An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

The silicon microprocessor computer chip, the backbone of modern life, is about to leave the consumer marketplace. We are not prepared for the end of personal computing.

If you are wondering what words the all-male Congress found so "blasphemous" that they felt compelled to literally scrape them off the monument, they were: ''Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declared herself an entity to be reckoned.''

I forgot who said it, but “genocide by rug pull” really is an apt phrase for this outcome.

Multiple analyses have shown that the USAID cuts have already cost literally hundreds of thousands of lives. The WH is using those funds for the security of one of the more noxious members of a presidential administration that includes Stephen Miller. But hey, pro life.

Happy Douglass Day! It was a great time participating in the national transcribe-a-thon with a bunch of my students at the Trinity #Douglassday events. Loved the @douglassday.bsky.social playlist and seeing the amazing cake from a local baker!

I'm stunned and disappointed to see the shuttering of yet another piece of public religious studies scholarship. #acrel #amrel #aarsbl #sblaar

An LLM also cannot tell you WHY something matters unless a human already wrote that in something it was trained on. History isn’t just a dry recitation of facts, it’s a process of making meaning of the past and how it interacts with our present day understandings, neither of which an LLM can do.

Right, another key thing that historians do is working with important records that have not been digitized. And the vast majority of the world’s records *have not been digitized* and thus do not exist in any format that LLMs/AI can work with.

This is the second account - the first being in Chicago - of DHS agents mass detaining people and then *sorting them by race*.

This thread is searing and essential reading:

From @jamellebouie.net, on the historical context of the 1871 Klan hearings (w/ref to Kidada Williams' work) and federal investigations of internment camps, and the need for "public investigation and testimony" & "recompense and repair" for victims of ICE/DHS terror (alongside legal accountability).

Interested in learning more about how curators are bringing the history of Indigenous peoples to the public? Historians Amanda Cobb-Greetham and Scott Manning Stevens interview curators Kathleen Ash-Milby, Jordan Poorman Cocker, and Patricia Marroquin Norby on Indigenous history in museums

What can you do with a history degree?

i think about this every day and the more history i learn, the truer it becomes

And never forget. These are asylum seekers. This is what the USA is doing to the most vulnerable people on the planet who we promised to protect.

1. deregulate everything and destroy all regulators so nothing functions in the public interest under the pretense this "aids innovation" and "empowers entrepreneurs" 2. blame poor people and minorities when nothing works

The vile video is racist. Period. And it came from a racist White House. If you can't say that, what are we doing here.

This Day in Labor History: February 6, 1919. The Seattle General Strike began. Let's talk about this much mentioned but little understood event. Let's also talk about general strikes a bit, which are very misunderstood, even by activists, and why we don't have them today in their classic form.

@wyden.senate.gov's record of warning that there is deep and constitutionally-serious dirt being done by the intelligence agencies in secret is unblemished. The vaguer he is, the filthier the dirt is. This is the vaguest I've ever seen him

Full on concentration camps. "We don't know half of what's going on in the camps, but we know enough" is echoing from 85 years ago.

"Four Billion Car Pile Up On The Information Super Highway" (Deathreat)

The Epstein documents reveal "a shadowy world of international espionage, deregulated finance, far-right politics, eugenicist race science, information warfare, and unfathomably intricate human trafficking networks," which aimed "to break the internet and, eventually, democracy..."

We have a Boston Review Forum out today on the Democratic Party in a time of authoritarianism www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Folks are dying from winter storms and the power has been out for a week but the government can spend big money on detention camps. bsky.app/profile/cost...

It’s entirely legal to record LE officers from your car. So they’re brazenly, illegally terrorizing this woman for exercising her constitutional rights. Yet we know that none of these officers be held accountable. We know this administration encourages this behavior. This is police state stuff.

"As a member of the press, I filmed the church protest a few weeks ago and now I'm being arrested for that," Indipendent journalist Georgia Fort said. "It's hard to understand how we have a Constitution, Constitutional rights, when we can just be arrested for being a member of the press."

The Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) Foundation laid off all of the staff on its Oral History Projects team, and although it asserts the oral histories it has collected since 2012 will remain accessible, with the department dissolved there won't likely be new materials collected. 🗃️

When I teach Vietnam, I explain that opposition to the war really grew in fits and starts. Some big rallies and visible protests, but also a steady stream of celebrities and ordinary folks breaking with their priors and taking a new stand. This last month, this last week, feels like a real shift.

Sharp as ever from @mcsweeneys.net: A Message from Your Federal Overlords

America as you have known it dying because we have to build this country better. Full stop. Holding on to the fantasy nostalgia doesn't help the people of Minneapolis, or anyone captured by ICE. You have lived with an illusion of freedom, but this is Authoritarianism 101.

This is bad not just because of the direct infections but there's growing research that suggests vaccines also stave off things (like dementia) that we don't typically associate with vaccine prevention.

As clergy pray, arrests begin

The city of Philadelphia has sued the Department of the Interior and the acting director of the National Park Service for removing exhibits about the history of slavery from the President’s House in the city’s historic district. 🗃️

"No statute of limitations on murder" should be one of the key messages from state-level Dems for the next 12 months.

From @vermontgmg.bsky.social: "This is the end of the world as we have known it for 80 years...There is no strategy behind this exercise in superpower suicide other than the president’s own narcissism, greed, and...general frustration at never being respected by the elites whose favor he desires..."

remarkable how much contempt this white house has for the nation’s historical and artistic treasures

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

the current american self-sabotage project makes brexit look like sensible statecraft in comparison

i think this MLK day the thing to focus on is the strategic focus and tactical brilliance of the civil rights movement and the way it was laser focused on a set of achievable goals

trump and his republican party are infected with the same death cult imperialism that brought the world to cataclysm twice in the twentieth century. there's no reasonable sane sensible foreign policy way of dressing up this "strategic logic." history is explicit: this is madness.

Making a pot of tea to prepare for my ritual reading of Letter from Birmingham Jail (Reposting with better link) www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets...

San Antonio Explained: How the city's MLK march became the nation's largest www.expressnews.com/news/article...

Some very interesting Trinity history here! From Mozart to Miles Davis: KRTU celebrates 50 years of student-led music www.expressnews.com/lifestyle/ar...

This isn't a left-right ideological issue. But it blows me away that anyone who is actually anti-Trump would think running back Joe Biden/Merrick Garland 2.0 will work the second time. No political party can tolerate a very large, armed secret police force committed to murdering its voters.

Democrats could act like a real opposition party, refusing to validate Trump malfeasance with votes, and setting up a shadow cabinet that regularly communicates how Democrats would be different. But nah. It’s not only a majority of Democratic voters that hate this approach. US allies see it too.

The incredibly lukewarm Democratic response on Greenland is being noticed in Europe, incidentally. Chuck Schumer not finding a stronger word than “quixotic” for Trump’s plan to seize Greenland has been name checked to me more than once.

The @cfr.org surveyed members of @shafrhistorians.bsky.social 🗃️, asking us to rank the ten best and ten worst U.S. foreign policy decisions. Here are the results of that survey: