honestly I wish outlets like Wired would feature people who AREN'T surprised by this and DIDN'T spend years covering this ecosystem without recognizing the fundamental dynamics of power I can tell you exactly why it was missed:

Autistic and neurodivergent people deserve far better than a government looking to prevent their existence, let alone one that will invent fictitious ways to do so that puts everyone in danger

It's the death of irony that the elected and appointed members of our government responsible for this have spent the day playing Pastor-in-Chief. Preach to the mirror. I don't ever want to hear a lecture on salvation from any of these people.

watching even a few seconds of the kirk funeral makes it clear a large quantity of this country is ready for full on nazi authoritarianism and we have to really grapple with how much we need to put a stop to this as quickly as possible

the funny thing about the constant misappropriation of MLK is that the guy left a massive body of writing specifically aimed at explaining his views of those of the movement he represented to the broad public. it is extremely easy to know what the guy thought on a variety of subjects and yet

Check out our review paper published at PSPR! 🙂

Forms of Psychological Bias Against Transgender Women and Men and People with Nonbinary Gender Identities -- now online at Personality and Social Psychology Review. Main article: doi.org/10.1177/1088... Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... #SocialPsychology #IntergroupBias #Transgender #Nonbinary

Seriously, just look at Missouri, where an abortion rights ballot measure outperformed Democrats in 2024, because abortion rights are popular, and now their Republican legislature wants to override voters to put a repeal on the ballot next election, an attack on democracy.

genuinely believe that a large number of political, economic and media elites do not realize that nearly half the voting public did not vote for trump

Reading this unfortunately timely paper right now. Every sentence makes me want to cry. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Universities. Rural hospitals. Tech companies. Several sectors are going to be profoundly hurt by this. Not to mention the chaos of the moment as current H1-B owners scramble to get back to the U.S., cancel travel, etc. due to the uncertainty. An absolute mess. As intended.

As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.

It's also worth pointing out that even if these obvious shortfalls weren't relevant (they are), all this would prove is that the cops are racist in both red and blue states. "Crime rates" reflect who gets caught, accused, and convicted of a crime, not the actual perpetration of crimes.

this thread is a nice reminder that hanania is an extremely poor thinker who benefits from the fact that many commentators are innumerate and can be easily misled with simple data manipulation

This is insane. Let your friends and colleagues know.

Y'know, call me old-fashioned, but if the WWE is going to be setting American civics education, I demand that we at least have it be canonized that George Washington dressed up in a leotard and performed a reverse tombstone on King George because that'd be more historically reliable

The thing I want to impress on people is that this is not actually hypocrisy, but a frank admission of values and beliefs. They genuinely believe that accusing Republicans of milking crisis for political ends is more heinous than suggesting mass extrajudicial executions of unhoused people.

Meanwhile, Black women commentators who have no public or private record of journalistic misconduct are struggling to find jobs or actively getting fired

Including gillick competence in the heritage paper attempting to define so called trans motivated violence as terrorism is a huge tip that some british knobhead wrote it. Gillick isn't an American thing, it's a UK thing.

So I got bad news regarding black people: www.aclu.org/press-releas...

A thread of all the elected Democrats who've put out statements of support for trans people this week as Republicans manufacture a genocide: 🧵

If you're a trans person, you should prepare for the possibility that every groupchat and gathering is compromised by FBI informants attempting to enrage and entrap you into doing something incredibly stupid that they can arrest you for.

I think this comparison is largely right. Yes, it’s a replay of McCarthyism’s ugliest aspects but that was fueled by a widespread sense that the country faced dire external dangers while this is about a deeply unpopular president’s grudges.

Y'all realize, of course, that if they do this successfully, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from listing gay people, Black people, or people under 5'6" as violent extremists, right? This lets them brand entire demographics as terrorists under FBI labeling if it is not stopped.

Ezra Klein went beyond opposing political violence to extol Charlie Kirk for doing politics "exactly the right way," making up a fictional version of Kirk to praise. That distortion, with its indulgence of bad faith, is a perfect illustration of the larger media failure that helps Trump. My latest

It's crazy how incredibly weak and craven most US companies have turned out to be, in the face of authoritarianism... Zero sense of responsibility to their consumers. Also they are lying. Read what Kimmel actually said... It wasn't about Kirk. It was about cynical use of his death. Cowards.

