Being among the first interrogated and ultimately fired by DOGE, I certainly felt we were facing the business end of a right-wing conspiracy theory 🧵

Roses are red Violets are blue

Picture of the East Wing demolition of the White House taken on my flight out of DCA.

The East Wing Obscenity This piece is on the free side of the paywall, and I have to admit that writing it made me more sad than I could have imagined. The ugly destruction isn’t just to a building, but to memory, history, and American grace. open.substack.com/pub/therickw...

I'm just a lowly art historian, but in moments like these I always think back to one early sign of Trump's wanton, pointless destructiveness: his demolition of the priceless & irreplaceable Art Deco relief sculptures on facade of the Bonwit Teller building, which he tore down to build Trump Tower

Called it youtu.be/4vfiCcgW2F4?...

The absolutely insane circumstances aside, any other president who had chosen to perform construction on this level would not have let this gaping wound in the side of the symbolic seat of national power to be so nakedly visible.

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification. I glanced down at the message. “Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began. So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

1/Stop everything and read/watch/bookmark this massive investigation between @motherjones.com @lighthousereports.com Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media a vast global surveillance empire used to target politicians, journalists, tech CEOs, and... Jared Leto. ow.ly/2LUF50Xb7KE

I've noticed the opposing team's fans only cheer when the opponents score on us. To win those fans over, I recommend we score on ourselves repeatedly; that will surely make them so happy they'll start supporting us. And I'm sure all our fans will keep cheering for us—who else is there to cheer for?

I was given to understand that the president's son getting a job with a company doing business before the government was an impeachable offense

I'm not sure I'm ready for my IDE to journal its feelings. It would've been too cruel to force Visual Studio to keep a diary to reflect on all the ways in which it had let me down.

This must be the national security justification for putting a 10% tariff on softwood lumber next week.

We obtained leaked recordings of Peter Thiel's off-the-record lectures about the antichrist. Here's what one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley and US politics is saying about the end of the world behind closed doors. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Never before in American history has one state's military force been deployed in another state over its objection. I say never because the Civil War involved states whose governments legally ceased to exist, their offices vacated by constructive resignation, with no legitimate governors to object.

Authoritarian governments sending troops drawn from the ordinary population to repress said population and then *not paying* those troops is definitely a thing that has gone well, historically. A+ dictator performance Donny

Everyone should listen to Chris Murphy's extraordinary warning about Trump on our pod. First, he says the logic must be that the more lawless he gets, the stiffer the resistance. "If I give in and consent to these kinds of tactics then it just normalizes it all." 1/ newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later. harpers.org/archive/1941...

Judge Young: "This case ... squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally 'yes, they do.' 'No law' means 'no law.'"

Omg. I’ve never seen anything like this in a judicial opinion:

We made a new game. It’s called Q-UP. It’s a coin flipping eSport. There’s a free demo! store.steampowered.com/app/3730790/...

ISB Disrupts telecom network that threatened Coruscant during Imperial Senate session

Credulously reporting that the US will take control of ‘the TikTok Algorithm’ like it’s the top secret macguffin in a spy movie. CIA agents pursuing a one-armed man across Europe who carries a steel briefcase containing the special code that controls the recommended feeds of millions of Americans.

NEW: Hours before a new entry ban is supposed to go into effect, the federal government officially acknowledges for the first time that the restrictions do NOT apply to people who currently have H-1B visas. Link: www.uscis.gov/sites/defaul...

Looks like Joe and Eileen Bailey have been discussing why that nice Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t on TV last night at the kitchen table.

DM: ‘You come to large wooden door.’ Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’ DM: ‘An orc opens it and asks you to come in.’ Cat: ‘I do nothing.’ DM ‘He asks you to come inside again.’ Cat: ‘I do nothing.’ DM: ‘Eventually the orc tires and closes the door.’ Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’

Ahem

The full write up is here: Was It Something The Democrats Said? A Response to Third Way’s Political Language Memo open.substack.com/pub/dcinboxi...

Tactical Breach Wizards is a year old today! To celebrate, we're rewinding the whole last year to see if it can be done better or if it's just a bullshit level. In the meantime, we're 25% off til Monday! store.steampowered.com/app/1043810/... .

Last week, Boston received a letter from AG Bondi threatening to prosecute officials and withhold funds unless we cooperate with carrying out mass deportations. The US Attorney General asked for a response by today, so here it is: stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.

2,500 years ago, Xenophon described the selfish and cynical mindset perfectly. If you've met people like this, or watched TV show hosts turned politicians like this, you'll recognize the mindset immediately. I love how the ancientness of this text proves just how innate these character traits are.

Ah yes, the first video game AIs: Blinky, who chases Pac-Man, Pinky, who tries to get in front of him, Inky, who tries to flank you, and Claude, who generates a trail of bullet points and em-dashes and occasionally veers into white supremacist rhetoric.

It’s just basic witchcraft. The AI companies used linear algebra to trap vast legions of demons in a matrix of numbers. Then they craft mystic incantations, which they call ‘system prompts’, to try to conjure a specific demon from the matrix and bind it to their will.

Well this couldn’t have come at a better time www.bbc.com/news/article...

Does the same thing work for consoling admirals after they drop their toys in the sea?

Judge Howell, twisting the knife on her opening Shakespeare quote, to call the use of executive orders to target Trump’s individual enemies not merely unconstitutional but also ‘cringe’.

1804. Oceans are now Battlefields. In the South China Sea a British convoy worth almost £1bn today is spotted by the French. It should be a massacre. Instead, Commodore Nathanial Dance is about to defeat a French battle squadron using some paint and the most overplayed hand in #navalHistory. /1 🧵

From yesterday’s ’maybe thanks to tariffs children only need two dolls instead of thirty’ to ‘maybe thanks to AI Americans only need three human friends instead of fifteen’, we’re speedrunning the curtailment of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maybe we only need three walls instead of four and a roof?

Trump looking at satellite imagery of Yemen, agreeing with the analysis that it is a Houthi compound because he can see in the photo they have ‘HOUTHI COMPOUND’ written in big letters across the ground in the compound. This makes sense to Trump. He writes TRUMP in big letters on his golf courses.

“Papabile, Papabile, breaker breaker, this is Camerlengo. That’s a black Smokey on the sede vacante, we are negatory on the habemus papam”

In any sane society, the only person who would have to hear Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson’s ‘Nixon did nothing wrong’ ranting would be the bartender in the dive bar these two unemployables are daydrinking in because their wives have banned them from talking politics in the basement.

Another classic case of He said, Xi said

kind of the key to american "populism" is the idea that all our problems are easy to solve, and have very obvious solutions that anyone with common sense could see, so if they are not being solved by the person who runs everything (the president) then it can only be out of malice.

LES FOURMIS, he told me, ONT MANGÉ VOTRE LINKY. There were a lot of things I was prepared to hear from him about the outage, because folks in this fairly wooded area love to moan about how awful it is when a branch falls on the lines, you know what it's like. but no. THE ANTS ATE MY LINKY

How I arrived on Bluesky

Old North Church in Boston last night on the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride.

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process..” storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I will say this - EVERYONE with power seems to be desperately hoping that unpopularity does the work that consequences need to do

Since the Trump admin continues to claim Mr. Abrego Garcia is a gang member, I thought I'd take the time to put together a timeline, based on all the documents filed in court, which lays out all the "evidence" the government has ever offered. As you'll find out, there's very little "there" there!