There was a lot of fantasizing over easy "boots-free" regime change in Iraq in the 1990s, esp via a "rollback" strategy that would theoretically involve the US using just enough force to tip the balance against Saddam. Equal level of delusion here about the day after and the unpredictable/

Trump: "We're gonna do things to Nigeria that Nigeria's not gonna be happy about, and may very well go into that now disgraced country guns a-blazing..." Is he serious? Is he not? No one knows. The NIgerian government does not seem to be taking him too seriously.

Some on the far right want to repeal the 19th amendment. Many more share a coercive, patriarchal view of women. I wrote about this and how the far right sees subjugating women as key to building the sort of electorate they need to win. @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/women-should...

Of course I'm worried about socialism. I mean, just imagine if Mamdani one day becomes President and nationalizes industry, imposes historic tax hikes, goes after the media, builds a secret national police force, militarizes the country, and sends people to camps.

Gosh, I wonder who'll win

"How would less fortunate corporations like Walmart, McDonald’s, and Amazon get by without SNAP and other programs to subsidize their sub-poverty level wages that leave many of their workers reliant on benefits?"

Absolutely. Wins make the non-inevitability clear. But we did have one of these wins back in April already, & then we <totally stopped talking about it> & have obsessed 100% about the NYC mayoral race, because our National Conversation™️ on politics is incredibly parochial: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Q: Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?" Trump: "No. I think they haven't gone far enough”

NYC is going to have the world's biggest media-manufactured crime panic in history the second Mamdani is elected. They aren't even going to wait until he is inaugurated. Whether or not you like the guy, you need to start preparing now for the fire hose of disinformation that is about to activate.

US citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents children would be coming to get bus, lawyers say

Leopards eating faces, Democratic Party edition

I’ve been in conversations with some very smart folks about the “to moderate or to not to moderate” discourse plaguing the Dems right now and I have some thoughts. First: these are all good smart people who are trying to save American democracy…

"To Trump, Reagan’s composed performance, with its affirmation of consensus, is almost intolerable. It must be discredited not because it is inaccurate but because it represents an entirely different model of what presidential authority looks like." -Jake Lundberg www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

My office captured several stills from today’s @dhsgov.govmirrors.com video supporting Gregory Bovino. The imagery is deeply troubling; it evokes another era when masked government agents rounded up so-called “undesirables" (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence).

Kevin Roberts' defense of Nick Fuentes is a watershed moment: the right has officially declared open, unabashed Hitlerism to be an acceptable position in their coalition www.vox.com/politics/466...

All a straight white man has to do is grow a beard and put on jeans and flannel, and voila: he has automatic Blue Collar Credibility, even if he actually grew up with a trust fund. ONY white males get the Assumed Blue Collar nod simply by putting on an outfit, too. Doesn’t work for anyone else.

I'm gonna try to articulate something I've been thinking about for a while, regarding *why* disillusionment, distrust, & dissatisfaction with democracy are rising. Almost everything I read takes this phenomenon as an exogenous shock, assuming no one chose to make it so. I suspect that's incomplete.

Some see the mass appeal of today's rightwing politics in status anxiety, as formerly dominant groups resent their relative decline. It's illuminating to extend Du Bois's "psychological wage" to capture how right populists generate both demand for this wage & give themselves a monopoly to supply it.

Autocrats, at times, use the military to shut down their parliaments and rule by executive orders. That Johnson chooses to shut down Congress so willingly is just a breathtaking abdication of responsibility to represent the body politic. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/u...

None of you will be laughing when Trump finds Iraq's WMD's in Venezuela.

“Nobody has heard of” Lesotho, President Trump joked, to the laughter of lawmakers. He’d just cut aid to the country. Weeks later, he announced a 50% tariff on exports from “the denim capital of Africa.” Today, Lesotho is under a state of disaster. I recently traveled there for @bloomberg.com:

Reagan was for free trade. I have shown my students plenty of other Reagan speeches in class. Hell, he voted for FDR on the issue of trade. The most MAGA leaning students just end up hating Reagan too.

ok who did this? ☹️

The United States now has an immigration enforcement apparatus that, if it were its own national military, would be the thirteenth-most-heavily funded military in the world. And the president of the U.S. wants to turn that heavily funded, extramilitary against you. trib.al/j6h0dad

US Caribbean boat bombing campaign keeps getting worse. Colombia says US killed Colombian fishermen in Colombian waters. Add international incident to illegal, unethical, and bad strategy. This isn’t national security, it’s murder. Who’s selecting these targets? Is this why Adm. Holsey resigned?

