"For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career...cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism." (gift link)

this is great

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot. I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

I read the “SAVE Act” (the GOP’s new voter suppression bill) so you don’t have to. This is my one page summary. Jesus it’s bad. 1/

The events of the past few weeks in Minnesota, according to @nytimes.com, represent another step toward autocracy on that index.

Pour one out for every professional political pundit, writer, consultant whatever that has spent the last decade trying to pretend that the Trump phenomenon was about trade or opiates and not a big chunk of white america losing its mind over having a black president bsky.app/profile/kyle...

just monstrous to keep going after this family

The United States is engage in a hostile influence operation among ostensible allies

what always annoys me most (beyond the obvious mass fatalities and avoidable suffering) is the fact the stage play isn't even remotely well constructed Blackburn's sole function in Congress is gutting corporate oversight, there's like 15 years of evidence for any actual journalist to explain

one of my lukewarm takes is that the Harris Switch took what would have been a 4-to-5-point loss and made it a 1.5-point loss. bad either way, a loss is a loss and here we are with a Trump administration, but the depth of the pit you're climbing out of does matter

"The 'anti-woke' movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo ...the social consequences, oddly, seem to have freaked these guys out more than anything else."

like, i understand that great replacement isn’t controversial anymore because republicans kept saying it and the media stopped calling it out, but it is still white supremacist rhetoric that has inspired numerous mass shootings, that has not changed

One advantage America has is that Donald Trump fundamentally has a child’s view of power. He thinks you wave your big guns or make an economic threat and people comply in the face of the flex. He doesn’t really grasp you can’t rule a country this size by main force.

if you spend any significant amount of time on X the everything app, your brain is being cooked

Good morning! We are raising funds today for rent relief for families in East St Paul, MN who have been impacted by the federal government's siege there. We have a brand new, limited edition shirt available TODAY ONLY for it. bikinikill.bandcamp.com/merch/limite...

Having non-politicized career experts in the civil service, instead of political sycophants who don't know anything about the issues they working on, may seem like an abstract issue But doing it the way we do it makes your life better, and the Trump/Project 2025 proposal would make your life worse

Apropos of that Trump video — there is a reason why, when researching my book, I came to believe that Barack Obama's election was the moment when America's democratic crisis began. It set off a racial backlash to civil rights that has been the defining force in our politics since.

turned 47 this week, still keeping it tight, more or less

It ought to be clear at this point that they should never be taken at their word.

Documents show RFK Jr lied to Congress about his agenda in Samoa—he did indeed go to spread anti-scientific doubts about vaccines. He was ultimately successful in getting an outbreak going there that killed 83 people, mostly babies and young children.

The book Will Exist. You can still preorder now 🫵🏻 www.kickstarter.com/projects/iro...

it is not exaggeration to say that all of these guys cohere around an ideology of “when you’re a star they let you do it”

someone with a WH press credential they're ok with losing really needs to lay out a few things like this ("i won Minnesota three times and they took it away from me," as another example) and ask "does the President have the mental capacity to understand the difference between reality and fantasy?"

a century and a half of civil service protections - that, in turn, protect us - are in the Trump administration's crosshairs

Once again, I'm begging the media to stop reporting what a politician says (eg Trump talking about using a softer hand in immigration enforcement) and focus on what they've done.

it's not unrelated to the way that torture is posited as a way to get good information when it's actually just a way to extract the false information the torturer wants to hear

And for Musk in particular the goal was to target every agency that had open investigations into his companies and make those investigations go away

absolutely. in addition to illustrating the horrific moral vacuum at the heart of people who will hang out with a convicted sex offender because he makes them feel cool, these emails also show the utter mediocrity of these supposed elites - their shallow thinking, their desperation for affirmation

What is remarkable about this NYT fluff/PR piece to glorify a Trump bootlicker in Cong is that they didn't bother doing any profile on the MoC - @joaquincastrotx.bsky.social - who did the hard work of getting Liam Conejo Ramos out while Katie didn't lift a finger to help out the 5 yr old boy.

"DOGE’s objective was never to save taxpayer dollars. Musk did not 'fail'...DOGE was—and remains, through Vought’s OMB—an effort to extinguish the existing government and create a new one in the image of oligarchs and far-right ideologues."

“Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional.” Read @billmckibben.bsky.social on how we reached this moment

"When Layer1’s founders insisted on knowing whose money Deploy Capital was investing, Mr. Epstein replied in an email to Mr. Rubin that his powerful friend Mr. Thiel would vouch for him." (in 2018, a DECADE after he'd been convicted)

good piece digging into the DOE's phony climate report, which is "starkly at odds with the vast majority of scientific evidence," explicitly dishonest, and clearly designed to justify otherwise-unjustifiable political goals: www.politico.com/interactives...

This I think is a big part of the appeal of AI to the oligarchs. Not that it will replace labor or raise profits in general, but that it will specifically replace the labor whose autonomy impinges on them personally.

The Muppets are real and no one can tell me otherwise.

For Wall Street journal readers with private heated off street parking this is basically a natgeo story about the third world poors

a good way of putting it because a nice dinner with the whole family is a thing that Musk's money can never buy him.

the $75 million Jeff Bezos set on fire for that Melania propaganda piece could have funded most independent newsrooms for literally decades

it's funny how quiet all the people who crow about the need to "save civilization" are about this kind of stuff, losing the administrative capacity to effectively collect taxes is like civilizational collapse 101

Our founders, though deeply flawed, understood that democracy requires an informed citizenry and a government accountable to it people. That’s why the press is the only profession protected by the Constitution. It’s also why autocrats and oligarchs seek to control and destroy it.

"The guidance was really favorable to companies in a way that’s a little bit detrimental to individuals," a totally unsurprising "revelation" about the Trump administration's "populist" tax policy www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

these billionaires will punish the existing customer base of any media outlet for not wanting the product that the billionaires think they *should* want

I'm just a shitlib but i think there's a lot of evidence at this point that this level of concentrated wealth is incompatible with democracy

It's not dooming to say that the President wants to steal elections and consolidate power. It's what he wants to do. Saying there's nothing that anyone can do to stop it - that's dooming.

median Trump voter

"Bezos loses $100 million in a year on the Washington Post" is roughly equivalent to "Seth buys two pretty-nice pairs of jeans and a sweater"

Working theory: If one had a chance to improve society by injecting just one piece of knowledge into every human — so that they truly UNDERSTOOD it, not just knew it on a surface level — "the difference between a million and a billion" would be pretty high in terms of return on investment

We did an accounting of the first year of Trump's pardons. It's ugly, corrupt, and unprecedented: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

It is worse than this, I think. Bezos would be eminently capable of getting good value for the paper in a way that would leave his personal wealth intact. He is disfiguring it because he believes owning it, and doing *this,* best serves his interests.

much discourse in online men's circles is inventing impossible standards that they can then fall short of and feel bad about grindset culture turned against itself. telling yourself that you're in control, that you can dominate if you work hard and then having to find an explanation when you don't