Hot take: Ben Shapiro is actually on Coates’ side of a key point in the Coates-Klein divide — that there has to be a clear line where you won’t platform folks whatever happens to the overton window.

This message should never come from the government. This message is both un-American and unconstitutional. The Department of Homeland Security should be sued. Immediately.

Part of the big problem here is that the organization of knowledge is actually knowledge in and of of itself - and it’s some of the very knowledge that systems like AI and search use. So this whole process has a potential to feed model collapse.

Amazing results - but feels like the “is it a coup or an autogolpe?” discussion when we’re calling it “politicized bureaucracy” instead of straight up corruption. I understand, saving it as a question for the discussion section, but it’s really sad that the word “corruption” does not appear at all.

This is ultimately why those American Jews who thought we could remain in good stead with the Christian nationalists, as a specially protected minority who would receive special privileges by allowing ourselves to be used as pretexts to crack down on higher education, were so tragically mistaken.

Can vouch for this and for the researchers cited here. But an important caveat … Protests aren’t magic and there needs to be a strategy behind them. Also, effecting change through a protest movement is a marathon, not a sprint.

In my search for an intellectually honest winter holiday, I learned a ton about Saturnalia, which—while always chaotic—only gained the traditions of cross-dressing and having a Lord of Misrule to mock the Emperor after the Republic ended. That was the tradition that fed this kind of stuff.

I’ve felt for some time that we need an American equivalent of the reform act of 1832 - the big question is we work through this tumult is about what institutional changes need to be in it and which ones are nice, but unnecessary. www.ebsco.com/research-sta...

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

They “targeted Harvard because it saw it as an incubator of liberalism that violated the civil rights of white and Jewish people” Yet liberalism is quite literally the only force that has historically kept the United States safe for Jews. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/u...

“The cost to Jews of the changes is steep. When you don’t work on with other groups, then you’re not going to have those other groups come into your defense.“ Back in 2023 I said @rweingarten.bsky.social and Dem leaders should push Greenblatt aside. In the event, he left—after doing great damage.

This is the real cancel culture. Using the full force of the government to punish perceived enemies, aid their billionaire tech cronies, and protect pedophiles, neo-Nazis, and other extremist, antisemitic hate groups. THIS is the threat to our rights and freedoms. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/t...

This approach to retractions is about the strongest possible fuel for those who already believe that there has been a conspiracy.

The equivalent of: - filling out a net promoter score for the DMV - answering the question “next time you need electricity, how likely are you to choose your utility provider?”

Important work - very similar to what Toby Stark, Krosnick, @keithpayne.bsky.social, Trevor Tompson, and I found in 2019 as well when predicting political behaviors in nationally representative surveys (would be good to finally get ours out). But big lesson is: explicit >>> implicit for behavior.

Our paper on how cross-cutting group memberships predict warmer out-party affect and analyses suggesting this is why Latinos in the US have warmer feelings toward the out-party is now fully published in the most recent @polbehavior.bsky.social issue. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

How do people form beliefs about complex topics? Happy to report our Bayesian model of the psychology of Bayesian updating is out in @ispp-pops.bsky.social! (w/ Gabriel Li & Krosnick) If you gloss over the Greek, it's a new model for how to assess the impacts of information on summary judgments.

Fascism is using us American Jews as moral human shields, covering its takeover with lies about protecting Jews. They aren’t. They’re pushing Jews into harm’s way, as some Jews become fools & believe it & some non-Jewish antifascists are fooled & believe it. Only fascism profits from this lie.

My mother was playing “this little piggy” with my 8 week old niece. Can we please all agree that there are only 2 little piggies? Went to market (piggy 1) Stayed home (piggy 2) Had roast beef (piggy 1) Had none (piggy 2) Went whee whee whee all the way home (piggy 1) Nonsequitor with 5 of them

The Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology (CAPT) at Purdue University is currently searching for a Postdoctoral Research Associate! The deadline to apply is Dec. 31, 2025. More information about the position is available here: careers.purdue.edu/job/Postdoct... #commsky

My @nytimes.com op-ed: The Boomers Are Protesting Trump. Where Is Gen Z? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/o... (gift link) The key point: "The absence of young people from conventional protests is both a problem and a warning."

