By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court reverses a decision in favor of Pedro Hernandez, a mentally impaired man who was pressured into an allegedly false confession of murder through these👇unconstitutional tactics. The supermajority says he did not face a deprivation of "clearly established" rights.

Occurs to me that we’re at the end of an ultimately very anomalous century-long evidentiary golden age during which it was extremely easy to produce an accurate visual/auditory record of reality, and relatively difficult to produce a false one.

Imagine living in a country where you can force a bad leader out and you don’t have to wait until they die of old age or personally decide to not run again

If you view political office as chiefly a vehicle for rent extraction and personal enrichment, there’s no great mystery why you’d rather deal with despots than democracies, quite apart from ideology.

"It is questionable whether Vance can build a successful campaign for GOP nomination, let alone win WH, on a platform of establishing alliances w/some of the most repugnant authoritarian regimes in the world." As @davidrlurie.com says at @atrupar.com's place, Vance craves "axis of authoritarianism"

That the CIA had nothing to do with it and Nixon tried to have them lie to the FBI and say they did is, like, the whole scandal. We literally have it on tape!

Elon Musk's right-wing civility cop sycophants have been in a snit because the world's biggest corporate welfare queen is getting criticized for tripling his net worth in the two years since his money helped Trump get re-elected. (new @ms.now column)

The cool thing about the Internet is that if you’re fan of klezmer music or gothic literature in rural Iowa, you can find your people. The uncool thing is that this has also evidently worked for nutbag fascists.

Unlike pretty much every other explanation of rising right-wing populism - inflation, immigration, whatever - “it’s the internet, stupid” has the virtue of predicting a continuous worldwide increase almost everywhere at once, which ended up being basically what happened

I have no idea how anyone who’s been to a No Kings protest could say this.

Busy (but depressing) week open.substack.com/pub/spytalk/...

Arrived at the end of Francis Spufford’s phenomenal Nonesuch only to realize it’s the first half of a duology. May need to go clambering about DC statues to fast forward myself to the release of the sequel.

Oh. So Tulsi Gabbard wrote a report showing that voting machine vulnerabilities didn’t flip any votes. And now she’s not the DNI anymore. Hmm. www.reuters.com/world/white-...

Ossoff: “The election deniers, they tell a lie so absurd, and therefore so debasing to tell, that the act of telling it proves the teller's total and humiliating submission. And you may have seen that one of those election deniers now asks to represent Georgia in the Senate.”

Why Trump’s Iran War Was ‘Doomed From the Very Start’ “The U.S. president desperately wants out of the bloodbath he started. It took months to get here, but the fate of the war was sealed in the first 72 hours.” Read here, by @swin24.bsky.social: zeteo.com/p/trump-iran...

So @jonswaine.bsky.social @washingtonpost.com has seen hundreds of documents containing evidence that Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump's Director of National Intelligence, was directed throughout her career by the leader of the cult she grew up in www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

Congratulations he's invented piracy.

SCOOP: A priest who is close to Trump successfully lobbied him to grant clemency to the fraudster David Gentile. Gentile privately indicated Father Frank Mann was paid for his help. EDNY prosecutors opened an investigation into the commutation. But it was closed by Trump political appointees.

If Trump stuck two french fries in his nose and said he's going to tell Westeros to invade Narnia, Fox would devote 10 hours a day to the Narnian threat and the New York Times would run articles headlined "President Considers Expanding Conflict Zone; Critics Raise Questions"

With dozens of self-inflicted crises on his hands, all Donald Trump wanted to talk about was his plan to renovate the reflecting pool, a topic literally no one gave a shit about. And now that he's fucked that up, his cult members are complaining that people are talking about his big project.

the influence of academics/NGO types drawn to radicalism for its own sake has been harmful here imo. The people impacted by bad policing don’t want to radically reimagine the entirety what crime is, they want their sheriff’s dept to be professionals who aren’t in literal gangs (real thing in LA)

It is endlessly astonishing to me that anyone is ever surprised by Donald Trump. There has never been a more transparent human being in all of history. Everything you need to know about him is right on the surface. You can understand him entirely, without remainder, with five minutes of exposure.

