Harvard fired a librarian for taking down a poster of Israeli hostages.

A recent report showed that the destruction of just one USAID program, the anti-AIDS PEPFAR initiative, would lead to the deaths of one million people *every year* www.vox.com/future-perfe...

The coolest thing I’ve seen today is that a bunch of volunteer public health professionals and developers have restored the CDC website from before January 20th 2025. This differs from an archive in that they want to rebuild the links between pages and replicate the full website.

Trump is the author of this hell but he writex it with tools preserved, expanded, and ultimately sustained by first Obama and later Biden. Detaining a legal permanent resident for campus protest, under the flimsy pretense of aiding terror, can only be done with tools Bush built & Obama sustained.

It's worth pointing out that the Nixon administration aggressively tried to deport John Lennon (who was here on a visa, not a green card) because of his political speech -- namely, opposing the Vietnam War. The FBI also surveilled him closely at the time. There's a great documentary about it:

30 years ago, we did. They were called "local newspapers." Then the Telecom Act of 1996 allowed essentially unlimited corporate consolidation of media outlets and they killed off local news in the space of a single generation.

Dude was visiting his fiancé, who lives in Vegas. His English isn’t good so he misunderstood the border goons when they asked where he lives, he said Vegas, they took him away for questioning without a translator and now he’s been in a jail for two weeks.

"The move by Trump’s Homeland Security Department is the single most anti-worker and anti-union presidential action since Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981." prospect.org/labor/2025-0...

elon musk is probably the current largest threat to the climate, as he dismantles every climate program and defunds all climate science research supporting his downfall, even if it takes tesla with him, is a great pro-climate action. people can buy other evs that don’t enrich tyrannical nazis

You'd have to be completely ignorant to think that mass layoffs of federal workers in agencies such as the Veterans Administration, the Social Security Administration, the IRS, the FAA, the FDA (food/drug safety), eliminating USAID and the Dept of Education is "theatrical."

ICYM this about the legislation that would leave EPA unable to use its collection of 500+ chemical assessments for rules, regs, permits or enforcement. Or to map out the nationwide cancer risk!

The New York Post attempted one of their infinite hit pieces on @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social, and the result is quite funny.

This is not a thing that happens if children had real human rights.

I think the more horrifying thing to sit with is this: the every-day operations of the jail, prison, and immigration detention systems are and have been dehumanizing, and we built them, and they lend themselves seamlessly to the fascist business of stealing and caging even more people

The DIY pandemic continues apace. No more free COVID tests through USPS, no more reduced cost or free COVID vaccines for un(der)insured people, and the last effective anti-virals are now $$$$/dose.

The larger picture, as others have pointed out, is that the Biden administration and now the Trump administration have cast anyone who defends Palestine as "pro-Hamas" and anyone who defends the rights of the people saying it as "Hamas sympathizers" which makes it much easier to justify persecution.

This is the dark heart & power of the war on terror discourse: its capacity to magically transform political expression into terrorism, and therefore deny an entire class of speakers the right to speak. We are seeing it play out aggressively in real time right now and it is terrifying.

A reminder that a pro-Israel agitator drove his car into a line of Columbia student protesters last May and hit one of the people there to protect them. The charges against him were dropped.

and what might be typical is no less terrifying for anyone who has been moved through this system, taken to far-off and isolated detention centers with very limited access to family and to community support, and near-zero access to the press

"[T]he strike has been linked to the deaths of at least seven incarcerated people ... Someone dies inside a New York state prison every three days, and in most of these cases the general public never hears about it."

Recently, I’ve been really pushing back on the framing that all of this is “backlash” to #MeToo. Because the misogyny came first. When we call it backlash, we’re starting the story in the middle, which allows the perpetrators to cast themselves as victims.

The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder whose wife is eight months pregnant—is a blatant assault on the First Amendment and a sign of advancing authoritarianism under Trump. He must be released now.

In a note to colleagues, WaPo’s Ruth Marcus says she resigned from the paper after CEO Will Lewis killed a column she wrote expressing concern about the direction of the paper’s opinion section

Columbia's Provost evidently sent this message to faculty forbidding them from moving classes offline or canceling them amid ICE activity on campus.

Every person with a working brain should be chilled to the bone by the government’s illegal capture and disappearing of this man. And every educator who works on a college campus should be enraged at this institutional cowardice and ready acquiescence.

i think public servants are going to have to get comfortable with the idea of not leaving their work until they’re physically dragged out by security because there’s no legal authority for this and you’ve got to stand by your principles make them work for it, we’re behind you.

It’s getting real y’all. 97% of New York Magazine Union members just signed a pledge to walk out of work if we don’t get a fair contract from Vox Media. If you love @nymag.com and the work we do, sign our solidarity pledge to support us in the event of a walkout: nymagunion.org/reader-pledge

Elon Musk got so mad about the FAA's caution around his exploding rocket facility that he bribed Donald Trump to fire all the safety personnel there & now 60 people are dead.

The people who didn’t vote withheld their support not because they thought it was going to make something happen; people couldn’t stomach casting a vote for someone they knew wasn’t going to make anything happen but more death.

i thought this was a joke but it is not. the new secretary of transportation is also a former reality tv star

A good reminder about the need for people w/ experience and expertise running government agencies. Also why we need staff stability across Presidential transitions. The folks managing this, across the relevant agencies, are career staff because the new appointees have no idea what they're doing.

it is an enormous waste of time and energy trying to make people who will never respect you do so. look for the people who treat you well from the get-go and foster those relationships instead

Pretrial defendants, who are considered legally innocent, make up the vast majority of the local jail population in Maryland today. Unlike Maryland, Illinois has seen the intended results of bail reform: fewer people sitting in jail before trial. baltimorebeat.com/bail-remains...

In addition to everything else, all of these people are incompetent and useless at doing anything.

regular blogger: i don't want to suggest Altman is lying :/ maybe they work out generative AI :/ me:

don't view these recent attempts to cut all social services as "what trump voters deserve". view them as the opportunity to radicalize them. viewing them with disdain only strengthens their movement. do you want to be smug, or do you want liberation? you don't get to have both.

one extraordinary thing is that no one is discussing the fact that a foreign billionaire bought control of the US government by being more or less Donald Trump's sole donor as being anything particularly scandalous

people who say "they can't be serious fascists or pose a real threat, look what dinguses they are!" are unfamiliar with how authoritarianism actually works in practice newrepublic.com/article/1907... good @melissagiragrant.com piece:

Repeating the phrase "arts and culture" in my head with an extreme Masachusetts accent over and over again.

It’s really frustrating how even as so many people are working so hard for the rights of immigrants and trans people and everyone else this administration is endangering, Democratic politicians are like: “If they don’t knock it off, we will be forced to ask permission to tell them to knock it off!”

thinking again about how Elon went to one of Twitter's data centers and literally started unplugging servers at random. that's our model of government today medium.com/@noahkingdav...

ghosting someone you went out with once or twice is morally neutral but ghosting a good friend is a sign of deep cosmic rot

Here are some nice mushrooms

Ursula K. LeGuin on technology

it is just intolerable for random judges to be seizing control of vast policy issues like this www.usatoday.com/story/money/...