This is what the conservative think tanks have been pushing all along. Been like this for six decades. Nothing's changed. They just now have the power to actually do it, because nobody will stop them.

Though the aftermath of shootings and other manmade crisis events is often filled w/ uncertainty (as facts of the matter surface & crystallize), the online dynamics — esp. efforts to determine who the perpetrator(s) were & what motivated them — are fairly predictable. bsky.app/profile/kate...

I wrote a paper about it (Twitter use during the Egyptian revolution) as a grad student. Now see it as one of a string of events that led to realization (by those in power and those who wanted it) that new and social media could/would be used to advance and/or defend their power.

We are witnessing a swift and sweeping consolidation of media (traditional and social) into the hands of a small number of billionaires who are actively aligned/aligning (both via free will and coercion) with Trump and his right wing political party. This is (I’ll say it) a fascist project.

Important point from Kate. Part of fascism is the control of information. They have a narrative/frame. And by controlling the media, they can more easily push that worldview. By controlling government information (and firing honest folks), they can limit accurate information.

Just a reminder of what comedians are allowed to say without having the FCC threaten to pull a broadcast license

“Debate Me” culture is not organic, endemic, or apolitical. This mode of high jacking discourse is and has been central to a 30-year conservative training program that has produced untold numbers of people to do this for every reason but “civil discourse”

The remarks weren’t “about Charlie Kirk,” they were about how this administration is using Kirk’s death as an excuse to shut down critics … and they responded by proving him completely correct.

I usually believe in "slow news" and tend to write about things the next day, but this Kimmel shit is such a mess, I put this together quickly. Key points: 1. Most people are pretending Kimmel said stuff he didn't. 2. SCOTUS just last year said that you can't do shit like this.

in light of the kimmel news, just a reminder that a few days ago a prominent fox news host literally called for killing homeless people. right afterward, someone shot up a couple homeless encampments. that fox news host still has his job.

I'd say they're honoring his memory by winning the war on the first Amendment that they've been fighting this whole time. Because what's changed here is that academic, media, and political institutions decided to surrender rather than fight.

What a relief that we've spent the past decade wringing our hands about censorious leftist college students

The next election is going to be a real-time stress test of Media Environment vs. Material Conditions.

I don’t know when it’s going to pop for a lot of normies that they are living under an authoritarian regime, but the cancellation of popular TV shows that make fun of the administration might do it www.vulture.com/article/abc-...

"What if the Democratic party’s problem is not that it is too left-leaning, or for that matter, too moderate, but instead is too disconnected from the lives of the people whom it wants to appeal to? " www.programmablemutter.com/p/not-popula...

I mourn a communal ideology of vaccination that promoted universal vaccine uptake as a way to offer protection to everyone, including those who can’t get vaccinated. It really feels like the anti-vaxxers won with their focus on individual choice with no regard for the harm it would cause others.

Very telling example of ideological blindspots. Dylan Roof not part of the extended MAGA cinematic universe for reasons you can figure out for yourself.

Gonna say this very very very slowly The main issue with putting your name on a protest list is not whether the government has your name It is you providing information about where you are/will be That is *legally* actionable

This is the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans will create entire alternative influence ecosystems with their think tanks to convince voters to back their ideas, no matter how unpopular those ideas start as. Democrats do this. This, ultimately, is why we're here.

James O'Brien "Ronald Reagan was not a vicious bully" Ronald Reagan, who liked to make homophobic jokes, said about gay men with AIDS "maybe the Lord brought down this plague". You can say he isn't Trump, but don't say he wasn't vicious

This is precisely the problem, the refusal by centrist elites to differentiate between challenging ideas and debunked lies. It's not "challenging" to hear that black people are stupid or gay people are degenerates, it's just wrong.

Clay Higgins saying there are no 230 protections for companies that don't suppress people celebrating Kirk's death is not just wrong on the law but a very clear attack on First Amendment protected speech. This is actual government jawboning in pursuit of silencing disfavored views.

It’s frustrating to have no idea what is true