Whole bunch of stuff beginning to make a lot of sense.

“I’m a Grok guy” is the single most embarrassing phrase ever uttered in the course of human history.

Four different men. Four very different crimes. But their common trait is that each of them had previously received a pardon, commutation or clemency from President Trump. And they’re only a small fraction of a larger number.

NEW: The first two years of Massachusetts' millionaire tax has raised $3 billion more than expected. And rather than driving the rich away, IPS researchers found that the number of millionaires has *increased.* Tax the rich. Greg Ryan in @bloomberg.com:

The administration is going to have a hard time proving any link between domestic antifa groups and any of the networks listed in today’s designation, but that won’t stop them from bringing the full force of federal law enforcement against antifascists domestically.

NEW on @indicator.media: A first *full-scale* comparison of Grokipedia v Wikipedia. Last week the awesome @harold.bsky.social rocked up to my desk bearing gifts. Hal had collected almost all 900K Grokipedia entries and compared them to their Wikipedia equivalents for text and citation similarity.

Rhetoric taken directly from Nazi Twitter. I can tell you the precise accounts even

Attacking a federal district judge as an “activist” for issuing a lawful ruling is an assault on judicial independence. A democracy cannot function when executive agencies denigrate judges for doing their jobs.

Hegseth announces military operation to remove ‘narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere’– live A massing of forces in the region have prompted widespread speculation that military action against Venezuela are imminent

Trump Administration Prepares Tariff Exemptions in Bid to Lower Food Prices If the proposal goes into effect, it would be the latest rollback of one of President Trump’s key economic policies over concerns about affordability.

Michael Wolff tried to buy New York Mag — with money from Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. So Wolff didn't just have a reporter-source relationship with Epstein. Nor was Wolff his informal PR adviser. They saw each other as potential business partners. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Rubio is working on legal grounds to persecute antifa. Four foreign groups are now Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) and they hope to designate them FTOs. Only one is actually an antifascist group: Hungary has previously focused on Antifa Ost (Hammerbande). www.state.gov/releases/202...

That April raid on a birthday party in Hays County resulted in zero criminal charges, despite claims this was some big TdA bust. www.texasobserver.org/prosecutors-...

Evade consequences and then enact violence (and exploit) on others -- today DHS claimed to do a big raid in Florida in which they arrested immigrants allegedly charged with sex crimes.

He says this the same week in which we learned the median home buyer is now 59 years old. Average age of first time buyers is 40. Immigrants built your house, dipshit. Assholes like your boss don’t pay them enough to own one.

In the last week, we’ve seen federal officials threaten or scheme to arrest a governor, federal judges, and a former president.

The Trump White House Is Trying to Hide Its Judicial Nominees From You The more the public learns about Trump’s nominees’ unfitness for office, the less time the White House is giving lawmakers, journalists, and the public to do any meaningful vetting.

Memo Blessing Boat Strikes Is Said to Rely on Trump’s Claims About Cartels Accounts of a secret Justice Department memo offer a window into how administration lawyers approved the president’s desired course of action.

i really resent the implication with these people that they understand the full shape and contour of their god's plan. the raw hubris necessary to rule out the possibility that their god intended transition to be part of our journey, trials of Job style

Uhh... This article is fucking light on details, but this seems bad, right? www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g...

Technology is supercharging the attack on democracy by making it easier to spy on people, block free speech, and control what we do. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s activists, lawyers, and technologists are fighting back. Join the movement to Take Back CTRL.

How Much Worse Could the Internet Get? Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification is premised on the idea that we created a technological marvel and then corporate greed ruined it. But what if that is not the case?

everyone keeps dancing around it but JD Vance keeps trotting out the “immigrants are taking our housing“ because it’s a nativist blood libel he’s engineering alongside eg “they eat our pets” but, more specifically, it is to legitimize the dispossession, en masse, of an entire sub-population.

Jeffrey Epstein Claimed Intimate Knowledge of Donald Trump’s Views in Texts With Bill Gates Adviser In text messages from 2017, Jeffrey Epstein seemingly represented himself as positioned to pass information from the Trump White House to Bill Gates through an intermediary.