Remember April 2009 when about 250,000 people took to America’s streets in Tea Party rallies and the media was like “oh man, the Dems are in trouble?” Approximately 28X as many people took to the streets to protest Trump yesterday. Didn’t even make the NYT front page.

A gentleman holds up a “no dictators” sign next to Pikachu and Cartman

Haynes attends the same church as Hegseth, so not looking forward to when the US government tries the civil war again, this time on the side of slavery.

Trump's masked thugs in Chicago. These citizens saved this man from being kidnapped. Look at the terror on his face. Trump's ICE America.

Trump's agents have been snatching people off the streets without due process — and over 170 US citizens have been caught in the mix. Outrageous and unacceptable. The lawlessness must end.

The issue with Venezuela is not regime change. It is what happens afterwards. Maduro is still popular with 20-30% of the population. If parts of the army and regime thugs go to ground, along with the drugs and drug money sloshing around in there, Colombia, Brazil and Guyana can be also destabilized.

Important: Sen Chris Murphy just sent pointed questions to Kristi Noem about DHS's account of shooting of US citizen by Trump's paramilitary forces in Chicago. The official line is imploding. Murphy wants Noem to explain why DHS misled. More like this, Ds. New piece: newrepublic.com/article/2019...

A great read! Proposes what I think is the right answer on the grand coalition: fusing the anti-authoritarian and anti-oligarchy resistances

The U.S. kills and captures citizens from another nation, either in their own territorial waters, or in international waters. These people may or may not (because we do not know) be commiting a crime that has not been proven, and possibly cannot be proven will actually be committed in the U.S.

Two things I read today: "Vice President JD Vance warned that U.S. troops stationed in Germany could be jailed for a “mean tweet.” "US revokes visas over comments made about Charlie Kirk's death" The hypocrisy.

👇🧵🎯 Again, this all boils down to the central crisis being the total failure of Article I of the Constitution. An imperial presidency unbound from legislative constraint & unsanctioned for violating laws & ratified treaties makes it impossible for 🇺🇸 to make credible commitments in int’l relations.

In 2020 conservatives were outraged by this picture of an armed cop deporting a child who came to the US illegally. Today, conservatives would cheer it. What happened? I have a theory . . . www.thebulwark.com/p/elian-gonz...

Remember we're already in a world of Kavanaugh stops based solely on ethnicity. If you are from a targeted group, this can happen to you no matter what your citizenship status is. What if you forget your wallet at home? You could end up in detention for days or worse.

I feel that my assignments in Terrorism and American foreign policy are putting students into moral hazards and I hate it

How W. E. B. Du Bois responded to government policing of "anti-American" sentiment during the 1910s: "I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, 'We are seeking to have the Constitution of the United States thoroughly and completely enforced.' ”

This is some of the best political news I've seen in a very long time. There's a clear a way to end the Citizens United precedent by changing state incorporation laws - and now luminaries in both parties are forcing a vote on it in the 2026 election.

Free Bob Menendez?

If red state schools accept this we are going to get a two-tiered system of higher ed. One set of states will be based in empirical reality and the other will be subject to the whims of a conspiratorial movement that is increasingly detached from facts.

There is no amount of open corruption that will wake up Americans. That family has realized this crucial truth. They broke Senate, media and Supreme Court. Nobody dares to stand up. We live in a Republic of fear and cowardice.

Trump: "Literally, you walk over from Iran to Qatar. You can walk it in one second. You go, boom, boom, and now you're in Qatar." Qatar and Iran do not share a land border.

Yesterday I was told that the class I’m scheduled to teach this month, Confronting Oppression & Injustice, is no longer part of our curriculum. This is a required class yet there was no discussion, no faculty vote, just an email saying the class no longer exists. This is what it’s like in Texas now.

The Congressional GOP rhetoric labeling the No Kings protest as “terrorist” & participants as “rabid” is a pretty clear attempt to encourage & justify violence against an event that hasn’t even happened yet.

Regrettably relevant research today Disguised Repression: Targeting Opponents with Nonpolitical Crimes to Undermine Dissent www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...