Thomas Edsall asked me how much Trump's fossil fuel handouts, attacks on cheap-clean-power, and reckless wars are costing the American people. So I sat down and did the math. This year alone, it's on pace to be $1508 per household. That's not going to be popular. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/o...

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

I dream of a day when the legal academy spends as much attention to congressional and other legislative reform, than they spend debating whom among us is properly critical of the Supreme Court. Reforming Congress is equally (or more) important than rethinking Supreme Court practice and authority.

This one trick can help save a democracy: Don't elect people who hate, disparage, and denigrate government into government leadership roles.

The emphasis on taking private property and using the military to support the fossil fuels industry was notable in the "Energy Emergency" Executive Order, so it is not surprising they found ways for the military to help block clean energy on private land.

The Better Government Lab is hiring a post-doc with data science skills and an interest in public management to work on reducing administrative burden in safety net programs. Interest in tech a plus. Start: August 26 or earlier @sebjilke.bsky.social @pamherd.bsky.social apply.interfolio.com/185941

“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/

Daniel Deacon @dtdeacon.bsky.social & my paper "Legalistic Noncompliance" is out now in the Duke Law Journal! It describes how the second Trump administration is saying they're complying with lower court orders even though they're not in fact doing so: scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol75/is...

Agree! And as my research with @timlapira.bsky.social shows: pundits, like other political elites, believe that their exact policy preferences are much more popular than they actually are! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The AAUP & @aft.org stand in solidarity with UM Faculty Senate Chair Derek Peterson. Right-wing attacks on his commencement speech are a direct threat to academic freedom. University leaders must stop apologizing to political agitators & start defending their faculty & protected speech. 👇

"Our students are not wilting flowers. They can handle controversy. They do not need sentimental, cloying nostalgia. They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we've given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed."

But with a much weaker and shallower infrastructure for organizing and mobilization, at least so far

New, from me: This should be a clarifying moment about the relationship the Supreme Court's opposition to representative democracy in America. Lets look at some graphs that make this point. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/power-demo...

Remarkably, much of political science doesn’t consider this to be “money in politics”

Sometimes people get confused about tensions between majority rule and minority rights Majority rule as almost always been helpful for rights for racial, religious, gender etc minorities The minorities that the Constitution tends to protect are geographic (small states, rural) and capital

New work out today at @psjeditor.bsky.social: Using a survey experiment fielded with civil servants from 9 US states, Dan Butler and I find bureaucrats are less responsive to term-limited chief executives onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Ever wonder if political elites’ beliefs about climate change are partisan? If so have I got a new article for you! Elites believe climate science more than voters, but there’s still a partisan divide. w/ @salilb.bsky.social & @alexanderfurnas.com iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

If corporations are lining up to donate to the White House, there are really only two explanations: either CEOs suddenly love paying taxes voluntarily... or they're expecting something in return. The question worth asking is simple: if they're buying, what is the White House selling?

Huge gratitude to the open-source community behind @quarto.org. With university efforts to improve digital accessibility, it's a great time to switch to Markdown to share class materials in accessible HTML. Here is my template course website if you want to try it: judgelord.github.io/PP000/

Brian Jacob and @cohodes.bsky.social discussed Michigan’s current education issues, like retention and public funding, in a Bridge Michigan article. Read their comments: https://myumi.ch/P3Pmy

Another version of "never fucking surrender" aka hope in action.

Wild. One of the "woke" polices ended by 14 USDA Rural Development programs was to prioritize rural development in Energy Communities---areas with retiring coal plants or above average employment in extraction, processing, transport, or storage of coal, oil, or fossil gas.

Lots of speculation rn (such as this FT article) on what war in the Middle East means for the future of oil. What do we know about the conditions under which we reach tipping points in clean energy adoption? Political science can tell us a lot! 🧵

So much meritocracy! "Asked if he formally interviewed for his government job, Fox initially said that he 'didn’t remember,' before saying that he talked to several then-leaders at GSA over the secure messaging app Signal before joining."

The launch of my book Coverage Denied (out 4/23) will be at the White Whale Bookstore on 4/28. If you're in Pittsburgh, register to attend here: www.eventbrite.com/e/book-launc... And if you're not local, you can register for the livestream! us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi... Hope you can make it!

