. The fact that China heavily subsidizes its exports of electric vehicles and other types of clean technology is treated as a criminal act. This is at the same time that we supposedly want rich countries to help finance the clean energy transition in developing countries.
Dean Baker

bro the Vatican is literally a 15-minute country:


mel~ @melissanarchy.bsky.social

If Dems flip CA45 and CA13, then the U.S. House majority will have literally come down to the 3 NC the GOP flipped thanks to its new gerrymander. And that itself hinged on NC's supreme court flipping in 2022.
Taniel

If you want to know where we're at – the President of COP29 used his speech to talk about proud history of oil drilling in Azerbaijan and refers to oil and gas as a “gift of the gods” at the opening of the CLIMATE SUMMIT!! Time to end fossil fuels.
Mike Hudema

I had the German measles, chickenpox and mumps consecutively in the second grade. I don’t wish that upon anyone. This is a FAFO timeline that affects children who didn’t ask for this. SMH
Becky Maruca

Don't be deceived. RFK doesn't care about corporate greed. He only attacks the pharma industry because he wants to make it easier to hawk dubious supplements and products from a wellness industry that is already worth trillions and is regulated far less than vaccines and drugs.
Dr. Lucky Tran

Words of wisdom:


Tim O’Brien

If you operate under the assumption that the Trump presidency is primarily motivated to enrich Trump and his allies, you’ll have an understanding of most everything that comes from his White House. However, the purpose of public office is to provide public goods for the general welfare.
Jennifer N. Victor

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” –Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Leah McElrath

Vaccines are cool yes, but have you ever considered cake? I'm not even joking. First, you take bread (already impressive) and tinker with how much flour, eggs, butter, and sugar you put in. But then for some reason, you add a bit of baking powder? It wasn't even invented until 1840!
Geeky Meerkat

Missing targets RAISES the urgency of near-term action, it doesn't relax it. But setting out unachievable targets as 'do or die,' as has been the case around 1.5°C for a decade, absolutely feeds fatalism. I've seen it so often in the young people I talk to and teach as well as friends and neighbors.
Jesse D. Jenkins

Donald Trump is now (1) below 50% popular vote and (2) has a margin of popular vote victory roughly HALF of Hillary's victory in 2016. They believe the left has to lay down and shut up because of this "landslide" victory.
David Pakman

TIL that one reason raw milk is having a comeback is a lot of people don't know what pasteurization is. They think it's adding "chemicals" not a rapid heat treatment
Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.bsky.social

why do all the people who are obsessed with bluesky being an echo chamber write for national publications headquartered in new york and dc?
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

The Democratic Party is radically to the left of where it was in 2000 and it’s also not left enough and both of these things can be true simultaneously because our cultural context has changed and the politics necessary to move us forward has changed with it.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

It’s kind of wild we witnessed multiple bomb threats traced to foreign adversaries and targeting polling stations in key swing states, and we’re all kind of like, “Well, that’s just a thing that happens now.”
Leah McElrath

American white identity politics has always been defined by its combination of entitlement to unearned privilege on one hand, and a bitter sense of grievance that the entitlement into which you believe yourself to have been born has been taken from you by non-white and/or non-Christian others.
Seth Cotlar

Biden doesn't have much time left in office, but he should immediately transfer all $300b in Russian frozen assets + interest to UKRAINE To help them buy all the artillery + fighter jets+ ammunition they need to fight Russia.
Tracy @blondiebombshell.bsky.social

This resonated:


Peter Gleick

Trump is now < 50%, and leads Harris < 2%. This election was extremely close. That margin will have enormous consequences. But it’s small enough that instead of debating which vulnerable groups and standards of decency Dems should abandon, they could just focus on how to better defend both.
Radley Balko

The paradox of tolerance can be solved with mutual respect. Give only what will be reciprocated. Nazis won’t give us space, so we don’t owe it to them.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

"It should go without saying that Gaetz is not, by any normal standards, even a tiny bit qualified to be attorney general. He practiced law for only about two years...suing an old woman for money she owed his father’s caregiving company."
Jenn&Tonic @jtsveigdalen.bsky.social

DOGE isn't real, it's an angle for Elon to fire the regulators who he doesn't like regulating him, and to gain a wedge for his personal businesses that all heavily depend on and benefit from government subsidy
scoops @scoopsstp.bsky.social

