This scandal will be a GOP opening for supercharged austerity. Officials will reach for "AI" systems which have been repeatedly shown to stop benefits from getting to those who are entitled to them. Protecting the vulnerable will include resisting what will become intense federal bullying/coercion.

Yes.

1/ I suspect we are days away from hearing Elon is "using AI" to “streamline” benefits programs. You should know why fully automating decisions about who gets critical assistance is a terrible idea that will have disastrous consequences. A 🧵 based on work I’ve done with the great @awhf.bsky.social

"Hilton values" should not include providing housing-for-hire for regime agents who daily violate the rights not only of immigrants, but U.S. citizens as well. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/t...

prosecutor associations are some of the most powerful organizations, and they get little scrutiny. anyway, this surprises me not one single whit www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/u...

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara to US citizen detained by ICE: "I apologize that this happened to you in my city with people wearing vests that say 'police.' That's embarrassing."

Traditional media outlets have led the way with thorough coverage of the Maduro capture and its aftermath, despite lacking physical access to the Pentagon complex.   All the while, that purported "new" Pentagon press corps has been MIA, which speaks volumes about what they're really about.

I found this shot of the Fuentes flags as I was going through my phone and working on this story yesterday. I have others. It was one of the first things I saw that made me realize how bad things were and rhat the building was breached.

Essential reading (as is always the case with @kattenbarge.bsky.social)

"There is no reckoning with whether a ceasefire that permits one side to continue killing can be called a ceasefire at all." www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

I'm quoted in this JTA piece on Jews, Darfur, and Gaza by @andrewlapin.bsky.social. Of course, some perspectives voiced by others in the article I don't share, but Andrew did a nice job and it's good that we're grappling as a community. Hope we grow into a more consistent posture on human rights.

What the fuck?

at a deep instinctive level they can't recognise popular ideas or take them seriously

Imagine watching Sinatra, son of Dolly & Antonini born in Genoa & Sicily, respectively, and Martin, son of Gaetano & Angela, born in Montesilvano, Italy & Ohio respectively, (Angela to parents born in Monasterolo, Italy), and crusading against the value of children of immigrants to the U.S.

some will leave, some won't, but their very fake anxiety shows how un-civic-minded, how selfish they really are, as if the unimaginable wealth they have isn't already enough.

More seriously, as most readers here know I helped draft the CA billionaire tax initiative text and you just can't get out of it by setting up a couple of LLCs in Florida. We have thought about how to block these fake paper moves for 4 years.

What these people are doing to the power of calling out real antisemitism, in an incredibly dangerous time of surging global antisemitism….man, it is just so worrisome

Every Sunday, protesters from Florida and beyond go to the notorious immigration jail and advocate for its closure

A thought-provoking one from @juliaangwin.com in NYT... "The result was shocking. The moment I switched, I no longer felt an urgent need to look at my iPhone — an urge that I hadn’t known was so strong until it was gone. I experienced a full-bodied sense of relief when the colors faded to gray."

This has nothing to do with faith or observance btw. It’s just about establishing an official hierarchy of citizenship where they are on top. bsky.app/profile/mark...

I encourage folks to take in the UN report on the April IDP camp siege in Sudan. Killings, rape and torture in homes, in the main market, in schools, in health centers, in mosques. The violence has not abated and - like Gaza - deserves our attention and energy. youtu.be/K_GYVl3Bts8?si=U8z8O...

stay safe, angelenos.

I am telling you that a large part of their dysfunction is that several Trump officials imagine themselves, constantly, as being in a social media sizzle reel where they display status and dominance over others. Their online personas are driving their actual behavior.

Merry Xmas to those celebrating! and a gute khinezishe esn aun a film to the rest of us

I wrote for New York magazine about deportations to CECOT in El Salvador, which are bound up with a tradition of US extrajudicial actions in the Americas and further the long arc of concentration camps.

Today from @nickkristof.bsky.social: – US getting closer to UAE as UAE backs RSF forces. Trump+family have started many new biz ventures with UAE – RSF targeting Black Africans with its mass murder/rape – "No one, from world leaders to the UN sec gen ... has made (Darfur) a sufficient focus."

