NEW from me: The US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since early COVID or the Great Recession—the country has lost 65k jobs over the last year as manufacturing, transport, & mining employment decline, while growth in construction has nearly zeroed out www.apricitas.io/p/america-is...

The number of ways this is unconstitutional lunacy is…a lot

From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

Every piece of reporting I've seen on this is drastically understating the scale. These are from Grok's replies within a single minute. Time-to-reply is degrading because it has such a backlog of NCII/CSAM requests to fulfill. Conservatively I estimate it is producing more than 5000 of these per day

Censorship and fascism at TAMU: I just finished my time at TAMU and let me tell you, the damage being done is already horrifying. Hundreds of classes censored (they like the word "mitigated" tho) and some straight up cancelled. Also, apparently Plato is race and/or gender ideology in Texas. 1/2

They need to start freaking out more. The Venezuela raid has apparently left Trump thinking he’s all-powerful and now he wants to do it again and again. Beyond the insanity of running foreign policy on short-term whims, it’s also literally the kind of thing that could set off global war.

Trump looks at Putin's Russia -- a failed and decaying state with a ruined economy engaged in perpetual wars of conquest that benefit only a dictator and his cronies -- and asks: How can I make the United States like that?

“Tump’s treatment of Machado has shown that America has no interest in helping her liberate Venezuela. America does not want partners. We want vassals and marks. Trump is showing the rest of the world who we are now. And I suspect that they believe him.” open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

Don't let this Jan 6th point get lost: Jack Smith testified to Congress he had "proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election." In other words, he could prove in court that Trump attempted a coup.

In some respects he's lucky that Eric Adams left him so many easy things that he could improve. Ingrid Lewis-Martin and Randy Mastro sat on a ton of shovel ready projects over the years.

Authoritarians don’t start by suspending elections; they start by insisting their victory is so obvious that elections are a nuisance. Trump has already said, ‘they should cancel the election,’ and now he’s baffled that the public doesn’t fall in line. #holdfast

Big congrats to @baruch.cuny.edu history prof. Gabriel Tennen whose work on curating a unique historical record of New York was recently featured in recent December 2025 @historians.org American Historical Review. academic.oup.com/ahr/article-...

I kind of think that the real problem we have right now is that the billionaire class is not just moustache twirling evil, but also completely fucking insane.

Attending @historians.org #AHA26? Check out our panel with @gromers.bsky.social + others related to: Infrastructure and Politics in 20th-Century Latin America.

The lesson of January 6th is that it does absolutely no good to prosecute the the violent foot soldiers if you're not going to prosecute the leaders and hold them accountable for their sedition under the full force of the law.

It's true but to me "the voters" are farther down on the responsibility scale. At the top are the elites who failed to understand the danger, the necessity for accountability, and kinda just hoped this would all go away. In a healthy political system he'd never be allowed to run again

Flu surges in 45 states as doctor visits reach highest level in nearly 30 years About 5,000 people have died of the flu so far this season, including 9 children, as the Trump administration pulls back on advice to get kids vaccinated. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

We’re being led by the anti-vaxxers of the legal sphere: People who’ve never lived without the protections of international law and domestic regulation, so they only notice the inconvenience, not the horrors prevented. When institutions work, their benefits become invisible, until they’re gone.

"Dems rightly bemoaned Walz’s political funeral, and they slammed the halfwit MAGA wannabe journalists who partly brought it about. That’s not enough. This double standard will persist until the left builds its own proper media ecosystem" 👏👏 @petertwinklage.bsky.social for 'First Draft':

The Brits - “Oh my god we may have to develop nuclear war plans against the United States” The French - “OH HO HO TIME TO DUST OFF OUR NUCLEAR WAR PLANS WITH THE UNITED STATES”

! The Netherlands has suspended its cooperation with the US in counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean Sea. It will from now on only conduct such operations inside the territorial waters of its islands there. Dutch Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans announced this while visiting Aruba.

