It’s. Just. So. Embarrassing.

Pharmacies should put a special MAHA display near the entrance under a banner saying: This Stuff Doesn't Address Your Problem, So Don't Hold Us Liable, But If You Really Want to Pay Us For It, Fine

This is literally what it means to be part of a party. Those failing to endorse him should be forced to step down from any party leadership positions.

If only institutions like journalism and academia understood this. It’s not partisan to stand up for yourself if you are under threat, even if only one party is presenting the danger. In fact, if the institution under threat is important—and they all are—then standing up to the threat is imperative.

Vaccinate your kids. Vaccinate yourself.

The Regents have still not publicly stated whether they plan to cave, but here’s hoping this helps.

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA NIH grants. The same judge, Rita F. Lin, previously ordered all UCLA NSF grants reinstated. Lin has now nearly entirely reversed Trump's July de-funding of UCLA research: www.latimes.com/california/s...

This ought to be engraved somewhere.

Disney fired and unfired Jimmy Kimmel the right way. by Ezra Klein

This would be terribly funny if it weren’t so utterly terrible.

Democrats now have a huge opening to go on the offensive. Between the RFK vaccine disaster, the Homan bribe, Trump's nakedly corrupt DM to Bondi, and Brendan Carr breaking the law, they should turn on the firehose. As should the press. Doomers will be blocked. TY for your attention to this matter.

I often appreciate that Will is willing to stake out controversial stances that aren’t always dumb and stick to them. But man the guy just does not have a good sense of when he’s out over his skis. He’s just so used to fighting he can’t distinguish between smart, engaged pushback and attacks.

Worth reading this thread on Russ Vought. Competence and zealotry combined make him likely the scariest person in this government.

The H1-B visa thing is, like everything else in the Trump administration, set up to carve up exceptions for friends and punish enemies. It’s the authoritarian thru-line that stitches everything together.

the reality is that you cannot say "this party is an existential threat to democracy (which they are!)" and reconcile it with "yes but sometimes we agree with them"

Ok my cis friends, we are going to need a lot of you to step the fuck up and fight hard for us www.them.us/story/trump-...

I won’t pretend to know who can win let alone who should win, but I do wonder sometimes if the actual lesson from Hillary and Kamala is not so much that voters don’t want a woman but that voters don’t want someone who sometimes comes across as a phony careerist

Wow. So insane it’s hard not to laugh.

A gun is in a mugger’s toolbox. He’s just using his tools to the fullest.

The Senate just *unanimously* voted for a day of remembrance for a well-bankrolled private citizen who was a virulent bigot and MAGA agitator. What the fuck are democrats doing? (You don’t even need the comparison for this to be absurd, but there was an actual elected leader killed and…nothing.)

i think that if the FCC threatened to revoke ABC’s license unless it replaced Jimmy Kimmel with Kevin Hart to diversify the network, Ilya Shapiro would be able to identify the issue here

This is why the First Amendment has been so obviously broken for so long. If there’s no concept that private companies who control the media channels can also suppress speech in important ways, and the First Amendment only operates negatively against the government, this is the inevitable result.

I'll say this again: In my opinion, when companies and institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law; they are making an educated guess that the United States is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won't matter.

I sort of guessed the answer when I asked which Kirk legacy would be honored — debating your opponent, or using state power to shut down the left. But it happened very quickly. www.semafor.com/article/09/1...

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

I think the answer is that the government directly threatening ABC to force a firing would be a First Amendment violation but ABC being cowardly assholes complying in advance in their moronic quest to satisfy Trump is not.

… and a person best known for ginning up a supposedly legal basis for war crimes.

I'd like to commend the lawyers who wrote this complaint on behalf of the professors and employees of the University of California against the Trump administration. It's a sober legal document with strong claims, but also, this is a fight for public opinion, and this reads like the writers know it.

With the added toddleresque tattling threat for good measure

Please permit me to remind you that just as the First Amendment protects Nazis, who would suppress our speech, it also protects the New York Times, which has sold out every American right and value for the mess of Park Slope potage that is false equivalency, false neutrality, and access.

This is the end game of decades of abandoning journalistic integrity for both sidesing in the hope that Republicans would like you if you were just extra nice to them and never called bullshit because then you’d just be the “liberal media.” It was never a winning plan.

Do not laugh off the Trump NYT defamation suit. Joke lawsuit but will potentially go in front of a joke judge. MMFA is currently being dismantled in a similar circumstance. Only defense would be journalistic solidarity to punish Trump for attacking their profession but it's probably too late.

We don’t have to participate in the rhetorical game where we, too, pretend like they couldn’t possibly mean this. That’s just giving them more rope to hang us with.

This is extrajudicial execution, without any clear threat to the US, no authorization from Congress, and far beyond even Article II. The military is not the president's personal hit squad. Or wasn't, until now.

How do you govern when one side just lies about the most consequential things all the time and we have a press that will never ever call them out as lies because it seems partisan? How?

The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?

Please pay attention UC Regents! This is how it works. There are no compromises with Trump.

Everyone who spent the last few years amplifying clear right wing bullshit on “cancel culture” (NY Times, The Atlantic) owns a portion of the free speech crackdown now underway

Here is Stephen Miller clearly indicating that we're about to see a McCarthyite campaign of state-sponsored persecution against the liberal-left, all fake-justified by the murder of Charlie Kirk:

Parents *shouldn't have to* lead the way in helping kids navigate AI risks and opportunities. Parents should be able to trust that developers and regulators are working to ensure that AI is safe and ethical, and that educators are trained to help kids navigate these tools responsibly. 1/

This is the complete insanity of the Kirk-related firings. **Accurately quoting him** is getting people fired. Letting him speak dir himself rather than affirmatively giving him a glow-up is a job-costing sin. What the fuck.

And yes, I was the last Black full-time columnist in the Opinion section. Washington Post -- operating in a city which for a long time has been majority Black, is now without any full-time Black opinion writers.

Fuck the Washington Post and all the other private organizations who are firing people for accurately posting about this vile racist, misogynist, transphobe who died and doesn’t deserve anything but shit talked about him.

Trump is trying to co-opt the world’s #1 public university, but he’ll settle for destroying it. He’s pissed that we have a high rate of first gen students and actually provide some of the social mobility that education promises to achieve. That we do great research not steeped in white grievance.

This may explain why there’s an aggressive response to people who merely post Kirk’s own words. It threatens the existence of the alternate Kirk - the motivational speaker that had been marketed to young kids and white Christian groups through selective quotation & clips.

Every politician, every brand, and every celebrity should delete their Twitter accounts RIGHT NOW.

As a colleague mentioned yesterday, Gamergate is one of the five most significant developments in US politics since the Cold War

Kirk didn't serve in the military or hold office. The war hero treatment -- half-mast flags, military guard, Air Force Two escort, calls for a statue at the Capitol or to lie in the Rotunda -- shows that for MAGA, service to Trump has become the highest, most honorable form of service.

This is excellent. A particularly important point: “Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long you dress them up in a posture of debate.”y

there's a weird feedback loop where the media's reaction to kirk's death pushes you to speak more ill of the dead than you otherwise would because it's the only reasonable response to the simpering praise they're heaping on him