CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow embodied what a journalist should be: someone who holds power to account instead of capitulating to it. Over 70 years later, his segment denouncing Joe McCarthy’s congressional witch hunts rings truer than ever.

Holy shit... www.youtube.com/watch?v=gieT...

steady.page/de/nminkmar/... Sehr guter Artikel von @nminkmar.bsky.social

"Ich würde auch von Hartz V sprechen, weil das Bürgergeld hatte ja eigentlich den Sinn, insbesondere für die SPD Hartz IV zu überwinden. Und diese Prestigeangelegenheit der SPD hat man jetzt wie eine heiße Kartoffel fallen lassen." Stimme dem Armutsforscher Christoph Butterwegge 100% zu.

Just bone chilling. And when the imprisonment of critics is combined with his offer to enrich and immunize his loyalists, this is how democracies die fast. But it's still our choice. Don't let him silence you.

Wichtiger Thread zur Nobelpreisträgerin Maria Corina Machado und was daran so problematisch ist, ihr diesen Preis zu geben

Rechtsnationalistische Bolsonaro-Trump-Freundin bekommt Friedensnobelpreis. Und alle sind happy. Das zeigt, wie bekloppt und maßlos vieles geworden ist.

Democrats' version of triangulation is really just about punching left. It's as much running right by rote as it is an actual strategy Our @dylangyauchl.bsky.social makes the case today in @prospect.org! 🧵 prospect.org/politics/cen...

If you come for my people, you come through me.

I continue to just respect the hell out of this guy

we are breaking new ground in Civ-Mil relations (I feel extremely nauseous ngl)

When a conservative president loses the country stars, that ain't good.

What's happening in Chicago is not normal. The arrest of Alderperson Fuentes is just the latest example of how far Noem and Bovino are willing to go to ignore the rule of law. We must all speak up.

Herdecke: Merz verurteilt Messer-Angriff auf Bürgermeisterin von Herdecke

Ich bin schockiert über die Nachricht, dass Iris Stalzer vor ihrem Wohnhaus in Herdecke niedergestochen wurde. Ich hoffe, der oder die Täter werden schnell ausfindig gemacht und Iris Stalzer kann sich von diesem brutalen Angriff erholen. www.tagesschau.de/inland/regio...

Coalitions are a funny thing

After a month of recovery, 12-year-old Lydia Kaiser—who was shot in the head at Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis—is back in class 🧡 Lydia was shot while shielding a younger student from the attack and suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Bari Weiss was named the editor-in-chief of CBS News, cementing the rightward shift of one of media's most storied newsrooms

Jane Fonda and hundreds of members of the entertainment industry have revived the Committee for the First Amendment, a free-expression group that was originally formed by Hollywood stars including her father, Henry Fonda, during the McCarthy era.

Democracy depends on its citizens, especially those with a public platform, holding the line on what we consider beyond the pale, especially when extremism has broad support. It’s an obligation we must accept. Who are we to draw the line? We are citizens who demand to live in a democratic Republic.

It’s true that those who think Trump is beyond the pale cannot claim to be representing “the country.” But neither can the Trumpists. America is deeply divided. There has never been a consensus that the nation should exist as a pluralistic democracy. And those who abhor that vision are now in power.

Too many prominent liberals and Democratic politicians are eager to sacrifice a substantive commitment to democratic values and principles on the altar of “unity”: No more drawing lines, too divisive! They are not fostering understanding – just helping to normalize Trumpism.

As America falls apart, Ezra Klein aspires to be the voice of reason and demonstrate that he can still operate across the divide and do politics where everyone else has given up on it. But creating a sanitized fiction of the other side as the basis of your politics is not realism – it’s folly.

It is certainly worth grappling with the reasons why Trump still garners mass support beyond the circles that are ideologically committed to destroying modern pluralism. But that’s a very different endeavor from simply using Trump’s mass appeal as a justification to normalize MAGA.

White innocence is achieved not only by justifying and apologizing widespread support for political extremism – but in this case, by decreeing that whatever a significant portion of “regular folks” are supporting categorically cannot be extremism in the first place.

This tendency to latch onto any argument that helps to normalize Trump and his supporters is also indicative of how strong the incentives are within mainstream discourse to sanitize the political choices of white conservative Christians: As “regular folks,” they can do no wrong.

Remarkably, such arguments also ignore that America has had plenty of experience with broad popular support for state authoritarianism in its own history. There is nothing old, stable, or consolidated about *multiracial, pluralistic* democracy. It started less than 60 years ago.

This argument builds on a mythical tale of America’s past, a distorted perspective on U.S. history describing democracy as old, consolidated, and exceptionally stable, imagining the country and its people as basically immune to authoritarianism: It cannot happen here!

Since the mainstream discourse stipulates that extremism must be “fringe” in these United States, anything that has broad support is reflexively sanitized as *not* extremism. This apologist sleight of hand is often deployed to provide cover for extreme forces within the Republican Party.

This tendency to obscure the radicalization of the Right, to normalize Trump because of his continued mass appeal, to legitimize rightwing extremism, to accommodate and launder Trumpism, is a pervasive feature of the Trump era – it is one of its core pathologies.

Klein’s musings about redrawing the line are a manifestation of a pervasive tendency in elite circles to accommodate rather than fight back, to acquiesce rather than stand firm. It is exactly the wrong lesson to learn from a decade of Trumpism as the dominant force on the Right.

Something Ezra Klein hinted at in his conversation with TNC last week is still gnawing at me: That Liberals / Democrats may need to redraw the boundaries of what is acceptable so that Trump is no longer excluded. I think that is precisely the wrong answer to our current situation.

ICYMI yesterday: I wrote about Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the struggle to define the boundaries of what is acceptable in America – and why democratic citizens have an obligation to hold the line on what we consider beyond the pale. Some thoughts from my new piece: 🧵