“Despite being the highest-profile supposedly “worst of the worst” deportees during the Trump administration, none of the CECOT deportees appear in the DHS “worst” arrests database” www.cato.org/blog/dhs-doe...

Hand in hand the family dances through the house to a Christmas song in the opening scene of Fanny and Alexander {Sweden, Ingmar Bergman dir., 1982)

ICE shooting in Glen Burnie leaves 2 people hospitalized, officials say, Alex Mann reports. (via @thebaltimorebanner.com)

In a profile of Stephen Miller with @swin24.bsky.social, we reported he’s privately laughed off immigrant families’ “sob stories.” www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol... Speaking last night on Fox about the spiked CECOT story, Miller laughed about how ‘60 Minutes’ is “trying to tell sob stories."

Agencies across the Trump administration have taken out subscriptions in recent months to news organizations that officials had very publicly cut off this year, reversing an earlier decision to cancel them.

“We’ve seen rapid normalization of abuses we once associated with authoritarian regimes or the old Iron Curtain countries. It’s now routine for masked, unidentifiable government agents to sweep people off the street and whisk them away in unmarked vehicles.”

The Despot fails to silence the lawyer.

Jack Goldsmith @execfunctions.bsky.social is now out with an analysis of yesterday's Court ruling disallowing for now Trump's National Guard deployment in Illinois. He notes that yesterday's ruling should terminate for now Trump's Guard call-ups in California and Oregon. Other highlights: /1

ICE is out of control.

Charles Kuralt, 1964, on Christmas among poor people in Kentucky coal country. Mentioned in passing: a local charity raised money for school lunches by selling bootleg liquor. Here’s to reducing poverty in 2026. (27:11)

Heritage Foundation implosion has been a wakeup call for some conservatives about dangerous trends on Trump-era right. I hope they will see that nationalism is inherently prone to bigotry, and reject it in favor of universal principles of the Founding: reason.com/volokh/2025/...

Pending rule from Department of Education would bar employers from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program if they have a "substantial illegal purpose," which turns out to relate to administration bugaboos like abetting DEI, gender change therapy and assistance to illegal immigrants.

Side-Walking Problems marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

1/HUGE: Supreme Court denies the Trump Admin a stay of the order barring deployment of the National Guard in Chicago, with five Justices accepting, on a preliminary basis, the district court's refusal to accept Trump's purported basis for deploying the Guard. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Justice Alito seems to have missed that the government's account of the Marimar Martinez shooting has been completely discredited.

Utterly lawless: "Agents lined up Latino workers and released people they said were U.S. citizens. They questioned and detained 57 people, including people who said only that they wanted a lawyer." www.syracuse.com/news/2025/11...

Ever year, thousands of trucks are involved in fatal accidents. In 2022, fatal large truck crashes peaked at an average 16 deadly crashes per day. In the last few months, less than a dozen such crashes involved people who DHS claims are unlawfully present. From that, a moral panic has been created.

Modern surveillance tools like automated license plate readers “let the gov’t monitor millions of people with ease. Law enforcement can track movements, detect faces, record conversations— & store such information indefinitely.” Cato brief urges Eleventh Circuit to recognize Fourth Amendment claim.

Will Republican congress critters support this while their party controls the White House? And will Democratic congresscritters support it once THEIR party gets control. Ay, there's the rub

of the new media organizations that are absolutely worthy of your support, i think the unpopulist should be on your list

My take on Gordon Wood's recent speech emphasizing America's role as a "creedal nation," pushing back on those who claim we should be an ethno-nationalist state. Wood is leading living historian of the Founding: reason.com/volokh/2025/...

Index of human freedom: "The United States, which ranked 8th in 2000, ranks 15th in the current index." Tabulation is based on numbers from 2023, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available. [Ian Vásquez on joint Fraser Institute/Cato Institute report]

Restoring Bivens rights: one bill "would allow citizens to sue for damages resulting from constitutional violations committed by federal officers," while the other "would create a cause of action against federal law enforcement agencies and police depts for constitutional violations."

ICE agents illegally break into a woman's bathroom in a NY nutrition bar manufacturing plant. "Pull up your pants," says a male agent. The agents only had a warrant to review employer documents. They didn't have a warrant to search for, detain, or arrest anyone there.

Quick explainer for why this is a big deal, a thread.

about Trumpism. “No enemies to the extreme right” but Liz Cheney, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, MTG, John Bolton, and any other conservative who gets crosswise of Trump is an enemy and a traitor.

who shared the video by bringing a copyright claim probably is higher than normal as a result. That's particularly true if you've got any sort of profile or following at all. Fair use is a defense and a complicated one, so no magic bullet to keep you safe, but if you're just posting it by itself ...

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.

Chicken with chestnuts, apricots and saffron, served with rice #BlueskySupperClub #FoodSky

"For a minute there, Blanche thought he could get away with lying about it. He forgot that the boss had already spilled the beans." [@saletan.bsky.social @thebulwark.com]

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

Here is something to help your quality of search experience slightly: When typing your query, add "-ar" to the end. This suppresses the useless AI slop.

Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

Trump admin. has dropped its plan to deport heroic Chinese dissident Guan Heng - likely because of massive public outcry. We must similarly press for reversal of Trump's many other cruel efforts to deport dissidents and victims of persecution back to their oppressors: reason.com/volokh/2025/...

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

Rauch @jonrauch.bsky.social contra Lindsey @niskanencenter.bsky.social at @theunpopulist.net www.theunpopulist.net/p/lets-not-g...

Trump's cruelly harmful new expanded travel ban further underscores his unconstitutional claim to virtually unlimited executive power over immigration. See my discussion here, which builds on excellent post by my @cato.org colleague @davidjbier.bsky.social : reason.com/volokh/2025/...

Brussels sprouts and pork belly cubes pan-fried with garlic, chopped hazelnuts and thyme. #BlueskySupperClub #foodsky

The #StopTheSteal crowd is claiming that 315,000 votes were recorded improperly in Fulton County, Georgia in 2020, thus somehow proving that tRuMp WoN!!! Nonsense: “sloppy paperwork is not equivalent to tampering with ballots,” and no evidence of the latter is evident. [Jason Shepherd, PeachPundit]

Trump: "We should take stakes in companies when people need something." Is he planning to overthrow the leftist Maduro regime in Venezuela, or merge with it?

Trump's new executive order will ban, over the next three years, more than 140,000 spouses, fiancés, and minor children of US citizens and legal permanent residents. Nearly 100,000 nuclear family of US citizens. Unconscionable

A brief survey of New Jersey public corruption, highlights only, since there's a lot of it [Chris Edwards and Yasmeen Kallash-Kyler, @cato.org]

Like Brianna Lyman, I’m a descendant of the founders of Hartford, and specifically of many, many generations of New England Lymans. And I’m grateful that America is a country that’s welcomed and benefited from immigration from those generations to this.

Scott Alexander: the case for not hating Boomers

"A hundred years after Kollontai and Lenin railed against traditional, economically motivated marriage, it had become women’s ultimate fantasy" www.newyorker.com/culture/the-... via @newyorker.com

A reminder if you're visiting New York for the holidays that the city's unnaturally high hotel prices result from a shortage of room space that was purposely engineered by city law, policy, and regulation, much of it at the behest of interest groups.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...