NEW: 35 retired fed judges escalate challenge against Trump $1.7 billion slush fund & IRS deal They say Trump Admin's latest filing "underscores the need to investigate whether the parties have perpetrated a fraud on this Court & corrupted the integrity of the judicial process"

Had a few (more) unkind words for the professional strategists who regurgitate the lazy, often self-serving advice that voters don’t care about democracy. www.offmessage.net/p/trump-iran...

Trump never did understand that ending this war was not up to him alone.

A WIRED timeline shows how dozens of governments, companies, and other organizations across Europe are moving, or planning to shift, away from US Big Tech.

NEW: Down in Florida, the retired judges who asked Judge Williams to reopen Trump v. IRS file their reply, saying that she can and should re-open this case to "investigate whether the parties have perpetrated a fraud on this Court ...." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Did JK Rowling have to come up with a a name for a goon?

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com The 2010 novel “Super Sad True Love Story” describes a world that feels very much like the one we live in today — hypervisual, looks-obsessed, post-literate. Our columnist Ezra Klein spoke to its author, Gary Shteyngart, about how he sees the world today.

i for one have full confidence in the trump administration's ability to adequately refit a plane donated by a foreign government into a highly secure mobile command center for the united states executive, following their unquestionably successful renovation of A Large Pool of Water

I have read this piece half a dozen times over the years and if you haven't, you should right now.

Americans – whether leftist, liberal, MAGA or anything else – really, profoundly do not understand how they are looked upon by the rest of the world. No nation is looking over and thinking "I want me some of that".

In honor of his role model, Bovino now wishes to be known as Greg the I’m-Paler.

this is one of the weirdest things conservative elites tell themselves and it's become load bearing to their entire anti anti Trump ideology

Weirdly the most heartbreaking thing in this story may be the lit professor pleading with his students to find utility in the study of poetry because it will one day help you write concise e-mails at work. harpers.org/archive/2026...

"So far this year, Mr. Hegseth has blocked the promotions of at least 40 senior officers to general and admiral ranks. About half of those are women or members of minority groups." This is an unprecedented effort to whitewash military leadership. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/u...

“I’m not desperate, YOU’RE desperate!” As people who aren’t desperate so frequently feel compelled to say.

... also DHS is absolutely a threat to elections this year, no "may" about it.

It kinda got lost in the madness, but the federal conspiracy case against anti-ICE activists in Minnesota - the Minneapolis 15 - is a big deal It's not just the 1st Amendment abuse. It's part of their plan to crush dissent ahead of a stolen election My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

Just saw that Angel Studios is releasing a Young George Washington & wondering how much of it is going to be nonsense Mason Weems made up.

Young people deserve better than a policy built on panic, and all internet users deserve a safe and free internet. The UK’s new social media ban for under-16s is a threat to everyone. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

One of the hardest things to accept is “my ideas are correct but unpopular” and it’s particularly tricky for leftists who romanticize “the people”

When people read about this era in 200 years they're going to be convinced most of it was an allegory and not real

I’m sorry, no. This is not the guy who did the reflecting pool. No. Come on. We’re just putting a hat on a hat here. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/u...

The sound you just heard is Republicans shrieking from the universe next door where Kamala Harris just said this, because their enraged ululations are audible across the dimensional barrier.

I think this is basically just full circle on right-wing folks indiscriminately tossing “socialism” at everything, so that now a bunch of folks who effectively want regulated capitalism with a robust welfare state think that makes them socialists.

holy shit????? ICE is getting rid of seven of the 11 would-be concentration camp warehouses they purchased and sec. mullin indicates new mass detention centers are not priority. huge!

The trouble here is that when anyone explains this, they sound like a scoldy weirdo. (“It’s a slur for non-Jews, which real Jews almost never use, but which antisemites like to imagine them using.”) Like so much else with the far right, explaining means you’ve lost the audience.