Annual morbidity in the 20th century, before and after vaccines:
Measles:
 Before: 530,000, After: 47
Mumps:
 Before: 160,000, After: 429
Rubella:
 Before: 50,000, After: 3
Diphtheria:
 Before: 20,000, After: 2
Smallpox:
 Before: 30,000,  After: 0
Polio:
 Before: 16,000, After: 0
Mikel Jollett

Hypocrisy is one thing. The same ghouls who deployed the “groomer” smear now demanding Gaetz be handed the highest law enforcement office in the country — while keeping the House report about his alleged statutory rape secret — is just straight up nihilism.
Radley Balko

Trump is asking Congressional Republicans to publicly stain their souls as proof of their total compliance.
Travis View

Clematis fuzz:


amohr

I really don’t understand this whole ‘stay on Twitter and fight’ thing. You’re jousting with bots and reply guys and wading through ads it’s not Waterloo.
Nesrine Malik

The only thing RFK Jr might have a point about is the revolving door between the FDA and pharma. Even then his assessment is massively exaggerated and utterly divorced from reality, nor does he have clue one about how to reform the system to address the problem without making things worse.
David Gorski, MD, PhD @gorskon.bsky.social

One thing I find hilarious about the argument about whether we can stop climate change without changing lifestyles is that advertisers are constantly working to manipulate lifestyles. If ads didn't manipulate lifestyles, why would companies spend untold billions on them every year?
Kevin J. Kircher

Walking, biking, transit, and fruits and veggies have a combined ad budget of roughly $0. And then we pretend people eat corporate fast food and drive SUVs because The Free Market Decided
Miles Grant

People sure have elaborate theories about the magic combination of economic factors as to why the metrics show a great economy but people think it sucks when it’s just… the media coverage. Absent that, it’s impossible to explain THIS:


Grudgie the Whale

There is no “game over” in the fight against climate change. Today, it remains our collective task to continue to bend the arc of global emissions towards net zero. The next battle begins today.
Jesse D. Jenkins

100%. Plus, the discourse has convinced many that 1.5 C is a “tipping point” as opposed to a policy milestone that signifies that we are already experiencing dangerous climate change, and the discourse is laying groundwork for a loss of credibility when 1.50 C turns out to be nothing special.
Bob Kopp

About 3,000 people die of food poisoning in the US each year, but apparently, that's not exciting enough for some people.
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

Hey you:


Ethan M. Aldridge

Imagine 21 fully loaded 737-8 MAX going down, with no survivors—every day. That's how many people will die in car crashes in the world in next 24 hrs. Based on 1.3 million road deaths in 2023, 40,900 of them in US.
@taras-grescoe.com

In addition to climate and water and politics, I follow mandolin posts here, but those are a mix of bluegrass/Irish music and people slicing their fingers up with sharp kitchen tools.
Peter Gleick

they should invent a bed that makes you as sleepy as a couch
@pleasebegneiss.bsky.social

Apparently everyone is supposed to believe that "woke" college students have equal power to the US government which is now fully controlled by MAGA. Think about how bonkers that sounds.
Prisonculture

There are books to be written about the pathologies in this photo. Mr. Covenant Marriage beams with a sexual predator, serial adulterer, and weirdo breeder. Clean Food/Earth nut clutches a burger with Drill Baby Drillers. Nepo-baby failson. World’s richest man reduced to a truckling sycophant:


Radley Balko

You got the United Nations, the Lemkin Institute, and the damned Papacy saying Israel's actions in Gaza are either consonant with genocide or need to be seriously investigated as such. I really don't see how anyone can look you in the eye and deny it at this point
Nick Brumfield

incredible number of you do not seem to understand the difference between trump’s base and the marginal trump voter, i.e. “the people who gave trump the win.” and the reason this is important is that politics have not stopped happening. trump is set to squander whatever goodwill he has with the voting public and this is an opportunity
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Something I think about not infrequently is how sure Madison and Hamilton were that each branch of the government would jealously protect their powers and how badly political parties have blown up that theory.
Hayes Brown

I was today years old when I learned that our future Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem launched a public awareness campaign in South Dakota with the tagline, "Meth. We're On It":


Will Bunch

If you really want to worsen the problem of homelessness in American cities, cutting Medicaid and other services for the poor is definitely a way to do it.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

