Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

Someone shot up my kid's school today, and our governor is paying tribute to a guy who thought that is an acceptable price to pay for having the Second Amendment. Jared Polis has failed Colorado.

Our politics seems to be entering a phase of "right supremacy" where only the lives of right-wingers have value. Assassinating the leader of a state legislative body in her own damn home was business as usual, but all of America has to have a reckoning if it's a far-right online influencer.

Just gonna drop this here tonight wapo.st/3VKVNT2

It is weird that the assassination of essentially a celebrity influencer is a bigger deal than the shooting of two top state legislators + their spouses

A lot to say about this, but one thing is that the Professor in question was a lecturer, and thus did not have tenure. The destruction of academic freedom is inextricably linked to the loss of worker protection in the university.

This is what democracy looks like! A people united will never be defeated. We want federal forces out of DC NOW! #WeAreAllDC #FreeDC

Twitter and now Bluesky have given prominence to academics and others with credentials and expertise whose views are more power-challenging/power-balancing/left than the Times editorial/Democratic leadership/other center-left power centers. That's the tension here.

When people say "We used to drink raw milk from our own cow and it was fine," That's... usually not the case! In families w their own cow, the mom usually boiled it before using. We just forgot bc that's a boring chore that mom did. And who pays attention to that? youtu.be/vKDPast9WFk

What I learned from the USAID dismantling: speed is the most important thing in fighting back. Public heath dorks (myself included) have a tendency to want to be 100% accurate w citations blah blah blah. This is not the time. Call them what they are: fucking psychopaths who are going to kill people.

[Bill Cassidy looking down at corpse of chicken he has fucked to death]: That chicken should not have been fucked that hard

However evil you think this is, it’s worse: “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”

I'm open to all versions of shaming, from moral suasion ("do you tell your kids at night that you took away other kids mommies and daddies?") to merely insulting ("Why the mask? Forget the white hood at home?") to the truly crass ("how ugly are you that you have to wear that mask over your face?")

When I see them in DC, I ask “have you hit your quota of kidnapping brown people for the day yet?” Or “Do your kids know that you’re not saving people but you’re actually ruining other children’s lives when you abduct their parents?” That seems to irritate them.

Thesis: Trump is ticking off his authoritarian to do list quickly Antithesis: While Trump is *trying* to tick off his authoritarian to do list, he's not fully succeeding Synthesis: Each item on this check list is not a binary but a spectrum, and we're *way* too far down the spectrum for any comfort

My latest in @newrepublic.com: an urgent plea to recognize the humanity of DC residents, their longtime second-class citizenship and need —should democracy not already be lost forever—for statehood. “Washington, D.C., residents are the most powerless canary in the most authoritarian coal mine.”

In a functional government, this would be a five alarm fire where Congress calls in Kennedy and asks him what the fuck is going on

The shooter literally had the minimalist “Loss” meme on their rifle. You cannot take anything this person said or did at face value. It’s all so deep soaked in irony and toxic fandom culture that if you aren’t actually researching this stuff for a living you really shouldn’t be engaging with it.

WILD situation in Texas right now: The House Speaker has required Dems, who just returned from their out-of-state quorum break, to have police escorts once they leave the chamber. One Dem is refusing to leave the House floor with escort, and GOP leaders have blocked press access to the chamber.

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

If pundits would like to talk about violence, a terrorist recently shot up the CDC and another assassinated Democratic officials in Minnesota but they sort of let both stories disappear Not as threatening as motorbikes in DC I know but maybe we could circle back?

It’s only a terrorist attack on the CDC and the murder of a state legislator. Did you think it was something of national importance, like a student calling something racist, the Harvard president writing a sentence years ago that’s similar to another sentence, or a trans kid wanting to play soccer?

Communties are coming together across the country to normalize treating these forces like fucking dorks

We’re working on it. That’s all I can say for now. Subscribe to The Onion.

A judge ordered the sale of Alex Jones Infowars today, clearing the way for The Onion to renew its attempt to buy the notorious conspiracy-fueled empire. "We’re working on it," @bencollins.bsky.social tells @status.news www.status.news/p/washington...

