I know BlueSky is considered the radical left but I have been around here for awhile and a lot of folks calling for revolution on here were in fact quite centrist a year ago.

The entire “Americans want pro corporate liberal centrism” project has failed, and an entire industry that runs on pretending otherwise is panicking. It isn’t just that they don’t want to move the party to the left; they don’t understand HOW to. They’ve literally never thought about it.

I’m no fancy politics guy, but i’d say any country where you can’t put a man in prison for accepting a literal bag full of cash in exchange for favors from the government is not, in fact, a functioning state.

PLEASE stop suggesting someone was "radicalized" bc they were not invited to a brunch. A rational, mature, well-socialized person without wildly autocratic tendencies does NOT "become radicalized" by an event or thing. They were already that way but kept in check by social norms we've abandoned.

I will keep saying this until the day I die: NOTHING IN THE WORLD IS APOLITICAL. The whole concept is grossly naive.

The UK is going to need to do better than that. Is there an arrest warrant out for some of these fascists yet?

The only thing that gives me some hope about that Kirk holy war sermon thing is that the place was clearly not that full because there were chairs at the ground level instead of standing room.

I still think back to mid 2020, more than half a decade ago, when I can still vividly recall thinking: this experience— which is turbo charging and front loading every awful thing about life in this country and its politics — will either force us to confront them and perhaps fix some things or…

To give a schematic overview of the past decade, the ZIRP era empowered Silicon Valley to build wealth and infrastructure equivalent to micro-states, which our neoliberal leaders, allergic as they are to the idea of state intervention, were all too happy to facilitate. (cont.)

Context: This thread was prompted by @senategabe.bsky.social asking me why Ed Davey is the only British MP calling for legal consequences for Musk, and the fact being that between Starlink, AI data-centres, Twitter, Musk’s position is essentially like a mob boss: “What the fuck are *you* gonna do?”

This is terrifying and all but there is going to be a day sometime soon where we are going to need this and there is no one to turn to.

Nobody who comes to regret their vote (and lots already do! it's no small chunk!) wants to hear oh well you were fooled but it's not your fault. They want the misgivings they already had, and their reasons for defecting, to be validated, and to throw their support to the people who got it right.

A democratic opposition coalition has to be big tent, for sure, but it doesn't grow by pulling its punches on the core message. You make the wannabe autocrat the bad guy, push down his popularity, denounce him as a malignant traitor, and rally against him. You can't half-ass triangulate that part.

These guys are the loyalists.

Aside from blatantly recruiting Nazi stormtroopers, “how are we going to afford student loan forgiveness?!” — where’s the media freakout and pearl-clutching about the price of this?

I've been getting really annoyed at elites saying "If It can happen to someone like me, it can happen to any of you" frame. It's already happening to everyone else. They are basically just asking everyone else to care about their problems while they do nothing about the rest of us.

It is nothing like that shutdown whatsoever.

TikTok and a few YouTube channels are basically the only place to get decent left of center video content. So of course the right is going after it and the Democrats helped because they were mad some leftists disagreed with them about Israel on there

Legitimately loved how people dismissed Mamdani's win because it is NYC and NYC is SO progressive. On what planet is this true? We are talking about New York City right?

This is hilarious.

“He’s recognizing the Democrats really don’t have enough leverage here to convince the American people that we should shut the government down,” Capito added. Yeah of course he is right. They are lying to the American people about why they are shutting down and clearly have zero interest.

Yeah - the takeovers aren't a *good* thing, but the era of the Big Three + cable channels + print magazines gatekeeping all political information is long over.

Philly npr/pbs exec made close to 7 figures for at least a decade and that is when i stopped giving a shit

While the media takeovers greatly concern me, I also think you can't really brainwash a country simply by giving them shitty Ellison approved propaganda.

Similar here: By official stats, my audience here 1/2 size of Xitter after 15 yrs. But I think it represents more actual people (vs bots, trolls, scammers, 'Lovely Ladies waiting for you,' Musk himself, etc) And beyond question far more engaged in actual response, discussion, etc. vs raw vitriol.

I love hearing Democrats on TV because they are just propaganda for Trump nowadays. "Look, the president did this totally insane thing today and we are in danger of becoming a dictatorship. I am also doing nothing about it."

I guess this wasn't covered in his "Antisemitism in America: A Warning" he released this year.

I've been trying to understand why this isn't generating as much fury as it should, and i think it's because there is a fundamental belief among many americans that the military can pretty much do whatever (which isn't entirely inaccurate.) that said, what the actual fuck.

i always go back to 2020 when the party coalesced around biden to beat bernie and I was like...oh, you CAN work in concert to beat back a threat! so, you're gonna use that same energy to beat maga too, right? seems like y'all got this? they didn't got it.

My experience with 2024 taught me that if you got an election where if someone wins its the end of your country, your country is already in some unbelievably deep shit.

Lmao.

I want to believe that the UK is going to avert their fate in a few years with Reform but it is really up to them. Nothing is going to swoop in and save it from fascism.

These are crazy margins.

This guy is one of the worst leaders I have ever seen. And I'm an American.

Of course some processes at NIH & in US science in general should be reformed. But uncritically presenting Jay Bhattacharya as a naive idealist rather than a hypocrite & political operative charged with NIH’s destruction is wildly divorced from reality. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/o...

A lot of non-Americans feel embarrassed by their own fixation with the US. They shouldn’t.

Sean Casten reminds me of all the people in DC I met who act super friendly and well meaning but then after awhile you notice they never listen to anyone.

True. Our banks, finances, technological solutions and security measures are inextricably linked to the U.S. We may not like it, but in many ways, what happens there is almost as important as what happens in our own country.

Something I am very much interested is how the United States completely collapsing into fascism affects its former "allies". The US is directly attacking these countries using all of its powers and that doesn't tend to engender kinship in beliefs.

I keep coming back to this post because it is so absurd. John Lewis forgave George Wallace, not Bull Connor, many years later because he came to Lewis and asked for forgiveness. Lewis believed he had real remorse and forgave him. Trump has never apologized and is actively gearing up for war.

Look, I’m no historian, but I did read both volumes of March, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened with Connor.

The argument makes democracy a binary, as opposed to a continuum. Sure, America can be considered a democracy even if cops racially profile and abortion rights are severely curtailed. But people who want a fuller democracy understandably aren't eager to vote for candidates who support such policies.

No, you said it better! During the Biden years and when I worked at the Post, I used to describe the position of many white center-left readers as, "Democracy dies if you criticize the sitting president too much or black activists speak too loudly about racism." It was full democracy--for some.

It is literally impossible to imagine Biden ever encouraging something like this.

The last pro-Bolsonaro protests took place in São Paulo and Rio. Today's protests took place in all state capitals and the federal district, as well as in other large cities throughout Brazil. And the Brazilian Congress has always been dominated by the center-right and right-wing.

the Brazilian right is attempting to pass measures through the legislature to shield Bolsonaro and other legislators from the legal consequences of the failed coup, for which Bolsonaro was recently sentenced to 27 years. these photos are of the massive protests in response.

There is such a contradiction in "It can never happen in MY country because unlike the US, we do not believe we are exceptional" If that were true then it could absolutely happen to your country.

Word. A thing I'm in the middle of on the daily is the core functions of the federal government. I work in Medicaid/CHIP and HHS. If those institutions fall (and they're being actively dismantled right now), millions of people will be hurting, including a lot of kids.

While I think Brazil did the right thing with Bolsonaro and it would be insane to have done otherwise, a country is in a danger zone when elections become so existential. It is very hard to keep the ideals of a democracy going when one major party is a risk to the nation itself.