Peace on earth, goodwill to men.

“Like Prime, but with human beings.” Marketing gift link. wapo.st/4axtwZ4

The US has sanctioned European researchers and policymakers studying misinformation, framing independent inquiry as a free speech violation. The Trump admin's refusal to allow regulation of platforms is US tech policy by other means—now being enforced through sanctions. Scholars must pay attention.

As Stephen Miller prepares his very own "Gulag Archipelago" – this time with warehouses holding 5-10K people each – sharing this conversation I did in June with @andreapitzer.bsky.social and @chenoweth.bsky.social. We answer: what happens when countries start building camps, and how do to stop it?

I recommend @andreapitzer.bsky.social's ONE LONG NIGHT over and over again. I recommend it to those who want to understand our authoritarian moment. I recommend it to those who aren't yet convinced that normal people can blow past the lessons of history even today. And I recommend it to you.

"But when the rule of law in a country is displaced by arbitrary authoritarian rule, as happened in Putin’s Russia, the results are predictable: investors and companies flee to more stable environs as the economy declines." — @davidrlurie.com

"Treachery" is such a strange word to use when attacking an ally our government has already abandoned.

What we saw inside Delaney Hall is the betrayal of the American Dream.

After what we're seeing at CBS, if today is not the perfect day for everyone to find some independent journalism & nonprofit newsrooms to support... what day could be better?

I'm quoted in this JTA piece on Jews, Darfur, and Gaza by @andrewlapin.bsky.social. Of course, some perspectives voiced by others in the article I don't share, but Andrew did a nice job and it's good that we're grappling as a community. Hope we grow into a more consistent posture on human rights.

The dirty too-clever-by-half Epstein files tricks are obviously a joke of absurd proportions, but it’s impossible to overstate how scary it will be to live in a country where we cannot trust anything that federal law enforcement tells us. Cascading harms we can’t yet imagine. Coming soon, no doubt.

"The unrelenting violent campaign by these settlers...brutal harassment, beatings, even killings, as well as high-impact roadblocks and village closures...coupled with a drastic increase in land seizures by the state and the demolition of villages to force Palestinians to abandon their land."

The CBS reporter who led the story calls pulling it a "political" decision. "The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

2/ So presumably the brass caught wind of something at the last minute or trump or Stephen Miller made a call and that was it. The subject matter and the players seem too potent for the details to stay secret for long.

What was it that Cronkite always used to say? "And that's the way the emperor tells us it is"?

Man we are just so pathetically unprepared to bear the the weight of authoritarianism

Why did CBS delete this promo and cancel this from airing in full?

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

Sudan topped a watchlist of global humanitarian crises released Tuesday by an international aid group for the third year in a row as a devastating war grips the northeastern African country. apnews.com/article/sudan-war-...

Short 🧵 on an interview that resonated with me. 1/6 On the surface, I have so little in common with Graham Platner (rural Maine/oyster farmer/working class) that even as I’ve watched his campaign with interest, I hadn’t paid close attention to his personal story. Then I listened to this interview.

The renaming of the Kennedy Center may not be Donald Trump’s worst sin, but it is offensive all the same. “This President simply cannot tolerate the degree of freedom and independence that art and artists require,” David Remnick writes. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/T39Mad

The reporting out of Darfur+ in the last few days show that measles is skyrocketing, a growing number of “grave-shaped earth disturbances” is visible via satellite, and an April RSF attack slaughtered 1000 civilians in a displaced persons camp with 319 subject to summary execution in their homes.

Politics is always full of strategy and calculation, but when do you hold out for a better deal, and when do you stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good? ICYMI @samsteindc.bsky.social: lnk.thebulwark.com/4qg5TZn

Recently, A.I. passed a kind of Turing test for the eye: the images and videos that it can produce are now sometimes indistinguishable from real ones. @chaykak writes about how 2025 became the year of “slop.” newyorkermag.visitlink.me/7WY9vv