Thinning out now. DC police the only ones left, and they're packing up too. Locals mobilized quickly out here, with handwritten signs warning drivers to avoid this block, lined up ready to protest what's happening. People shouting down from apartments too. "You should be fucking ashamed!"

Just so we’re keeping score & everyone understands where we are now: you live in a country where there are two tiers of citizenship, the government is sending people to concentration camps, the president sets the policies of elite universities, & there are security checkpoints in the capital city.

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Soha Hammam, & Chris Shay) has finalized our participation estimates for No Kings Day on 6/14. Here are five key takeaways🧵:

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

What If We Get It Right by @ayanaeliza.bsky.social offers a bold vision of many climate solutions that are rooted in scientific evidence and the principles of climate justice. My Review: climatechangebooks.org/book-review-... #ClimateChangeBooks #Booksky #BookReview #Books #ClimateSolutions

Our hearts are broken for David Rose’s wife, 2 kids and his baby on the way. He was only 33 and died protecting CDC and ATL. We don’t have words to do justice to his sacrifice right now. We are looking for ways to support the family. 💔

These Americans served with honor for more than a decade. Put their lives on the line. Trump fired them, just for being who they are-and now is denying retirement benefits our nation promised them for their service. Treating troops this way is dishonorable, unfair, & harmful to national security.

The over-representation of crime news affects us all. For folks who see this stuff it leads to "mean world syndrome" where we think the world is a worse place than it is and folks who think the world is a scary place are more likely to give power to authoritarians who promise safety.

So, this is making the rounds and really -- desparately -- needs to be clarified. The TL;DR is this: Polls don't measure shifts in opinion so much as shifts in context. news.gallup.com/poll/693203/... (A brief 🧵) /1

Brutal stuff from @swin24.bsky.social on the former children's hospital chaplain whose friends says he's been "tortured" in isolation as the Trump administration tries to deport him www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

If anyone is curious about the current list of search terms being used by right wing activist organizations to harass university professors, here's a public records request I received today from Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation. Not intimidating or meant to curtail by my speech at all, right?

Starting to think no one remembers the purpose of the Fourth Estate in a democracy …especially those working within the Fourth Estate.

A hunger strike at a South Florida immigration detention center state officials have named “Alligator Alcatraz” enters its tenth day, as detainees protest what they call inhumane and dangerous living conditions.

The civil service can not recover from this without legal and criminal consequences for Trump, Musk and Republican members of Congress who let it happen. A couple “good” election cycles won’t cut it.

ICE GOONS draw guns on humanitarian aid workers

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump. Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt. Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

Incredibly illuminating story from @billmckibben.bsky.social on unnecessary local permitting barriers -- highly specific to the U.S. -- that make rooftop solar far more expensive than it needs to be: www.motherjones.com/environment/...

The “deal” that Brown made with the Trump admin is much more extreme than is being reported. It includes government oversight of course evaluations and no barrier to government interference in faculty hiring. Read it for yourself here: www.brown.edu/sites/defaul...

Excuse my language but what fucking business is it of the united states government whether Brown undertakes this kind of medical care for parents and their kids who fully consent to it and desire it? Insanity! Pure discrimination in an agreement trollingly cloaked in preventing discrimination.

The damage that is being done will not be reverted through the pendulum swing of simple party politics. They have destroyed the administrative state. They have created a secret police. With camps. They have placed apparatchiks in lifetime positions.

DHS has arrested two medical personnel at a surgical center in California for demanding that the officers trespassing in their building identify themselves & provide a warrant, accusing them of another.... wait for it... ASSAULT. The case shows how DHS lies relentlessly to violate the Constitution

The only way to get them to stop doing this is to threaten to pull Fox News and Newsmax off the air when Democrats regain power. I'm sorry, but they very clearly are unwilling to follow norms unless credibly coerced into doing so.

It's even dumber. Because Mr. "No this is not genocide" got mad about the bed bug joke because he claimed calling him a bedbug was basically one step towards actual genocide. www.techdirt.com/2019/09/03/b...