“I want their morale as low as possible because a team with low morale is ineffective.” Meet the veteran who chases ICE on a scooter

Mass firings, buyouts and heightened uncertainty led to an exodus of federal workers in 2025. More than 300,000 employees will be out of the government by the end of December.

How I’m walking out of 2025

‘Evening.

Moody skies on this morning’s hike

Let’s dive in

Good morning (?)

PSA: Trancers 4 is the weakest of the franchise (so far).

"I must say, Mateo, you sniff a good ham."

Texas A&M University will not reinstate a lecturer who was fired after a video of her teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class went viral, despite a faculty appeals panel unanimously concluding that her dismissal was not justified.

The lecturer in question is our colleague in children’s literature studies. She is a brilliant scholar and from all accounts a gifted teacher. This ruling is infuriating… at the end of the day, it is our students’ education that will suffer.

Extremely unusual. More people (~8-10 per year) die climbing the mountain.

I did not understand this: one of the five Europeans the US has barred from traveling to the United States...is a permanent resident who lives with his family in the US. Now he is worried about being arrested and deported for the crime of monitoring online hate. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

Good to see this action by US government blocked. All researchers are placed in danger by this kind of speech policing. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

Chaos reigns

Everyone is porcupining and bracing for war. Finland has raised the reservist age to 65, bringing its reserve force to nearly one million. The memory of the Winter War with the USSR continues to shape Finnish thinking. yle.fi/a/74-20201345

Nina Jankowicz: “They’re not doing this because they have any evidence of censorship — they lost a Supreme Court case that made those claims… They’re doing this because the group of researchers and advocates have stood up to liars like Donald Trump and the platforms that enable them.”

Bo leads the way

Those who speculated wildly about the Brown shooter without knowing any facts got things wrong—and it is important that they lose their credibility because of it, Graeme Wood argues.

NOAA has started terminating grants to UCAR under the UCAR/NOAA Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Program (CAMP).

Christmas movie? Yes. Terrorism movie? No. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

So much this

🫡

Made it. Holiday mode activated. 🫠

I'm a scholar of extremism and a writer of fiction. Recent nonfiction: Extremism (2018, MIT Press) amzn.to/4pMXU6t The Social Construction of Extremism (2024, dissertation) www.jmberger.com/social-const... Fiction: Optimal (2020) amzn.to/4pMXU6t The Pope's Hitman (Crooked Lane Books, 2026)

Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem has ordered the suspension of the green card lottery program at Trump’s direction, saying it allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the US.

Worth waiting for. Take it from me ;-)

"The key responsibility of governments in Australia now, beyond ensuring the safety of all citizens, is challenging the existing ideas or conceptzia about our domestic & national notions of resilience, cohesion, prosperity & security." My latest at Lowy. www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpre...

The Trump administration has reportedly set a goal of yanking citizenship away from over a thousand naturalized Americans in fiscal year 2026, in yet another escalation in the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

"what it sees as" = "what it characterizes as" or "what it claims is" We have bigger problems than semantic nuance. But part of the bigger problem is an industry committed to extending good-faith presumptions to people who are clearly acting in bad faith. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

“Rittenhouse did appear on the right-wing lecture circuit, but as a 20-something kid without much to recommend him other than the fact that he’d killed some people, the effort was less than successful.”

Trump Administration Aims to Strip More Foreign-Born Americans of Citizenship www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

Immigrants brought here as children were told they wouldn’t be deported. Now, they’re being targeted anyway.

I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to appoint a right-wing conspiracy theorist nut job podcaster as deputy director of the FBI.

What this will mean, in practice, that if you are deemed an enemy of the administration, they will pore through your citizenship application paperwork looking for some reason to retroactively disqualify you. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

Oh my God just go read the papers, do the research, and learn the stuff you need to know. I realize the incentive structure in academia is bullshit, but have some integrity - and some interest in learning things and producing quality work!

FBI work is hard. Trashing the FBI is easy.

After a long road, our analysis of Jan6ers' social media is released! Check out "Look Mom I’m On TV: Crowd-Sourced Policing, Social Media, and the Prosecution of January 6 Capitol Defendants", the product of @prosecutionproject.bsky.social research team! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TMTFB...

“Name, Shame, and Blame: Terrorist Designation and Peace Negotiations” in Terrorism and Political Violence www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I've seen a few folks talking about the Bondi gunmen training with Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines...and realizing they don't know about ISIS-SEA. Anyway, here's an article we did a few years ago about the financing behind the siege of Marawi. newsletter.insightthreatintel.com/p/maute-grou...

Out now: we examine policy and investigatory implications, methodological challenges, and avenues for future research on the online posting behaviors of violent and non-violent right-wing extremists. It is #openaccess. Proud of this work: pt.icct.nl/article/unde...

According to a Reuters investigation, some Jan. 6 rioters and their allies are now advising Justice Department officials on how to retaliate against those who helped put them behind bars reut.rs/4qeX9mu

"ISIS never gives up. As long as they continue to have the will to fight … they'll use any means necessary to accomplish what they're trying to do." @azelin.bsky.social www.npr.org/2025/12/17/n...

Cheese tax

Portugal. The Man’s album “Shish.” Andor. The Studio. Pluribus. 28 Years Later. Baldur’s Gate 3 (yeah I know, but I’ve only just found the time for it). Multiple terrific books which I’ll post further about.

NEW: President Trump is expanding the previous 19-country travel ban to a whopping 39 countries (plus the Palestinian Authority), and appears to expand a block on legal immigration to now include spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens, who were previously exempted.

Need a better system for reading than this guy pushing random books to the floor à la Interstellar.

Zero intelligence secrets, sources, or methods are put at risk by showing a video of a boat exploding, or of shipwrecked people clinging to boat pieces hit by a missile and exploding. Such a video reveals absolutely nothing about how the US identified that boat, located it, or chose to attack it.

Gotta say it's mindblowing to me that the Brown shooter is still at large and they don't even seem to have identified who they're looking for.

Wonder when the first ICE deradicalization study will land for peer review...