Been a hot minute since this was my main beat but an immediate and enduring lesson from writing this in the summer of 2020 is that many of the tools of policing have their origin & are in feedback loop with the tools of colonial riot control, across decades www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...

Very stoked that @chrisgeidner.bsky.social came on to talk with @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social and @trentrichardnelson.bsky.social

Liberals and Georgists and feminists and Marxists and Christians agree. www.liberalcurrents.com/the-centripe...

"Artists responded by canceling performances, and audiences reacted with record-low ticket sales. It’s hard to interpret the closure of the Kennedy Center as anything other than a petulant, Trumpian reaction to these setbacks." www.liberalcurrents.com/none-more-wo...

Amos Adams Lawrence said afterwards: "We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists" www.liberalcurrents.com/from-powerle...

"is it all just envy" no. it's these dumb bastards trying to use their ill-gotten gains to wreck our fucking country www.liberalcurrents.com/is-it-all-ju...

UATX is assigning Land's Dark Enlightenment series <stares blankly into the middle distance>

Absolutely

ICE, CBP & the detention centers are still funded through the OBBA, so it would mostly be TSA, Coast Guard & FEMA that would be affected.

Helen of Troy has one, and only one, relevant character trait: very pretty. In the Ancient Greek story, she's basically an object. An excuse to go to war. A MacGuffin. All the audience needs is to see her and go "yeah, I get it." Any beautiful actress can do that. Such a weird hill to die on.

"What [MAGA authoritarians] fear most is the plain truth of being human." Interesting reflections. Not the main point of the piece but it's pretty astounding that MAGA figures think the anti-ICE protests are operating in Trump's political favor, as Alan shows here. Let them think that.

What is a prolonged shutdown of just DHS even going to look like right now? With, e.g., a shit ton of innocent people stuffed into detention centers?

Sorry but this MAGA style rant about Rome, on top of being wrong, is also just very funny to me. Sure you could criticize Rome, THE GREATEST SOCIETY THAT EVER EXISTED THAT CONTRIBUTED MORE TO THE WORLD THAN ANY IN HISTORY, but they also were good at some things, like humiliating artists,

For the doubters about the demand list: Thune is literally saying they won't engage with a list that more or less just asks to recodify that it's illegal to break the laws they're already breaking. Now they have congressional Republicans committed to letting masked goons break into your home

The GOP has offered nothing this century except for catastrophic wars. No healthcare plan; no re-industrialization. Now they're losing their only issue, immigration, as people see the violence and havoc that comes with mass deportations.

An understanding that the reason Epstein got away with it for so long is that the norms against sexual predation on minors were clearly much weaker than they are today. Not non-existent, but weaker. A positive analysis, not a normative argument.

"Nazis waged a relentless war on creativity and relied on the ability of people *not* to imagine themselves in someone else´s shoes." "The purpose of art, in the MAGA worldview, is not to cultivate feelings but to propagandistically impose their politics." www.liberalcurrents.com/none-more-wo...

Judges, and the people ICE is detaining, keep pointing out that this crisis is one of the administration's own making -- adopting a policy of mass detention without preparing for inevitable surge of legal battles. www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

NEW: The top Trump-appointed proseutor in MN says his office is dropping "pressing priorities" to manage crushing immigration workload. His short-staffed office is doing constant overtime and bouncing between contempt hearings. The bleak assessment: www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Modern apartments have lower fire death rates than houses. Yet codes require fourplexes to install commercial sprinklers, build dual staircases, and hire architects—while similar-sized single-family houses are exempt. These costs block building smaller apartment buildings.

This is an important point. Empathy—in and of itself—is anti-fascist. The arts—and the project of higher education as a whole—teach empathy, enabling you to put yourself in other people’s shoes. So to a fascist, they must be destroyed.

We are flirting with an American version of China’s cultural revolution. History repeats because history isn’t taught. The arts are crucial. The arts are elemental to maintaining a healthy culture, and they are always attacked by those that silence dissent due to the need to control the narratives.

mcardle: exposing yourself to a 14-year-old girl was not an abnormal thing for a person to do, and sure, he was arrested for that, but who's to say what he did was wrong?

The war on empathy and the war on the arts are part of the same project. www.liberalcurrents.com/none-more-wo...

The Trump admin is ALSO changing the rules so that rather than 30 days to file a Notice of Appeal, people will now only have 10 days (in most cases). That's just 10 days to find $1,000 and appellate counsel for an appeal the government says it will likely automatically deny!