What is just crazy about this, aside from the need for this statement at all, is that Greenland already IS in the US sphere of influence. It's far cheaper for the US, in material, security, and reputational terms, to have Denmark continue administering Greenland and work within NATO on security.

we were sitting on top of the most powerful hegemonic structure in human history that allowed us to rule most of the world with only a fraction of the resources required to actually rule the world and they're burning it down because they want to kill people for fun

A devastating story about the life and death of Lia Smith, a transgender woman and college student targeted by conservatives online because she briefly participated on the school's diving team. Lia was found dead by suicide last fall at the age of 21. (Unlocked article below)

Trump just said "all" of Venezuela's oil must be made accessible to US oil companies. Trump wants to emulate Putin's model: Authoritarian, expansionist rulers carving up their regions and distributing the spoils of conquest to friendly oligarchs. 1/ (new piece) newrepublic.com/article/2049...

"Hernández boasted that he would 'stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses' while trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine into the US. "Trump freed him, saying, 'If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail'..." www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

It’s genuinely wild that the United States spent decades building an elaborate rules-based international order which de facto cemented its permanent status as the dominant global hegemon, sustained by ideology rather than might, and now is just blowing it all up for literally no reason

One common theme throughout history is that empire often isn’t straightforwardly profitable the way you’d expect

Co-signing this. Grok is out there making CSAM on request from pictures posted to the internet. And if you posted pictures of your kids to Twitter, you LICENSED Grok to do that. Take those pics down NOW

Trumpian imperialism in action: kidnap the head of the regime, leaving the rest of it in place so as to access the oil reserves for the US companies. Then realize the oil is actually quite expensive to extract, so go ahead and SUBSIDIZE the oil companies. Perfect. www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

So, Platt Amendment redux?

Notice how she cites the indictment, which *does not accuse Maduro of trafficking fentanyl.* Tom Massie has been almost alone in the GOP pointing that one.

It's almost like working two hours a day on a podcast and spending the rest of your time shitposting is not good preparation for running a government agency

Too many top lawyers would rather collect tens of millions of dollars from corporations seeking favor with the Trump administration than protect the right to vote or combat discrimination. www.democracydocket.com/opinion/big-...

If the biggest donor to the DCCC/DNC ran a website where you could use AI to take women's clothes off I feel like there'd be a demand for Dems to give the money back.

Just to give you a sense of the scale of this, these are the search results for "@grok string bikini" over the last hour.

It's Their Time

This looks like 1,000 videos I've seen from authoritarian states

The Trump administration rejected recommendations from an advisory committee to honor Frederick Douglass and the woman suffrage and Civil Rights movements, replacing them with coins that feature pilgrims, the Revolutionary War and the Gettysburg Address.

Here are some choice quotes from Jack Smith’s testimony about the conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “..the evidence made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy.”

Prominent MAGA figures are making it 100% explicit that MAGA is a neo-imperialist movement that's all about pillage and plunder justified by assumed racial superiority:

On X, a senior U.S. Justice Department official is promoting a post that praises colonization as “one of the greatest things that ever happened to the backwards parts of the world.”👇

Post a famous bathroom scene

Advice That Is No Longer Necessary Anywhere in the World but Here in El Salvador… Don't ever forget that the least fascist among fascists also are fascists. - Roque Dalton, 1975 Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle www.sevenstories.com/books/4420-s...

yep. i can identify any number of structural issues but at the end of the day the basic problem is the republican party. this has been apparent for at least 20 years. it is also an incredibly unpopular observation to make among “serious” people.

Yesterday was the deadline to provide Congress with a full explanation of the Epstein Files redactions... The DOJ failed to comply with the law, again.

Every day that the pushback by Congress is muted, the more we can be sure Trump will take it asa green light to invade another country.

This is so fucking reckless and dangerous, I just can’t.

More immigrants => better health for Americans. More deportations => worse health.