The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Stunning new revelation: Epstein hung out almost exclusively with guys who had black boxes where their heads should be.

Hey losers leave trans folks alone

Ken Paxton has launched a snitch line to gather reports of supposed violations of Texas' transphobic bathroom policing law. Please do not abuse this snitch line. Please do not fill it with faff and nonsense. Please do not attach huge, unwieldy and irrelevant documentation to any reports.

AOC: I want to remind you where the real crime is. It's in the oligarchs taking $170 billion of our money from health care and food assistance and public programs and taking that and funneling it into a secret police program.

It's amazing how much of American political discourse comes down to white men are used to having all of the power and opportunities, and now that they only have most of it, they feel like they have lost something that is rightfully theirs.

like his complaint is literally that there are people who believe in things, believe those things are right, and believe in those things regardless of whether they are popular.

I’m going to keep saying it: both the “male loneliness epidemic” and the techbro obsession with AI are, at their core, about a complete lack of distress tolerance for the messy business of relating to other people and a terror of vulnerability/interdependence.

"Individual liberty" is when conservatives decide everything. Their concept of liberty is just domination, not freedom to do what they want, but freedom to force everyone else to do what they want. bsky.app/profile/donm...

i think to understand the meaning of the birthright citizenship clause to the framers of the 14th amendment, you have to understand significance of dred scott to the civil war republican party. dred scott wasn't just a bad ruling, it was understood as a rejection of the declaration itself.

The average SNAP benefit per month is $177 a person. The average ACA benefit per month is up to $550 a person. People want us to hold the line for a reason. This is not a matter of appealing to a base. It’s about people’s lives. And working people want leaders whose word means something to them.

AOC: I have to tell you, in my traveling across the country, I am hearing and have been seeing consistent things from everyday people. And it is that they are terrified, they are frustrated, they are angry, and they are shocked by a president violating the values that we hold dear

Mamdani: "We believe in standing up for those we love. Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job ... your struggle is ours too."

one thing you see in the discourse here is an effort to equate a recognition of the diversity of the working class with “neoliberal identity politics,” so as to make one of those options the only acceptable one

i think i would honestly find this whole discourse more tolerable if people simply said what they were actually saying, which is that they think the Democratic Party is too associated with femininity (and secondarily, with black people) and that they want to correct this

so…several weeks ago, he heard rumours his tattoo was a Nazi symbol but dismissed it as insane and didn’t look into it at all, not even to proactively prepare to address potential political attacks? instead, he waited for a news outlet to contact him with proof that it was a Nazi symbol?

once again: asking for a candidate without a Nazi tattoo isn’t asking for a unicorn you sound genuinely insane when you claim that it is

"How do you expect to win back men...?" We don't want those men. They are the hot dogs on the floor of humanity and we still have all these nice prepped hamburger patties if someone would just let them cook.

/2 I notice that the finger-wagging “you can’t see your opponents as evil” rhetoric from people like Megan is only pointed in one direction. The Right treating everyone but them as evil and inhuman is priced in, something we’re supposed to accept in the spirit of Kleinian discouse.

Most of the power authoritarians have is freely given. We should not comply with them in advance. Trump is far weaker than he looks. So is the GOP. We should draw them out, drain them at every opportunity, and fight for people’s wellbeing at every turn. We have been sent here to fight for people.

Pritzker: "In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists & protesters when unprovoked what would we call it? If officials marched down streets harassing civilians & demanding their papers, what would we say? I don't think we'd have trouble calling it what it is: authoritarianism"

You're not nostalgic for 2002, you're nostalgic for *being a kid*!

"the menswear guy isn't fair and balanced." do you even hear yourself? "fork lady is eroding public confidence." "ladder baby is undermining the credibility of the field." "lemon raccoon is acting without transparency or accountability." that's what you sound like.

Charlie Kirk was a vicious, racist trust fund baby who made the world a worse place. I am the CEO of Antifa Inc. and I approve of this message.

Worth noting that Khalil (and others) who have everything to lose, have shown more bravery and commitment to free speech than elites across academia, corporate America, culture and politics bsky.app/profile/josh...

