Barely a blip in the news. 🦗from the New York Times editorial and opinion pages. Compare with days of Hunter Biden Hysteria about unprecedented abuse of the pardon power.

This has been the autocrat’s playbook for a decade or two: have friendly oligarchs buy up independent media and then they impose government-friendly editorial policies so the autocrat doesn’t have to get their hand directly dirty killing the free press.

These stories are really shocking. Which is good, we shouldn’t get used to the government abridging civil liberties and abusing its power.

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?!

If ICE can threaten arrest for filming, then journalists, watchdogs, and protesters can all be silenced the same way. You don’t have freedom of the press if recording police is treated as terrorism.  #holdfast www.cato.org/blog/dhs-pol...

We’re way deep into the Idiocracy plot at this point.

Step 1, start a trade war to grind imports to a halt, destroying the logistics industry. Step 2, build a secret police force to round up people you don’t like. Step 3, make use of the destroyed logistics infrastructure to treat human beings like cargo. apple.news/ABuh7OUkjTs2...

That’s not how GDP works. But it is how propaganda works.

1 - the exec branch can't decline to spend $ Congress appropriated 2- the fed govt can't use federal $ to extort states over policy/political disagreements 3-the fed govt can't use federal $ to impose conditions unrelated to the funding program 4-the fed govt can't use federal $ to coerce states

This is critically important. Democrats need to pass it if they retake Congress. Trump will veto it. So pass it again. Campaign on it. Given current polling, corruption of the FBI, and the brutality of ICE and BP, there’s no better time to say, “Federal police are not above the law.”

Ellison is trying to buy Warner Bros. Now that the US has become a full-fledged personalist regime, this is just the way things work.

There's a lot of focus on how the dripping antisemitism on the right has created a useful rupture in various parts of Trump's support, and that's true. But I really worry that EVEN those on the less hateful side of that split are ignoring how dangerous some of these terrorists are.

This is how it works. Let the administration corruptly influence the media, and then the media no liber can report on government.

The thing about the Free Press is that you can read it and have no idea that Trump is violating the purported values of the publication, or even that he is President. And the Free Press is the reason why Bari Weiss was put in charge of CBS News.

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

This is the upshot for the government that exerts a control over the media.

BRENNAN: What are you going to do to force DOJ to comply? MASSIE: The quickest way and most expeditious way to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi. That doesn't require going through the courts. We're drafting that right now.

An underappreciated dimension of our media and politics environment is that every policy principal is now terminally online, arguing basic policy matters in public In no sane world, prior to 2016, would anyone want the DNI (or any admin official) to set or defend U.S. policy or objectives this way

There’s room for somebody on the left to wrap themselves in the flag a little & make a point that the right’s rejection of America as a creedal nation—and their ad hoc, ahistorical effort to make it an ethnonationalist project instead—is distinctly *unamerican,* a rejection of the national project.

I'd prefer that DHS didn't regularly post sacrilegious Christmas-themed social media posts. I think a reasonable person could interpret this as openly mocking the Christian religion and one of its most significant holidays.

Everything Trump does looks both tacky is aesthetically unpleasing, because it's thrown together and not thought-through.

It is legitimately hilarious that they couldn't figure out what to do with the "The" before JFK's name so it looks even more tacked on.

“These renamings are the latest assertion of kind of presidential authority over truth itself. The name isn’t supposed to be up to the president; it was established by act of Congress…But the White House can update the website to read ‘Trump-Kennedy Center.’” www.thebulwark.com/p/screw-it-l...

The Trump Doctrine is, essentially: “Who’s gonna stop you?”

Yes, the last thing we'd want is a chief executive who takes a moment to consider the legal, practical, or moral implicates of his decisions.

More collective punishment from Kristi Noem: x.com/sec_noem/sta...

I don’t know how it works at the New York Times, but my editors at The Guardian would never let me publish this if they knew that I was one of the elites who spent time with Epstein. And if I published it without telling them, I would be out of a job.

Scenes from a personalist regime: the President's media company is pivoting, slightly, to nuclear fusion at the same time the President is deregulating nuclear power.

Pretty wild thing to say a week after you went to SCOTUS to argue against independent agencies on the grounds that al federal employees must respond in a knee-jerk way to the president's personal preferences, and no one else's.

Imagine trying to interpret the First Amendment by the practices under the Articles of Confederation. The whole point of the Constitution was that politics under the Articles didn’t work, and the whole point of the Bill of Rights was that the Constitution didn’t protect people&: rights enough.

On Dec. 4, DOJ labeled people who impede or "dox" ICE agents "domestic terrorists." I document how DHS believes following, recording, and protesting agents is "impeding," and has a policy of threatening & arresting ICE observers. That's unconstitutional. www.cato.org/blog/dhs-pol...

If courts' only recourse for government officials flagrantly disregarding their orders is to refer the contemptuous acts to those same officials to investigate prosecute, what real power do courts have to check the executive? And why should the executive ever obey a court ruling against it?

It is really striking to me how much Americans are just accepting this dystopian police state that we find ourselves in.

The government explicitly lies to the courts, according to this judge.

thanks brett kavanaugh!

Another way of covering this would be “Trump attempts to extort states into not regulating AI by directing more politicized DOJ attacks.” Or, “Trump signs document claiming unilateral power he doesn’t have.” Either would work better than what I’ve seen.

Anti-commandeering doctrine and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution mean that the government can't extort states into doing what the federal government wants. It's also the case that executive orders aren't law by decree. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/t...

This should be the biggest story in the country right now. The sitting US President was extorting state lawmakers from his own party by threatening to withhold public money if they didn’t gerrymander for him. I don’t know how else to say it…

Jesus. This is crazy. Why can’t the paper of record just say that any “pardon” would be meaningless, because the president can’t pardon state offenses?

I don’t want to see “experts say Trump can’t pardon a state conviction.” That’s like “experts say sun rises in east, and some scientists claim water is two hydrogen atoms attached to an oxygen atom.” It’s just a fact. He CANNOT do this. And the media DAMN well better get their coverage right.

I don’t know why these people in Colorado think they don’t have to obey Emperor Trump’s commands to let his supporters out of jail.

Donald Trump is an anti-constitutional president, pass it on.

We don’t have enough lawyers to make this painful enough for DHS.

WOW. So this is obviously a huge violation of this man's rights, and it illustrates a few things we're seeing broadly: - DHS officers are ignoring peoples' IDs and instead requiring screening through their own systems - Confirms @404media.co's reports of use of DHS's facial recognition app.

Remember the days when we didn't do shit like this? I miss those days.

The usual next step when the U.S. government seizes a ship (as it sometimes does) is to sue the ship in federal court.

Outrageous.

While I've actually thought about it more than I should, I've never come been able to settle on whether I prefer serif or sans serif fonts. I really didn't expect that the MAGA culture war would force me to pick a side.

A crackpot lawyer who has made a career of trying profit from suing vaccine manufacturers is now in charge of the government’s health bureaucracy. I guess it’s not surprising that his agency keeps conducting BS studies to lay the groundwork for page financial payouts.