This is not some lefty, hippy, environmentalist point of view. It's what investors are saying. www.ft.com/content/4696...

pin the party on the climate policy platform: A) Business-friendly tax incentives for domestic manufacturing B) Dismantle global fossil fuel infrastructure by force, increasing gas prices, forcing rapid transition to clean energy, killing fossil fuel export markets & end manufacturing tax credits

If ICE employees were engaged in this level of stalking, threatening, selling data on, and spying on citizens, elementary schools, news organizations, and abortion clinics *IN 2023*, imagine what it's like today. www.wired.com/story/ice-ag...

Sadly, an angry ex has long been a common cause of deportation/family separation, which DHS encourages when promoting the ICE Tip Line on social media. Abusers, employers, and landlords also use it as a threat or a get out of jail free card for domestic violence or when workers get hurt on the job.

Angry spouses using the feds to snatch their ex is sadly super common www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/u... A friend's husband was deported when his brother's ex got mad one night & called ICE on both brothers. 8-months pregnant, she was left homeless, but...you know...banality of evil #FamilySeparation

In my work on narrative formation & its impact on how people absorb new information & make decisions, the biggest hurdle to lab testing is that narratives are formed by repetition over-time, which is hard to replicate in a lab. But, it is easy to imagine a candidate with x, y, or z policy positions.

HAPPENING NOW: Come hear about my research with Karla Magaña on Racialization and Perceived Institutional Ideology judgelord.github.io/research/rac... + Lauren Mattioli on Appointments and Influence: Judicial Agenda Setting Across Three Presidential Administrations

5/ "The climate left has to change the narrative : Oil is not a victim of geopolitical disruptions, it's inherently disruptive for stability, sustainability, security.' @picharbonnier.bsky.social has argued this in his books. Now, facing acute disruptions, the whole world will electrify. FAST

Every year now, it will take more and more taxpayer dollars and state coercion to hold back the tide of cheaper and cheaper clean energy.

Jesus. Paying a French company a billion dollars *not* to build a wind farm.

Coming up this week: Join us at 1 pm ET, Wednesday 3/18 for our next JAWS Session on executive politics! Read the papers, learn more about the participants, and register here: jawspolisci.network

The scary thing about a prediction market is that people with little information can randomly make a catastrophic event marginally more likely.

and that was after an election cycle dominated by both parties' elites demonizing immigrants, boosting "violent criminal" propaganda in the State of the Union, bipartisan anti-immigrant bills, competing over deportation numbers, ending pathways for legal status, who was tougher on immigrants, etc.

Not once does this story mention that the Supreme Court in 2007 rebuked the argument that EPA lacks authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Let's not let SCOTUS off the hook here: it will need to decide whether to change course, because otherwise this is likely dead in the water.

Thrilled to share that my paper with @judgelord.bsky.social and Justin Grimmer:"How shifting priorities and capacity affect policy work and constituency service: Evidence from a census of legislator requests to U.S. federal agencies" is out at the AJPS!

New in AJPS: "How shifting priorities and capacity affect policy work and constituency service" with @ellieneffpowell.bsky.social & Justin Grimmer +Data on 611,239 legislator requests to federal agencies on @harvarddataverse.bsky.social Paper and data are both open access: doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

Have you read Dr. @triofrancos.bsky.social’s new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism? Check out this interview in @thebaffler.com to learn more about her maxim for economies transitioning to clean energy: “Minimize extraction, maximize public good.” thebaffler.com/latest/schro...

Incredible personal reflections on organising from @alybatt.bsky.social Spadework www.nplusonemag.com/issue-34/pol...

One of the q's on the new citizenship test is incorrect. 1920 is not when "all women" got the right to vote. The 19th A prohibited sex-based disenfranchisement, but didn't guarantee voting. Many women, esp. women of color, remained disenfranchised. #WeTheMen www.washingtonpost.com/nation/inter...

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Heritage gloating that they've made Democrats lurch to the right. 20 years later conservatives will then concoct a conspiracy theory that this was all a Democratic Party plan to destroy the US.

"Net Worth Held by the Top 0.1% (99.9th to 100th Wealth Percentiles)" Federal Reserve Economic Data

It couldnt figure out a bag of chips or an ROTC uniform but it could figure out he was black?

Profiles in "Knowing which way the wind is blowing."