This is some of the craziest shit I've seen in a while and I really fear for our social order sans some pretty heavy-handed regulation

As just such a journalism professor, I invite Chris here to lay out his own pedagogical vision for the only private profession mentioned by name in the Constitution. If it’s “let the machine write for you” then I further invite him to resign and make room for real journalists

Felipe De La Hoz (@felipedlh.bsky.social) wrote a hella fine piece at Hydra last week about modern dandyism (and politics); gorgeous photos by DiDi Turley. flaminghydra.com/issue-500/

TODAY: @felipedlh.bsky.social on the life of a dandy, and those just imitating fashion. "What I find both amusing and irksome is that traditional menswear is an ostensible point of propriety for these wannabe authoritarians and they don’t even care about it at all." flaminghydra.com/r/883cbc3f?m...

Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal fire wall intended to protect taxpayer data.

During October's ICE raid in NYC's Chinatown, I saw an IRS criminal division agent standing guard on a corner. A majority of that agency had been detailed to ICE ERO. For @slate.com, I wrote about the phenomenon of federal agents from once-specialized agencies absorbed into this national police blob

they’re calling it My Most Personal Essay Of All Time and i’m literally never doing it again gabydelvalle.substack.com/p/accidents-...

I wrote last week about the dangers of normalization and political debates rooted in premises already engineered by the authoritarians, when premise is often just as important as the discussion itself

NEW: ICE has a plan to lease offices across the US as part of a secret, months-long expansion campaign. Today, @wired.com is publishing dozens of those locations. Many are near schools, medical offices, and places of worship. Vital work from @leahfeiger.bsky.social that I'm proud to publish.

I was right about the politics of this then and I’m right now. The best time to do this was 2024, the next best time is now. It is the moment of possibility

This cannot be something a civilian law enforcement agent is allowed to wear in the US — and an agency that has a culture that tolerates this cannot be saved.

Once more, there is no incentive whatsoever for them to think twice about reflexive surveillance of critics. The absolute worst case scenario for them is a judge slaps them down and then they just move on to the next hundred subpoenas. The power has to be taken away completely

Not big on going over how reporters phrase things with a fine-tooth comb but I do worry about speed of normalization. "Negotiations over requiring judicial warrants to enter homes" this is already a constitutional requirement. "Non-protesters have been impacted" it is not suddenly illegal to protest

Again, this is FALSE. Administrative warrants are NOT signed by an immigration judge (or any judge at all). They are generated and signed by ICE officers themselves with no external oversight whatsoever. Here is a blank sample warrant. Note who signs off on it; an "immigration officer."

If no one is being prosecuted for the child sex trafficking can we at least get some prosecutions for all the other crimes?

God put pits into cherries bc he knew that I would eat too many too quickly if I didn’t have a little obstacle

Am I correct that this is the first time federal agents have arrested a journalist exclusively and explicitly for news-gathering? I know about Guevara's deportation, but there was an immigration rationale there. Öztürk was detained for the op-ed, but I don't know if she'd identify as a journalist

This is one of the clearest shots across the bow yet. The administration has no intention of permitting free and fair elections going forward; that fact does not mean that they will be successful or are particularly competent, but acknowledging that is a prerequisite to counteracting it

Perhaps the most politically important thing about Zohran Mamdani is that it seems like he really, really likes New York and New Yorkers.

The Washington Post published a clear video of federal agents removing Alex Pretti's handgun moments before he was fatally shot. There's nothing in the video to suggest Pretti even reached for his weapon. wapo.st/49Zqv1L

For @thebaffler.com, I wrote about autocracy, the inevitability of the imperial boomerang, facets of denial, and what it means for state and local officials to contemplate their own access to violence in the face of federal subjugation

Rubio will probably try to slither back to some think tank someday and it is imperative that he not be allowed back into civil society

I’m not sure they realizing how this is shifting public opinion. The things I think should happen here are pretty much unprintable and majorities of the electorate increasingly agree with me. The time for peaceful resolution is slipping past

1. ICE has STOPPED PAYING for medical treatment for its 73,000 detainees ICE has not paid its bills to 3rd party providers since OCTOBER and the situation will likely persist for MONTHS, a Popular Information investigation reveals Meanwhile, critically ill ICE detainees are not receiving care 🧵

As I wrote in my @theverge.com piece on gov't weaponization of content moderation to remove avenues to capture/archive footage of ICE, some DHS/DOJ actions can best be understood through the lens of narrative war, where non-approved footage isn't just irksome but a competitor in narrative-building

As a journalism educator, I spend much time considering our objectives & responsibilities. For @newrepublic.com, I lay out a notion I think should be self-evident: journalism has an inherent right to self-defense. We are under no professional obligation to be even-handed with attempts to destroy us

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

crazy to think how i struggle to ask for any kind of help but the president of the united states asks "can i have your nobel peace prize?"