If you know anyone who opposes birthright citizenship, ask them this: “if you had to prove you are actually a citizen without reference to where you or your parents or their parents were born, could you?” For most of us, birth certificate is all we’ve ever needed.
Whey Standard

A diesel transit vehicle only needs to carry a few passengers to be better for air quality than the same people driving cars. But California state policy is eager to force more people to drive in order to make transit vehicles "cleaner."
Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

Editorial cartoon, November 18, 1924:


Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social

NEW: Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found.
Charles Ornstein

“Nearly 2,000 children under 5 are dying every day from air pollution, which has become the 2nd biggest health risk factor for young children around the world. More than 8 million deaths of children and adults were caused by air pollution in 2021.”
Brent Toderian

I think why the trans thing has me riled up beyond the obvious “some of them are my friends” thing is that it really sums up the philosophy of Trumpism, namely that People Who Matter should get to punch whoever they want and are the victims because their knuckles got sore from hitting them too hard.
Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social

"The purpose of a system is what it does."


Warren Wells, AICP

The most underrated piece of winter clothing is the scarf. Every year I re-learn this lesson when I wait too long before wearing one. And then it makes a huge difference in my outdoor comfort.
Alex Schieferdecker

I hate that Trump is the most successful foreign intelligence op in history. Like when else has a country just straight up installed their adversary’s leader in plain sight? He’s going to wreck us and tell us it was our own fault and Putin will be laughing the whole time.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

the thing about being a political junkie is you have extremely difficult time conceptualizing how someone could be totally ignorant of politics. but i would strongly encourage you to imagine the kind of person who googled “did biden drop out?” on november 4th and then cast a ballot on november 5th
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

From Harry Enten:
Trump's mandate? It's very shallow. Trump's now under 50% in the popular vote. His margin ranks 44 of 51 since 1824.
Weak coattails: 4 Dems won for Senate in states Trump won. (It was 0 in 2016 & 2020.)
The GOP is on track for smallest House majority since there were 50 states.
Leah McElrath

This one is doing the rounds again, for (I presume) obvious reasons:


Brent Toderian

BlueSky, September 2025, Part 1

Whew.

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

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

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

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

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

__

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

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

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


Leah McElrath

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

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

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

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

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

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


Williams Institute

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy dies in whiteness
Jeff Jarvis


Blue Fairylicious Girl @bluesnowflake.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


mar1957.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Daniel Gilmore @gilmored85.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

ahahahah:


Marisa Kabas

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

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

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


Lindsey Cormack @dcinbox.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Jess Calarco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hahaha... #botanists:


Kelly Zamudio @kzutaustin.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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


JBC @johnbcaddell.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


spencer roberts @unpopularscience.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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


Marion @mawinon.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all going according to plan:


Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

rikules.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t stop, got heron shit to do:


Alistair Coleman

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

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

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

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

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

Extremist murders by ideology, 2013 to 2022:


Philip Bump

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

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

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

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


Jesse Duquette

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Dr Rebecca Warren

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

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

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

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

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

#InsectThursday. Seen on Tuesday in Gilroy, California:


Harold von Drehle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


I'm Not Really Mary Poppins

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

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

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

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

__________________________________

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

Everything below is from before the Kirk shooting.

__________________________________

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

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


American Fietser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Author, Séamas O'Reilly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Derf Backderf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Brooke Newman

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

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

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

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

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

very well


 @lucavi.bsky.social

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

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

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

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


Mike Luckovich

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new John Roberts portrait just dropped:


Jen Taub

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

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

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

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

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

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

I crocheted Patti Smith’s Horses cover:


@lindsaynicolle.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Clara Jeffery

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

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

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

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

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

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


Atti 17.11

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

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

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

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

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

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


Nina Willburger @drnwillburger.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cartoon:


billbramhall.bsky.social

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

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

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

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


Colin Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Adam Weinstein

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

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

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

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

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


Jake Grumbach

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

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

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

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

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

Normal fucking country:


unraveled @unraveledpress.com

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

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

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

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

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

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


Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

My god…


Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I refuse to get used to this:


Gillian Branstetter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Mehdi Hasan

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Joe Patrice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this checks out:


Catbus @hayao.lol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


M. Nolan Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Tom Warren @realtack.bsky.social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Brent Toderian

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

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

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

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

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

America, 2025:


Patrick Chovanec

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Brent Toderian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Clara Jeffery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Harry Turtledove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Brilliant Maps

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

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

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