Until the NYT reports Trump's statements without sanewashing, the overwhelming majority of the US public will remain blissfully unaware of the reality. The editorial staff of the NYT is as culpable in any war crimes as Trump's team and members of Congress who refuse to act.

this is a useful comparison but actually way undershoots the extent of the purges in China by only counting the officially gone and excluding the much larger category of disappeared, which adds about another 69 senior officers since 2023. chinapower.csis.org/china-pla-mi...

Constitutional lawyer here. I don't think it would violate the Constitution for the VP/Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, but the intended constitutional remedy for this behavior is impeachment & removal. The fact that that remedy is politically impossible is a scandal and a crisis.

Would someone explain to me why Serbia seems to play such an outsized role in European political disasters?

Germany is quietly (or maybe not so quietly) preparing for war.

Now is the time to confront what Trump is saying, not sanitize it. To take him literally and seriously. To stand tall and not back away. I built Democracy Docket to expose attacks on free and fair elections not sugarcoat them. Support its work. Subscribe now. bit.ly/4qmEiFz

really they should be looking at things like this... www.verywellhealth.com/foul-languag...

textbook sanewashing

An Easter message from the president which should really force the VP and the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment.

A different perspective. Always helpful.

“military aged males” got normalized as a viable target for war and it’s pretty much a racialized fiction meant to justify indiscriminate murder.

This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.

But he is probably 100% accurate…..

Sorry, which side is supposed to be religious zealots here, someone remind me.

Two notes: this is the same legal authority Rubio invoked for Mahmoud Khalil and Rumesya Özturk, among others (which may be unconstitutional). Second, he has not yet revoked her lawful permanent resident status. He has initiated the process for doing so (which is somewhat of a foregone conclusion)

🚨 🚨 ABC News confirms that Iran used advanced, passive infrared detection to shoot down the American F-15E fighter jet. Passive infrared detection does not emit radar signals. As a result, it cannot be detected or jammed by American electronic warfare systems. That leaves our aircraft vulnerable.

"The consequences of ending birthright citizenship do not only fall on immigrants — under this policy, all Americans will find it more difficult to claim the rights of citizenship." Commentary: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Basically it seems that any original idea you ever thought you had about conversation, either Goffman or Sacks already had it

The birthright citizenship case shows how Trump-era Republicans have embraced the convictions of the proslavery Senator John C Calhoun, who believed America was a “white man’s government” and the integration of nonwhites onto the polity would destroy the country www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

A country where Flag Officers are dismissed on the whim of a president or a secretary of Defense -- and where it's tolerated by those in a position to stop it -- is a country in decline

As a result of Trump & Hegseth's re-segregation, all five service chiefs, the JCS chairman and vice chairman, and nine of ten combatant commanders are white men. Also, the U.S. military is back to zero female four-star officers for the first time since 2008; there were four in 2024.

All but three (!) of the 1,651 refugees admitted into the United States in the three most recent months we have data are white South Africans. For comparison, in 2024, the U.S. admitted 100,060 refugees. It's an explicit white supremacist project. www.rpc.state.gov/documents/Re...

🔥 🚨 🔥 🚨 🔥 🚨 🔥 French Senator Claude Malhuret says what the majority of the world is thinking

Hegseth purge of Black and women officers larger than previously reported "Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for MORE THAN A DOZEN Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military." www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

BREAKING: Hegseth asks the Army's top uniformed officer to step down, the Pentagon says, as U.S. wages war against Iran.

Pfizer has ended its large Phase III Trial of an updated COVID19 vaccine. They were not able to enroll enough people to meet their goal. A major problem is the FDA’s wholly unreasonable demand that people with chronic conditions, who benefit most from the vaccine, not be allowed to participate.

She read us a letter from Erasmus about bulking up his 76 page essay to a decent 200+ pages to be a big enough book to be worthy of being dedicated to the person in the dedication.

15 minutes after the tornado warning expired, a hearty group has gathered for the Center for the Book annual Brownell lecture in book history. Up this evening is Ann Blair speaking about "How Renaissance Scholars and Printers Decided on the Size of Books." If I tweet, it will be a thread here.

Brown University is home to George Orwell's original manuscript of 1984. Most of it is marked up heavily in Orwell's hand-writing but this untouched page caught my eye.

Since the New Deal, the right edge of the conservative movement has been committed to the goal of eliminating all facets of the federal government that do good in the world, leaving behind only a war machine and a surveillance operation capable of containing the “internal leftist enemy.”

Kurt Gödel, in a draft letter from 1961: "A completely unfree society (i.e., one proceeding in everything by strict rules of "conformity") will, in its behavior, be either inconsistent or incomplete, i.e., unable to solve certain problems, perhaps of vital importance. ...

I like it how you can see the time when Trump's speech occured

Seattle Seasonal Update

This is a massively underappreciated practical & logistical problem. There are at least hundreds of children found abandoned every year, but more importantly, TENS TO HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS who have no father listed at birth.

friendly reminder that, according to Arendt, totalitarianism starts with “statelessness” and denying people access to rights as citizens

My Bluesky timeline today is remarkably free of April Fools foolishness. I have chosen my follows wisely.

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

As a Jewish historian who works at a university, I think it’s great that an administration committed to destroying “the internal globalist enemy” which is staffed by groyper antisemites is collecting lists of Jews. Can’t see any potential downside here at all.

As a rule, people asking for "lists of Jews" are the very ones who should never get a "list of Jews."

among the problems here...who counts as being Jewish? is it self ID? can people opt out? if peopel refuse to answer questions, are they punished by school or govt? are you going to have uni and fed officials combing people's geneologies or social media posts? 1

In honor of a judge halting Trump's ballroom construction today:

Cartoon by @andertoon.bsky.social

"ICE agents will be staking out Marine Corps graduation events to find undocumented immigrants in the recruits’ families." another feather in the cap of the "career incentives give the best ultimate explanation of right wing goon squads' behavior" school of thought newrepublic.com/post/208407/...

Along the way, the judge rejects fears that EEOC will not keep the contact information confidential, remarks that belief that DOGE shared private info from SSA is unsupported, and suggests White House staffer ties to known antisemites and attendance at rallies are "unserious political arguments."

This is an ugly decision and one that likely endangers people. And it seems like a bad precedent for other minority groups that might be selected for attention.

I wonder if this will destabilize the Gulf, and I am not joking

My next book, a practical guide for how to write for mass media, publishes four weeks from today. I hope you'll consider ordering it now, inviting me to speak, and to tell others. Here's what @tressiemcphd.bsky.social said about my work. Pre-order here: www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

BREAKING Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to stop funding NPR and PBS is “unlawful and unenforceable,” a federal judge ruled. Doc buff.ly/WcnQN4A

panel from last summer