Possible plot possibly thickens.

Unreal. Now that Trump dropped IRS lawsuit, DOJ just announced a new slush fund for alleged victims of "weaponization." Two Qs: *Will there be *any* congressional oversight? Most reporting suggests not. *Would payments to J6ers violate 14A? Raskin explains here: newrepublic.com/article/2105...

The line "I am a great admirer of America's, but right now my admiration is not increasing" would've made me laugh too. In fact, it did.

As I review my chapter on the Second Red Scare in Philadelphia, I start to integrate more thoughts along this line.

“Unfortunately for the vice president, there’s video” will be an increasingly common sentence.

My puppy says hi.

People trained to do X are asking machines to do X for them and, in turn, forget how to do X. Film at 11.

I missed this piece when it first came out, and I'm sorry I did. It's quite good. Fwiw, my soon-to-be-published book will touch on some of these issues in Red Scare-era Philadelphia.

"With credit increasingly serving as the glue holding daily life together, the consequences can be dire if that safety net disappears." It's telling that the NYTimes thinks of credit as a safety net. I mean, the gist of the rest of this story is that it isn't a safety net at all.

Trump gathered all of the very worst people in the country in one place and got them to break a million laws and then pardoned all of them, and now local law enforcement has to go get them one by one as they commit new crimes.

I often say that the fight for democracy is the fight of our generation. But let me be clear, if you aren’t fighting for Black voting rights right now then you aren’t really fighting for democracy.

Just had Canvas stop working as I was typing comments on a student paper. I now can’t access anyone’s work or grades. Strangely, this never happened back when I used a grade book and had students email me their papers, a system no shareholders extracted money from.

There will be an elite media effort to rebrand Rubio as "the grownup in the room" when the GOP 2028 stakes heat up. It will involve a lot of magical thinking, but it will happen.

I will be thinking about this question for the rest of the day.

"Are we being pricks" is always a good question to ask.

Me in the @inquirer.com. The GOP's contempt for democracy on full display with the Mamdani bill. In other times, we might have dismissed this as a stunt. Those days are long gone.

Me in the @inquirer.com, pissed off about the Chip Roy thing.

I couldn't agree more. For me personally, the damage done is that, even after tenure, I continue to write too fast, and I routinely have to remind myself that no one is making me do that.

Spotted in my neighborhood. Pour one out for Rudy.

“We're not looking for a fight.” Always what I like to say after I've dropped some bombs.

hah hah

"...several Council members stood as close to the board as they could, shouting their displeasure as board president Reginald Streater demanded order....the board took its vote remotely, in a locked room, as some audience members remained in the auditorium to see the meeting streamed via Zoom."

If you have an interest in urban public education--whether as a parent, a community member, an interested observer, or a scholar, or all of the above (like me)--you should be following this story in Philadelphia.

"Again"?

The GOP's newest bit of bigotry is actually called the MAMDANI Act. It would allow for "the deportation, denaturalization, denial of citizenship or entry to any migrant that is a member of a socialist party, communist party, the Chinese Communist Party or Islamic fundamentalist party."

Ok, so my flight back to the US leaves in six days. I should be fine. I do not feel fine.

because of "current technical capacities" of course

The special issue of @cpsjournal.bsky.social “Back from the Brink: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies”, co-edited by myself and Isabela Mares, was just published. The issue includes 8 articles, many of which set new research agendas. A🧵w/overview 1/10 journals.sagepub.com/toc/CPS/curr...

It's a bad enough take that it might wind up on the final exam for my Comparative politics class in the fall.

It is hard to capture what a sweeping strategic defeat the war in Iran has been for the United States. I’m going to thread here some of the posts today that try to capture those effects. Here’s the first:

"AI companies envision a future in which humans don’t have jobs, so of course, the security guards they would hire to protect the data centers that act as the beating heart of AI tech would also be autonomous."

This should be read from beginning to end. I barely know what to say, other than that I'm glad @wired.com is doing this work.

Nice to see you out there today, Philadelphia! #nokings

To be read.

There are worse places to involuntarily teleport to. I mean, "in a ditch outside of a Baptist church in a little tiny town" doesn't sound great, but a Waffle House? Not that bad.

I just submitted the first draft a book manuscript. This was crawling across the finish line, not running or even walking across it. I am beat.

Writing the final chapter of my book, explaining what the Philadelphia teachers did after they were fired for not naming names in 1954. One sold Encyclopedia Britannica. I can't assume people know what this is anymore, or what it meant to people in the '50s, can I....

So, if "Israel warns it will pursue Iran’s next supreme leader" and "Israeli military said it would also target every person who seeks to appoint a successor for killed supreme leader Ali Khamenei," where does that leave us? No diplomacy...ever again? Or what?

Hegseth: "the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live." The United States is a regime of mass murder.

For someone currently writing about McCarthyism in Philadelphia, seeing the revived 1953 Chevy jingle on the 76ers broadcast is nothing short of triggering.

A positive thing, and another exhibit of how important it is to fight back, even on the relatively small stuff.

It's been a long time since I've logged onto social media for the one and only goal of bragging about a word count, but today was a great writing day after a series of bad ones. Here's hoping I'm not jinxing anything, but I wrote 1,300 words today...and I think they're pretty damn good.

"Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, compares the federal government’s argument that it can unilaterally control the exhibits in national parks to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, a novel about a dystopian totalitarian regime."

I'm interrupting a morning full of book-writing to come here and say... of course he did:

An encouraging story about local organizing in Texas.

Today I learned about PA judge Michael Musmanno's deranged 1951 courtroom performance. At the start of a routine civil case, "he directed that all parties and witnesses leave the court room, and then, in the presence of newspaper reporters and others" asked the plaintiff lawyer if he was a Communist

"It's pretty gross" is about what I'd say if someone handed me one of my ribs too.

This is fucking disgusting. Hashtag Abolish smart glasses. Hashtag Abolish manfluencers.

"...in July 2006, just as Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal case became public, Trump called then-Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter to tell him that Epstein’s activities with teenaged girls were well known in both New York and Palm Beach."