We currently have a Supreme Court that seriously claims (with no explanation) that the current occupant of the Presidency suffers irreparable harm by having to follow existing law, the constitutionality of which has never before been in doubt or even questioned.

Join IPK on September 29th for a discussion with @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social. She will discuss When the Wolves Came, a new documentary podcast spotlighting evangelical leaders resisting political extremism in their church & country, with Delia Baldassarri & @bartbonikowski.bsky.social.

the biden administration spent nearly four years refusing to take any victory laps. they allowed the right to dominate the storyline and bs filled the vacuum. their biggest accomplishments they added dumb "bipartisan" language to. so the public was left w the impression biden wasnt doing anything.

As I was saying…

Canceling Jimmy Kimmel show is not about Charlie Kirk, just like going after universities was not about antisemitism and occupying DC was not about fighting crime.

Scholars once assumed that countries w state-owned media were most vulnerable to the authoritarian capture of the public sphere. Hungary proved that wrong. By leveraging licensing, private media can be brought to heel—all the more so w high concentration of ownership. Trump has learned from Orban.

A reporter just asked the U.S. president a perfectly legitimate question about his attorney general's vow to prosecute people for constitutionally protected speech. He responded by threatening to prosecute the reporter. The threat itself is an abuse of power. It ought to be an impeachable offense.

at the center of the efforts to destroy civil society in russia, hungary, georgia and elsewhere is the stigmatization, harassment, & criminalization of NGOs. that's what this is about, a full-on assault on democratic debate & freedoms. this is not hyperbole. it's right here.

They wanted to pin Kirk’s death on the left to orchestrate an authoritarian crackdown. Reality didn’t cooperate: shooter was not a leftist. Option 1: move on, wait for another day. Option 2 (from the autocratic playbook): brazenly lie & bend reality to your will. They seem to be choosing the latter.

Very fascist-y.

“When certain far-right voices vow retribution in response to Kirk’s murder, they’re seizing on it as a bad-faith pretext to wage open warfare on liberals and leftists who are not guilty of any political violence at all.” @gregsargent.bsky.social absolutely nails it newrepublic.com/article/2004...

The bullets had “trans markings”!! Oh wait, they didn’t? Well the killer was secretly trans!! Wait, he wasn’t? Well the killer had a trans girlfriend!! I mean roommate! Or he once walked by a trans person on the street!! Or heard “trans” on TV!! Trans!! Trans!! Trans!! (F’ing shameless monsters.)

The Nation pulls NO punches, from @espiers.bsky.social "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.”

Well since I can’t use Kirk’s murder to attack my political opponent I guess I’ll move on

The pivot from rage to empathy and sorry is like 50 times too brazen to even be funny, it's just the most crude and evil demonstration possible that none of these people genuinely care about any of this shit

Can we please stop lionizing the dangerous, radical, and morally odious victim (who obviously didn’t deserve this fate), now that the narrative no longer fits the Trumpists’ bad-faith preconceptions? Placing him next to national heroes is appalling. (Disclaimer: political violence is unacceptable.)

It is pretty amazing to see people go from “the left is the enemy of democracy and must be purged” to “who can really know why good kids do bad things?”

Pivoted so hard they affected the earth's rotation

Political violence is toxic and unacceptable in a liberal democracy. But what is even more toxic and unacceptable in a liberal democracy is the hypocritical and rabid vilification of half of the country—including its most vulnerable groups—by the gun-loving party in power, and the president himself.

We don't yet have any idea what the ideology of the Kirk shooter was. But we do know that the Denver school shooter was a far-right white supremacist. www.denverpost.com/2025/09/11/e...

The ATF hasn't even verified that any markings related to trans people were found on the recovered ammunition and doesn't match other evidence descriptions. Why did WSJ rush to report otherwise?

VIA NYT

here is the truth the mainstream media doesn't want you to see The whitewashing of Charlie Kirk’s toxic legacy is underway www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

He joked multiple times about Paul Pelosi getting smashed in the skull with a hammer.

He ticks off a list of violence against right wing figures, and the rhetoric he says that fueled them, but ignores the murder or a leading Minnesota politician, the planned kidnapping of the Governor of Michigan, shooting of the CDC, or the assault of Nancy Pelosi's husband.

Russia flying drones into Polish airspace is a direct consequence of the United States’ abdication of its global leadership. What are the chances that if the situation worsens, Trump will take any action? And what will Europe do?

Art of the Deal™️. The Worlds Greatest Negotiator™️

They could have done something like this in the Trump immunity case and given a chance for the special counsel to take Trump's federal election subversion charges to trial. Expediting cases is a choice

If Democrats can't run on anti-corruption legislation, banning masked agents, and requiring Presidents to stick to the budget deals they agree to with Congress, plus Medicaid reform or whatever you add to the top of that list, that's a skill issue and they should step aside for someone else to run

I study political parties around the world and have never seen a governing party so openly contemptuous of its country, laws, and citizens. The GOP seems to hate America, Americans, our constitution, and democracy in general.

It's hard to think of anything more antithetical to the Founders' vision for America than willingly letting federal troops patrol the streets.

J. Sotomayor dissent: "The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction."

The Roberts Court is overtly devoted, as a matter of judicial and political philosophy, to supporting the policy agenda of Donald Trump. These are DISCRETIONARY rulings - the Court is ruling, repeatedly and usually without explanation, that EQUITY requires that Trump’s agenda advance.

it is always worth remembering that vance made a conscious decision to be a person of low character. he has eagerly contorted himself into evil for the sake of what amounts to a whiff of power.

What do we think are the chances that an authoritarian regime that is actively destroying US liberal democratic institutions, has complete disregard for the rule of law, and is upending the world order will accept the risk of losing power in the next election (to a party it sees as illegitimate)?

It's obviously murder. We're not at war with Venezuela. The US has no jurisdiction to kill people in international waters for maybe committing crimes or being on the boats of people who might be committing crimes.

All kidding about this nonsense answer aside: The regime is asserting the power to murder without trial a boat full of people suspected of drug trafficking, who easily could have been intercepted and arrested instead. That is unconscionable and horrifying even assuming everyone aboard was guilty.

Critizing the radical right actually works to create a distance between voters and these parties. If all other parties do it together.

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.

"She did not die defending the Constitution. She died trying to overturn it. She was not protecting lives at a gate in Iraq; she was forcing her way through windows in the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power." New from @markhertling.bsky.social:

New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

When a party becomes openly contemptuous of the liberal order and acts in a manner hostile to the norms and rules that make democracy possible, I don't think people are bound to respect their authority as legitimate nor are other parties obligated to treat them as one would a democratic partner.

Me three months ago:

"Regulation by deal, precisely because it bypasses general lawmaking procedures, leaves open the possibility that any deal can be supplemented with even more demands in the future. It can provide no legal guarantees of security." ALWAYS read @kimlanelaw.bsky.social 👈

Update from the Trump attack on universities, GMU edition... DOJ now wants to investigate the GMU Faculty Senate for adopting a resolution that simply uses the exact language from the University's strategic plan (approved by the Board!). Unprecedented interference! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

Hulk Hogan and the Lawsuit That Changed Journalism and America talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hulk-...