Another phony promise from a phony regime — they loot the treasury for themselves while benefits for regular folks are always just around the corner

Fun fact: It’s easy to keep premiums low when you only have to insure healthy people.

“I’m pretty f*ckin’ redneck. I grew up farming asparagus and sweet corn in Wisconsin. All these f*ckers i grew up with didn’t like Donald Trump back then — we didn’t like anybody that 💩 on a gold toilet. Now all these f*ckers are in love with him. I don’t know what happened.”

It's not an imperial presidency, a la 1974, that is at issue. It is an authoritarian one, which simply acts on deeply rooted preferences, as expressed in Project 2025, or the whims, resentments, and wholly self-interested motives of Trump and those around him.

NEW: RFK Jr.’s HHS made moves this week to restrict youth access to gender-affirming care. HHS said the policy changes were based on a peer-reviewed report. We looked at the peer reviews. They’re devastating. One called the report “a dangerous incursion of politics into science and medicine.”

One day, there will be a study on why so many smart people threw away their principles and careers to serve a charlatan.

The articles in this issue didn't just use Nazi imagery, they actively called for mass execution of people they view as immoral, abortion and gender affirming care providers, sex workers, LGBTQ people etc. It's blatantly fascist propaganda that has no place at Harvard.

honestly, “it’s because they’re still mad about the New Deal” is a pretty good guiding hypothesis for a lot of stuff

the look on his face when he realized what he'd done

Nature is healing. After a couple of brief episodes of rationality, Rand Paul is back to spouting stupidity.

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 cannot emphasize enough that the White House has no authority to withhold funds from the Smithsonian. It can, however, try to persuade/threaten Congress to reduce future funding.

Like I wrote for The New Republic: it's all just vibes. No one gives a damn what he does or says, as long as his admin is hurting the people it's supposed to be hurting. Immigrants, transgender people serving their country, and gender variant kids. Because none of them deserve to live in MAGA-land.

I feel like I'm going to get a lot of use out of this Pluribus screencap

A November YouGov poll had ICE favorability underwater by 14 points among all Americans and 37(!) points among political independents today.yougov.com/politics/art...

Those who speculated wildly about the Brown shooter without knowing any facts got things wrong—and it is important that they lose their credibility because of it, Graeme Wood argues.

John Roberts wanted to create an America where presidents of Roberts' political party can run afoul of the law with very few ways to stop him. And he succeeded.

The name Santander comes immediately to mind www.mlbtraderumors.com/2025/12/pira...

The contrast between ordinary citizens courageously confronting Trumpist bullying, and billionaires and CEOs obsequiously bending the knee– this spectacle in its clear simplicity provides a lesson we should not forget.

Thread

In YouGov polling this week, less than half of Republicans said they strongly approved of Trump. www.ms.now/opinion/poll...

“Does discrimination drive alienation?” is a great question and it feels like there are some other groups that might make clearer case studies than white men

Here’s an article that I wrote five years ago in which I call MYSELF Cassandra. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

“Politicians should do what wins elections” is asinine for moral reasons but also, no one knows what will win an election! Yglesias et al keep acting like there’s some obvious set of policies or words that will guarantee victory but Harris basically did what they wanted and she lost.

‘But but… something something… Mamdani… intifada…something something’

If you're not trans, I don't think I can fully explain how important this is. It's so powerful that one of the most circulated science media publications in the world has come out and said "trans children are real and providing transition care improves their lives." That's groundbreaking.

One of the darkest days in franchise history

The White House has been caught. The administration inserted a photo of Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross into the Epstein files and falsely implied it showed them with victims. In reality, it’s a publicly available fundraiser photo featuring Jackson and Ross’s own children.

That's why I think affordability is a bridge into the frame of "fairness" as explained by @antoniascatton.bsky.social. It's a mental model people get, and it's a lot of people are complaining about when it comes to affordability. It ALSO tees up attacks on both inequality AND corruption.

This is a good discussion about "affordability" between @perrybaconjr.bsky.social, @whstancil.bsky.social and @brianbeutler.bsky.social that gets into how this issue can be a trap for Democrats.

The Epstein file is the only thing Trump has ever taken his name off of

I love my two blackout drunk Minnesota sons

Lib Dems call for inquiry into hostile foreign state interference to include US

Remember all the bullshit about how he didn't even accept a salary? Anyway, full admission here that no one at DoJ so much as sneezes unless he says so.

Obligatory leopards snark, but also, you know the clock is already running on how long it takes JD to clap back

Former NSA employee (16 years) with a pro tip for you. Released controlled document on the left, Epstein on the right. See the difference? In real redactions, some words, headers, and bits will almost always still be visible, but especially classification headers. These documents are UNCLASSIFIED

Oh, so now bomb threats are bad. She didn't seem to give a shit when she incited them against schools and Children's hospitals.

People raising that Epstein files show Trump met a 14 year old victim of Epstein’s. Actually this was known from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. But corporate media barely covered it. At least nbc news covered it years ago

listening to this pod and they mention in the course of the talk whether anyone would put an Archie Bunker type on TV anymore and yet overlook the obvious answer - yes The answer is "Last Man Standing" in which Tim Allen plays himself & it looks a lot like Archie podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a...

JFK’s niece: h/t @jamiegangel.bsky.social

Bannon’s like, “What can I say to make people forget that I knowingly coached a sexual predator to help him repair his image?”

Just about everyone who hitches themselves to this sociopath comes to regret it. "Allies privately acknowledged that years of intraparty fighting and a series of embarrassing disappointments at the hands of Mr. Trump had taken a toll." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/n...

racist and fascist goobers are constantly imagining that the colonized are doing to them what they've already done to the colonized. think of war of the worlds; this terror that the invaders will be invaded.

the goal is to reverse victim and victimizer so that it seems reasonable or necessary to commit further atrocities. think Hitler claiming Jews intended to exterminate the Aryan race as a prelude to the Nazi holocaust.

I found it. The Bari Weiss/CBS News town hall promo for feminism does indeed use a 1964 photo of Beatles fans.

" ‘Between democracy and totalitarianism,’ says Mussolini, ‘there can be no compromise.’ The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live side by side. So long as democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form, totalitarianism is in deadly danger.

From a focus group of Gen Z Republicans. (www.city-journal.org/article/manh...) Tell me again about how Zohran Mamdani is the big threat to Jewish thriving in the US today.

And before you say, "well this is the fringe, they don't represent the mainstream GOP": 1. Are you new here? 2. This was in the paper run by the Manhattan Institute, the same org Christopher Rufo--who has perhaps more power over higher ed in the US than anyone else--helps lead. So, no. Not fringe.

But tell me more how it's the left who needs to be "civil" and "respectful of different viewpoints"