A Reuters examination details how rightist influencers and Trump officials have formed a powerful alliance, working together to target perceived adversaries, amplify false claims and reshape the media landscape.

To be clear, the e-mails released Wed were acquired from Epstein’s estate after a GOP House Oversight subpoena, designed to block the release of the actual “files”—the voluminous records of the Justice Dep't’s investigation into Epstein that resulted in his indictment on sex trafficking charges

this whole paragraph is an exercise in the pose of knowingness, and illustration of how making being "more reasonable than the extremists" the whole core of your intellect leads inexorably to believing in nothing at all

The overall proposition from those waging a war on empathy seems to be a convoluted, subversive way of convincing the easily swayed to care less about other people, ultimately lowering the threshold for accepting morally deficient behaviour.

"The university system will ban advocacy of “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without approval."

In Bovino's upside down world, there is no difference between an armed gang member preying on others in his community and a guy working 12 hours a day washing cars, flipping burgers, or installing sheetrock to feed his family — and he wants you to hate and fear both men equally.

Nice, just an advert for taking kids away from their parents and selling them to Christians. (also mangled words)

The podcaster and former Trump strategist reportedly filmed hours of footage with Epstein in 2019 "seemingly designed to get Epstein ready for an image-changing sit-down interview"

Megyn Kelly suddenly finds pedophilia very hard to define When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”

@eff.org: "Websites subject to [Wisconsin's SB 130] are left with this choice: either cease operation in Wisconsin, or block all VPN users, everywhere, just to avoid legal liability in the state. One state's terrible law is attempting to break VPN access for the entire internet."

I think it's the "saving up for braces" part of this story that adds a whole new level of ick. Like... that's a kid, man

you could fact check this — there aren’t 30 million illegal immigrants and there is no evidence that the presence of an immigrant in say houston has any impact on housing in madison, wisconsin — or you could note straightforwardly that this is just nazi rhetoric

Of course there's a difference, and it's reflected in many state laws. But . . . that isn't the point. Middle-aged men coercing sexually mature but underage girls into sex is still illegal, exploitative, and vile. "But they weren't 8-year-olds!" is a really weird thing to say.

They are coming to Charlotte literally because of a few right-wing propaganda accounts on X and I am livid.

These influencers can call in the state itself for support. In an episode highlighted by Reuters, the Libs of TikTok account libeled a Black lawmaker in Connecticut. Then its calumnies were amplified by the Department of Justice and the ICE Twitter accounts.

At roughly the same time that Senate Democrats were readying themselves to cave to their Republican colleagues on Sunday — effectively ending the weekslong government shutdown without any real concessions on health care policy — President Trump was getting booed by the crowd at an N.F.L. game

Katie Wilson, a Political Newcomer, Is Elected Mayor in Seattle Ms. Wilson, a self-described socialist, joined the race after Mayor Bruce Harrell opposed taxing high-income residents to finance construction of new housing.

This was always where this was headed.

One of the things that's very difficult to really take to heart about MAGA conservatives is that you can't get them on hypocrisy about their children because they really don't give a fuck about their kids

Emails reveal Jeffrey Epstein and associate discussed ‘girls’ and travel Revelation comes despite US justice department downplaying possibility that other men involved in Epstein’s abuse

Wisc GOP are proposing a bill that would mandate women use ‘catch kits’ when they have a miscarriage or abortion—forcing them to bag up their pregnancy tissue & bring it to the doctor as medical waste. Not a joke.

pantomime for a congress that's too corrupt to function dominated by a right wing party in complete thrall to industry, but I'm sure Politico makes that clear to readers being a news outlet and all

We are really ruled by the dumbest people in existence.

You just know that “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” bit would have done NUMBERS in this little clique

"One of the first people to make public allegations against now-deceased billionaire child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was Ava Cordero, a transgender Latina woman. Cordero, a model, was transphobically mocked in the media after she filed an October 2007 lawsuit"

This past weekend, you probably heard a lot about the 40-day government shutdown—the longest in history, FYI—and the Republican spending bill that just passed the Senate. You also probably heard about backdoor efforts by Republicans to use that bill to attack abortion rights.