The “fun” thing about the kennedy center freakout is that conservatives have been carving out “creative” exceptions to anti discrimination laws so they can be bigots to ordinary people just trying to make a purchase, but if actual artists don’t want to perform for the god king they must be punished

OK, a little pie-in-the-sky goal here: Any chance we could get Law Dork 549 new subscribers — free or paid — before the new year? That would give Law Dork 80,000 total subscribers! If you've relied on my work this year, share this with your recommendation! www.lawdork.com

Good NYTimes piece by @ashleyahn88.bsky.social on how Trump administration pushed sectarian messages on Christmas: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/a... This fits problematic trend of Christian social media posts as DHS & DoW have co-opted Bible verses & others like DoL have pushed Christian content. 1/

Trump is using Christmas to extend white Christian nationalism. *Official messaging emphasizes "our Lord and savior" *Trump ordered two additional federal holidays around Xmas On top of: *Encouraging proselytizing in workplace *Seeking evidence of anti-Christian bias www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/a...

Texas Universities are now like police departments who would prefer to pay out the inevitable lawsuits rather than stop breaking the law

Trump says the people who “thought Epstein was the greatest guy on earth, only to drop him like a dog when things got too HOT” are “sleazebags.” Trump is criticizing people who…stopped hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein?

A government that can officially declare that Jesus is your savior can just as easily declare the opposite.

But sure, it's atheists and religious minorities saying "happy holidays" that's the REAL War on Christmas.

[butterfly meme] Is this ceremonial deism?

“We are blessed to share a nation and a savior”. Through the official messaging channels of a Cabinet-level department. Christian Nationalism 101.

I want to ask the flipside question: what will it take for wealthy progressives to fund the infrastructure and entities needed to identify, support, and sustain emerging voices on *our* side of the aisle?

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Yes, CECOT is a concentration camp in the guise of a prison. The Venezuelans were the first people to *ever* be released from CECOT since Bukele opened the prison in January 2023. Seriously. The first.

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Ah yes, the "two sides" of the GOP's bigotry: outright blood and soil religious ethnonationalism or conspiracy-addled eugenic antisemitism. Well at least he's staying neutral on that! Thanks, NYTimes.

At least we have the foreign press to tell us how it is

This to me is the biggest issue. These men spoke at grave risks to their own safety about being beaten, raped, and tortured at the order of the President of the United States. All of Weiss's odes to free speech and "dangerous ideas" is and has always been horseshit

Something which isn't always acknowledged is that "contrarian thinkers" are just regurgitating conventional wisdom with a little extra racism, and these forbidden views are generally expressed by the most platformed mainstream figures, like Pinker.

This is Bari Weiss in stonewalling, chin-out, "I won't let the haters get to me" mode. Whether she gets away with it will be determined by whether Sharyn Alfonsi's colleagues at 60 Minutes and CBS News decide to fight back. Pelley, Stahl, Cooper--this decision goes on everyone's permanent record.

The maga divide summarized: does the gutter racism that is the mortar of our coalition apply to Jews or not? And if it doesn’t do we mean that or are we just pretending for the moment?

CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls 60 Minutes story Weiss said investigation had to include comments from Trump administration 60M's ⁦‪Sharyn Alfonsi‬⁩ said multiple US agencies refused to comment - and this lets WH veto coverage My NPR story www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g...

God this is such a fucking bummer. The thing they think DEI is is actually what they are. Bari Weiss's talents are: getting rich people to give her money, and cosplaying as a "journalist" by using centrism and faux objectivity language to obscure her persistent bias and sizable incompetence.

So Bari Weiss’s first real editorial intervention at CBS is to repress coverage of American concentration camps.

Bari Weiss spiked the CECOT story because she wanted to have Stephen Miller included and demanded to control the language 60 Minutes used to describe the men who were brutally tortured after being sent to El Salvador without due process.

This email from Sharyn Alfonsi to her colleagues after Bari Weiss killed their @60minutes.bsky.social piece on CECOT is powerful and worth a full read. (h/t @yasharali.bsky.social)

The CBS reporter who led the story calls pulling it a "political" decision. "The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

told my landlord he no longer has to apologize for being white and he lowered my rent by 25%. told the grocer it's now the trump kennedy center and he sold me potatoes for $1. told PG&E it's a christian nation now and electricity is free. try it sometime

when they say "take the country back," they're not talking about winning elections

Right, this line Vance used was a very common line used by segregationists. Here's Rep. Mendel Rivers (D-SC) reacting to the Brown decision, which he said "would bring mongrelization of the Caucasian race. He added that he for one won't apologize for being a white man."

People are rightly disgusted by this speech, but it’s a measure of fascism’s normalization that many see this as more of the awful same rather than what I think most of us who’ve been reporting this beat hear it as: a significant calculated escalation. Full alert stuff.

Wow: Overt, unapologetic Christian nationalism from the Vice President here. Even Trump has stopped short of saying something this explicit on the topic while President.

White Christian Nationalism is an authoritarian, fascist ideology. And the Vice President of the United States is an avowed, explicit White Christian Nationalist. (h/t @atrupar.com)

the vice president is a klansman

Fact check: No.

I wrote about the conservative quest to restore the "true" Constitution, the Antebellum Constitution, shorn of the egalitarian nonsense in the Reconstruction Amendments, a document that replaces equality with a society of dominators and the dominated. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

I am committed to vigorously defending Minnesota’s medical providers who do incredible work to treat and care for all Minnesotans, including our trans neighbors. I have already taken the Trump Admin to court to stop them from scapegoating the trans community. I will not hesitate to do so again.

Math is woke now

there is really no difference between the current administration and having the country run by david duke

This is precisely the intention of vouchers. They are an elaborate plot to destroy the public education system, which is part of a larger plot to enslave the American population

The Party of Religious Freedom™* (* as long as you're a white Christian)

Elon's little serfs are quite literally begging journalists to come back because every publicly available source of data shows people have fled the platform and young people won't use it. They are literally begging regular people to come back. Don't do it! It is a website by and for actual Nazis!

Disgusting, unvarnished bigotry.

At a time when religious nationalism is on the rise both in the United States and around the world, it is especially vital—and urgent—that religious minorities and the nonreligious are represented by a commissioner with Rachel’s clarity, courage, and commitment to religious equality.

This shouldn't be news but it is: The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom finally appointed a well-known defender of church/state separation. It's about damn time. www.friendlyatheist.com/p/rachel-las...

To give you a sense of how big a departure this year, the government doesn't do this for wanted criminals.

Say it with me, Democrats: "Because Donald Trump is a fraud and a crook who surrounds himself with frauds and crooks. He doesn't care about you. He only cares about making a buck — even if it means lying to you, cheating you, and stealing from you."

This is incredibly welcome news. Congratulations to Rachel on her appointment.

You may be relieved (but not surprised) to know this little volume will convince no one who wasn’t already solidly on the Christian Right anyway and just wondering whether they ought to adopt this particular label. Here’s my endorsement: “Refreshingly trite in its dishonesty.” —Samuel L. Perry