I gave my heart and soul to that place. Built entire sections for journalists pushed out of their home countries. When the writer I hired, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia, they paraded me around as a symbol for press freedom. I put MY LIFE on the line to defend journalism and WaPo.

This is the playbook, folks. If you're not paying attention now and doing something about it, then you're going to have to sit down the rest of your life because democracy is being taken away. Do not be quiet in this moment.

First Colbert, now Kimmel. Last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multi-billion dollar mergers pending Donald Trump's approval. Trump silencing free speech stifles our democracy. It sure looks like giant media companies are enabling his authoritarianism.

Call me radical, but I think we *don't* need to have polite chats with racists who are spewing conspiracy theories that keep motivating white supremacists to massacre our fellow citizens, and we *don't* need to have bipartisan deals with fascists trying to destroy our democracy and our government.

what ezra doesn't seem willing to accept is that charlie kirk was part of a political movement that does not think that "we are going to have to live here with each other" and is fact very interested in the elimination and/or subjugation of many, many people

this from my piece on charlie kirk is probably the most important takeaway if you want to know why bad faith, right-wing voices in media are treated as just another set of peers

I can call fascists fascist for doing fascist things in fascist ways—such as a top government official in a violence-encouraging regime lying that fascist lawbreaking is “simple policy disagreement” and threatening anyone who accurately calling fascists fascist—and I will continue to do so, fascist.

The fact that Matthew Dowd lost his job for pointing out Charlie Kirk’s hate speech, while Brian Kilmeade openly suggests we should euthanize the homeless and there is zero outrage, shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.

Please don't forget, and don't let anyone else forget, they did this openly.

"Healthy debate" = when I criticize you "Cancel culture" = when you criticize me

From an Atlantic editor. I cannot get over how the entire centrist hivemind is attempting to wish into existence a person, and a movement, that does not exist. You are journalists, you are supposed to describe things as they are, not how you want them to be!

The stuff Jeffrey Epstein’s friends felt comfortable saying and drawing in grotesque detail with their names attached knowing they would not face consequences is the kind of thing I think of when I think about rape culture and how sexual violence against girls and young women is actually glorified

Listen to me: Our profit from the post office is the post office. Our profit from a library is the library. Our profit from a school is the school. And our profit from our lives is life. Our life. Ours.

i'm always struck by how these grievances involve people having to account for their actions in some way, shape or form. we're not talking about an experience of discrimination or hate or unfairness. it's "i made a choice and other people did not like that choice and responded to it."

Anti-Bluesky pieces all have the same basic argument, which is that being surrounded by some of the craziest people on the American left is somehow, going to be more influential on my thinking and thought that being surrounded by racist content from around the English speaking world.

RFK Jr: It's gonna be the biggest infusion of federal dollar into rural healthcare in American history BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. You know why? Because you're cutting $150b for rural hospitals, you're putting $50b back. That's not an infusion. That's a loss of $100b.

Warnock to RFK jr: "For the first time, we are seeing deaths of children from measles. We haven't seen that in two decades. We're seeing that under your watch. You are a hazard to the health of the American people."

Pritzker: "I refuse to pretend that any of this is normal ... I refuse to fall into the pundit trap that demands we sacrifice vital constitutional rights if it's being done in the fake guise of fighting crime."

The far right succeeded in this country in large part because adult men were angry about this supposed theft, and the Nazis learned to channel that rage. "[Marginalized group] stole your sex mommy!" is quite literally their rallying cry a lot of the time.

Just a reminder that there’s no secret health or weight loss information out there that Doctors Don’t Want You To Know. There might be new information that some doctors don’t know yet, but they are not keeping this secret miracle from you.

Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.

Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."

It's so upsetting how many problems are seemingly coming about because of public policy successes being so good we collectively lose memory about how some things really were worse in the past lol

*i* think that the issue isn’t the words, it is the substantive positions. no amount of language self policing will satisfy someone who just disagrees with, say, legal protection from gender discrimination

I know there's a lot of controversy about the Cracker Barrel logo, so I worked up a new option that should be good with everyone... The barrel is back, but it's now guarded by Scubble, The Cracker Goblin. I also worked up a new slogan for the company!