🚨HOLY CRAP. The Trump admin just took a SLEDGEHAMMER to due process, largely eliminating the Board of Immigration Appeals process and MANDATING DISMISSAL of ALL appeals (which cost $1,000 thanks to OBBBA) filed after tomorrow unless a majority of the BIA votes to hear the case.

Roman Polanski's attorney's met up with Epstein, and represented him, as found in Epstein Files. It was 1978 when Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation was signed into law. There was runaway Pornography of children, and it was bringing in big bucks.

MAGA despises this about the arts, their power to evoke the universality of humanity in the face of evil hate. www.liberalcurrents.com/none-more-wo...

It’s true. Michael Knowles and Megyn Kelly would walk a red carpet in a heartbeat. They absolutely cannot stand that they’re not bigger stars themselves. And they’re bursting with resentment at the people who are.

Megyn Kelly’s response to Billie Eilish’s anti-ICE speech at the Grammys was to tell her to shut up and “sing for me, bitch.” MAGA can only see artists and art and something to be subjugated and controlled. www.liberalcurrents.com/none-more-wo...

These chuds try so hard to act like they don’t care what artists think while they’re fighting off tears. Every one of them desperately wants to be prestigious and it’s absolutely killing them that artists haven’t made a show of submission before MAGA, never mind a show of respect.

Rapists all the way down www.liberalcurrents.com/guys-win-and...

“What they fear most is the plain truth of being human.” Whamo.

Read @aselrod.bsky.social on MAGA and the arts

Trump's constant degradation of female reporters is unsurprising but the press corps' collective decision to treat it as background noise is actually kind of sickening

Very stoked that @chrisgeidner.bsky.social came on to talk with @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social and @trentrichardnelson.bsky.social

I can’t remember what event it was 1 or 2 or maybe 3 years ago that caused me to say goodbye to the Washington Post. But I’m quite happy to support my local Baltimore Banner and Liberal Currents (among others).

"What follows is a brutal, extended assault: tear gas, flashbangs, rubber bullets, pepper-balls. Kids in costumes. Elders. Disabled community members. People run blindly into traffic. Cars are tear-gassed. I fear panicked drivers will plow into the crowd." www.liberalcurrents.com/what-its-rea...

A Trump ‘Blockade’ Is Stalling Hundreds of Wind/Solar Projects Federal agencies are delaying approvals for renewable energy projects on both federal land and private property at a time when electricity demand is going up. By Brad Plumer and Rebecca Elliott www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/c...

"They laugh, gesture, taunt, and treat suffering like entertainment. They do not see the people out there as neighbors. They do not see themselves reflected in this community. They see an enemy. Meanwhile, the nightmares of this community now include their faces."

Columbia Heights has now connected the located child and her family with legal counsel. But TX lawyers told MPR they have spoken to MN families at Dilley who were not provided required legal counsel before being shipped out of state. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

These 2 kids detained last week were brought back to MN today. But school officials say many others from the Columbia Heights district are missing. They're not sure if they're in ICE detention or have moved away with their families. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

NEW: Abigail Spanberger this afternoon ordered that all state agencies leave ICE's 287(g) program. This means that the state police (and some other agencies) will no longer be empowered to detain and arrest people for ICE. Big, big move by the governor within weeks of coming into office.

Gonna ruin my mentions before sitting down to dinner and just say, Mamdani endorsing Hochul just makes good political sense. She's been backing him in all kinds of ways, almost none of his more ambitious agenda is can accomplished without the state government's assistance.

"These protesters endure gas, munitions, trauma, and violence in the name of the Constitution. In the most literal sense, these are patriots. And I discover that I am one of them." www.liberalcurrents.com/what-its-rea...

Also a good insight in how ICE is constantly trying to buck the courts

Read this starting from page 11. It's not just about her mental state (she clearly was having a mental breakdown). She actually walks through the timeline of when she started at the job (Jan 5) and then from when she started working on the case, the specific events and what time each day etc

TIL the CIA killed off its invaluable World Factbook...with a press release dated today?? WTF, is this yet more Trump fuckery? www.cia.gov/stories/stor...

Guys they are really, really not winning It sucks what they’re doing to our country, and my city especially God only knows how much damage they’ll do before they’re stopped, much of it irreversible But they are very much not winning

If you have not yet read this I strongly recommend you do so