Important to keep in mind. In mere months, the "papers please" regime that is often used as shorthand for authoritarianism has become the standard operating procedure of the series of connected entities now acting as a de facto national police. It's much harder to put the genie back in the bottle

The whole "just walk around with your papers" line is wrong-headed for a number of reasons, but among the ones most people don't understand is you can be present lawfully without the correct "papers" for a myriad of reasons

If I can pull your attention elsewhere for a min, to a red-state city that has for the most part stayed out of Trump's crosshairs: Salt Lake. A deeply conservative state that has developed a robust refugee community with relatively widespread support. Can that survive? Can it offer an alternative?

In the last 4 days: -- Elise Slotkin says she's being criminally investigated by DOJ -- ICE illegally goes "door to door" in Minneapolis -- FBI raids the home of a WP journalist -- DHS illegally arrests, detains 100+ Somalians with legal refugee status

BREAKING: Hundreds of sensitive U.S. records obtained by WIRED undercut the Trump administration’s claims portraying Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua as a unified terrorist force invading the country. Intelligence agencies spent much of 2025 unsure TdA even functioned as an organization on U.S. soil.

So if it's the government's explicit posture now that people with completely unequivocal lawful status are detainable not just incidentally but as explicit arrest targets, can we assume this will extend to temporary visa holders? Permanent residents?

3 Prosecutors Quit After Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow Joseph H. Thompson, a career federal prosecutor who was the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota last year, quit after the Justice Department sought to examine the woman’s supposed ties to activist groups.

I'm sorry but this is baby shit. Delete the post? Resign? He's an active danger to public order. People are going to get killed whether he deletes the post or not. Do something!

There are places shaped indelibly by immigration — historical & contemporary — around the country. People think of NYC or LA or MN or FL; they rarely think of Salt Lake. In a state that went Trump +20, refugee programs are broadly popular and immigrants rhetorically supported. I tried to answer why

I understand people are generally well-meaning when they say this but it’s a little grating to see all the statements emphasizing that Good was a U.S. citizen. The obvious implication, intended or not, is that it would have been less bad to shoot a noncitizen at point blank

The danger of this moment cannot be overstated. Trump/Noem's vile defense of the killing shows that the heavily-armed government agents roaming our cities are unbound/unaccountable even when they kill Americans. On the pod, @felipedlh.bsky.social and I dig into this: newrepublic.com/article/2050...

For those keeping score, Bellingcat, The New York Times Visual Investigation Team, & Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the President & his cronies

ice agents simply aren't trained well enough to be on the street. they are a genuine danger to citizens

As I wrote recently in @newrepublic.com, the notion of state protectors bringing charges against federal agents acting outside the bounds of their authority is perfectly plausible and probably necessary

U.S. foreign policy

For @theverge.com's set of looks back at the year, I looked at the dark horse of mass free spree suppression, which bodes to get much worse: weaponized content moderation, served up by increasingly pliant tech giants

Seems to me like a significant escalation by DHS. There is ample evidentiary record that this person is a U.S. citizen and DHS has not in any way attempted to refute that record specifically, simply taking the tack of “no she’s not.” Now it claims to have deported her despite a federal court order

Not good

A story I found about Haiti: In 1999, a group of Haitians were tired of political disorder and dreamed of a better life in the United States. So they built a small, 23-foot boat by hand using pine trees, scrap wood, and used nails. They called the boat "Believe in God."

As I wrote for @theverge.com when the “anti-Americanism” push was first rolled out, the vagueness is also part of the point, forcing people to way over-correct, in a process that will almost certainly use “AI” for screening

What the fuck! I don’t think I’d ever seen this word used Ina by official communication from any agency, let alone one purporting to justify an arrest