This is honestly about as good of a TL;DR of the basic relationship between Millerite ultranationalism in practice (as a component of MAGA) and 20th C. fascism as you're gonna get.

I don't think this piece is great or that Trump will be able to pull this off but everyone dunking on it without apparently having read it and realizing it acknowledges their critiques is negatively polarizing me in the other direction.

This stuff is such misleading cope. "The car occasionally asks a human for advice" is not "they're just remote controlled" no matter how many times people on here pretend it is.

Death Camp For Cutie over here

This pro-Trump nostalgia absolutely was confirmed over and over again by the Dems' own internal polling, in a truly horrifying way: newrepublic.com/article/1882...

Striking from new Quinnipiac poll: *Voters prefer path to legalization over deportations for most undocs by 59-34. Among independents it's 61-33 *Majority says Trump on immigration is making America less safe Again, there's broad rejection of the whole project, not just ICE tactics (see below)

Beatings to continue until morale improves:

Lol, this is savage:

oh god we're doing it again aren't we

one thing that would be cool, when prominent creators turn out to be terrible people, would be if we didn't have to go through this performative dance of insisting that their work was never good in the first place.

Very funny to see folks celebrate an investigation that must have been initiated and mostly concluded in the Adams administration as an accomplishment of our brave now socialist leader.

Everyone freaking out about seems to be missing the part where ... they just have dinners. Still bad to be in a all-white-men secret society! But the illuminati this is not. Also not a secret particularly: gothamist.com/food/inside-...

Trump’s witch hunt for 2020 election fraud in Georgia is going as one would expect

Can people please stop posting random unsupported claims made to law enforcement found in the Epstein docs as if they're proof of anything? The only thing they're proof of is that law enforcement gets a ton of nonsense complaints, especially about high profile people.

If you are willing to let the government frighten and cow you by the threat of removing your TSA PreCheck privileges and making you stand in the metal detector line with the plebes, you *do not have what it takes* to engage in any sort of resistance and should not give advice to anyone who might

Every ICE/CBP clown wasting his time arresting, harrassing, or manhandling Joe Citizen is time he isnt spending kidnapping an immigrant. Every drone in the office wasting hours putting every twin cities resident in a revenge database is not spending that time locating immigrants to kidnap.

More terrible over-the-top satire from the writers of America: the series.

Let me reiterate: THEY DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH GUYS TO PERSECUTE LARGE NUMBERS OF DISSENTERS. What they are doing, instead, is using fear and paranoia as a force multiplier: they don’t have to persecute us if we keep ourselves home because someone told us we can’t walk in public without being terrified.

the practical effect of arresting lemon et al is to spark widespread condemnation, especially since these arrests will certainly be thrown out. this doesn't mean the action isn't a dangerous escalation, it does mean the white house doesn't know what to do but spam its only attack

Just another constitutional crisis flashing by like a fucking cow beside the highway

Did @matt-levine.bsky.social go on vacation or something?

I spoke to a woman at the protest in minneapolis and she explained she wanted to be there in part because "i was a kid when george floyd got killed" and i nearly dropped my recorder

When I was in law school he gave a lunch talk on Roman law which he began by saying "I know nothing about Roman law." He then spent 30 minutes describing what he imagined it would have said.

To put it another way: Courageous jurists on the lower courts have held back Trump from inflicting even more damage on civil rights and liberties. This timeline sucks, but the one in which the judiciary doesn't even try to push back is FAR worse. We insult these judges when we dismiss their impact.

Not how non-violence works. People went onto that bridge in Selma expecting to get seriously hurt; the spectacle of police brutalizing innocent people for doing nothing wrong was supposed to reach and radicalize the public. As it is doing now, in fact.

The TACO cycle: Markets want to price in TACO. But TACO only works if Trump sees stocks tank. So we get a loop: Trump does things → nothing happens (markets already priced in TACO) → that emboldens him to do more → until markets start to think he might not TACO → stocks fall → TACO is restored.

Cheers is fine but the idea that it was some kind of high point in elite culture is deeply funny to me.

there is a very coherent explanation for this, which is that it is usually very hard to prove that someone is knowingly spreading a falsehood—or lying—and that reporting standards prevent outlets from saying things they can't prove to be true

I think that worrying about Trump’s absurdly incompetent DOJ investigating Walz and Frey is largely doing the propaganda work that they want it to. It sucks ass and it’s not normal or whatever, but keep your head on straight until something actually happens with it.

carvahlo told them that UTAX did not have their nose, and that they'd known this. but that wasn't what any of them had believed

In which a bunch of useful idiots discover that the right wing billionaires funding their university do not, in fact, care about free speech: www.politico.com/news/magazin...

I think there's several conversations about Newsom right now worth untangling. 1) Is he the likely nominee? (he's currently the most likely individual, but unlikely vs the field tho) 2) Whether you should support him in primaries (no) 3) What pre-commitments you should make if he wins nomination

Would they have the votes to convict in the Senate normally? Of course not. But if you have 51 senators, say, 48 Dems and 3 Republicans and you have that vote, you convict 48 to 3 and that's that - new president. Refusing to seat a new Dem congress just creates a Dem supermajority congress.

now, of course, when you point out the practical obstacles to "canceling the elections" people move the goal posts to "voter suppression and various shenanigans." yeah, those things exist and they always have. but the other thing is that those things work *at the margins*

funniest running bit on twitter is "gentle r kikuo johnson new yorker cover drives idw and tpot types insane trying to interpret it"

And yet what the Third Way and Ritchie Torres are doing, not this, is going to be what "Democrats" are doing.

Who did this? Because I fucking love it and I want to shake your hand, sir (not gender specific)

“Six Dems voted for an apparently unobjectionable nominee to run DoD hospitals who was going to get confirmed anyway” apparently means the party is fascist, we do not however care at all that Dems kept the vote from happening for almost a full calendar year

To functionally abolish ICE all a Dem administration would have to do is enforce existing civil rights rules -- so many agents have done fireable things like this.

they really do not have Enough Dudes

What ICE/BP is doing to Minneapolis is awful. And it's taking everything they have. By population, Minneapolis is America's 45th largest city. Keep both in mind at once: the regime's desire for authoritarian domination is bottomless, and they'll act on it, but their capacity to do so is limited.

Please everyone stop writing articles about "defense" or "economic" reasons to occupy Greenland, that's all irrelevant

Dr. Fukuyama, you can't miss

You can make LLMs say almost anything. A news organization reporting "what grok said" is engaging in journalistic malpractice. It doesn't know. It just creates plausible sounding words in response to a prompt.

wow

If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free. consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov

I can't see into MTG's heart but if she were cynically self-promoting she's doing a bad job--alienating allies she'll need one day. I think a lot of people refuse to believe that people they dislike have their own opposed vision of the good and instead can only imagine bad faith cynicism.

The past year has been terrifying. Really, the past two—I lost a lot of sleep in 2024 over the promises of the Trump campaign, promises they immediately sought to make good on. But at the end of the first year of his would-be dictatorship, I am calling it: we are going to win.

guy who is both a homeopath and a germ theory denier who believes that a lab leak is incredibly dangerous because the virus provably contains nothing which would make you sick