The President of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed. "HANG THEM", he posted. If you're a person of influence in this country and you haven't picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.

come work with us! @bluelabs.bsky.social is hiring a survey scientist. we're looking for someone who loves working with survey data and wants to solve tricky problems facing the polling industry. please share widely! job-boards.greenhouse.io/bluelabsanal...

instead of saying this was good strategy, maybe senate dems should say: "the republicans were going to kill people by starving them to death, and because we aren't monsters, we decided to let this fight go. We'll keep fighting. Stop electing monsters."

Preliminary data from @umich.edu survey on student AI use for class. Most rarely/sometimes use AI & always follow class policies, but think others frequently use AI & only sometimes follow policies. Perceptions of misuse ≠ reality Misperceptions may provide implicit permission for misuse.

Im seeing a lot of arguments like this from colleagues in PoliSci My view from working on autocracy is that Dems were winning on the biggest fight- making autocratization unpopular and now they're giving that up. Those are the costs

So, has anyone read enough to know if the sandwich actually had mustard and onions?

This is what we find in the polling data, it’s the biggest source of the polling errors that are hard to correct for, and the shifts around the edges of partisanship are slow.

Once again, the Actual Thing the Actual Democrats Must Actually Do is to make institutional reform the platform & to explain to voters why & how Doing A Popularism is the <consequence> of that, not a prerequisite.

Really good reminder that the problem isn't that Democrats don't talk about kitchen table issues - it's that voters don't make decisions from policy platforms & speeches - they form impressions from "random tidbits absorbed from a propaganda-filled media environment." newrepublic.com/article/2023...

Good description here of why “pro-semitism” and Christian Zionism are both really antisemitic. And the crazy brewing fight between the Christian Zionists and the wannabe Nazis.

There's going to be a lot of focus on the topline -- that polling was more accurate than in 2016 and 2020 but still biased towards Dems on average by 2.7 pp -- but I want to highlight some of the other findings I found most interesting

Ah, my favorite example for undergrads on why you look like a douche when you plagiarize. Maybe a good lesson for the current AI moment too! m.youtube.com/watch?v=1s0h...

HE. FUCKING. KNEW. FOR. YEARS.

My comments to the Michigan Daily on what to make of being added to the "Professor Watchlist."

Wondering about the dispute? Watch the full Reagan radio address here:

Today in life under competitive authoritarianism

The most telling thing about the whole ballroom incident is that Trump believes the only cost anyone could possibly be concerned about is the dollars they personally would be spending. History, tradition, lives, self-worth, environmental, opportunity costs … none of these.

Media outlets who refuse to describe in plain terms what the president did because they find it objectionable are lying to their audiences and running cover for the president. It's as simple as that.

I mean, Rome stuck with "SPQR" for 300+ years after it ceased to be representative and their senate stopped mattering.

As I said before, if Trump keeps violating the law to deny federal funds to states and cities that voted against him, and Congress and the courts don't stop him, it's really inevitable that those jurisdictions will start considering strategies like this.

If you attend a No Kings Day event, please record the number of people in attendance in our crowdsourced crowd-counting sheet. We prefer official estimates above ad-hoc counts — if you count yourself, pls be conservative (people are bad at estimating crowd sizes). docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

The plan to deride all protesters as “unpatriotic” is a lot harder to pull off if the protesters march under the banner of a truer patriotism. The symbols of America are fundamentally anti-dictatorial, but they can only be reclaimed by using them for their original purposes.

Hence why, in our 2020 book, we found that status threat was empirically indistinguishable from racial animus. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

“The Defense Department has confiscated the badges of the Pentagon reporters from virtually every major media organization in America,” the Pentagon Press Association said

Here's a basic rule of legal interpretation, as applicable to the US Constitution as to ordinary statutes: later additions have priority over earlier provisions in the event of conflict. The Fifteenth Amendment, including Section 2, is later in time than the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1.

🎶“It’s beginning to look a lot like feudalism..”🎶

Amendment 14, Section 5: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Amendment 15, Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. This is plain text!

“the constitution forbids race conscious remedies” would be news to the people who wrote the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments

New from me at Cato: I go through the numerous and massive First Amendment and academic-freedom violations of Trump's proffered "compact" with universities and then talk about the mechanism by which it would be enforced, by way of what I describe as a "retroactive push-button guillotine."