This is an especially worrying statement when facial recognition can be inaccurate, biased, and generally make mistakes. Basing whether someone should be in the US or not, and ignoring physical media like a birth certificate, is ripe for disaster bsky.app/profile/jose...

Now you'll get fired from your job if you refer to January 6th attackers as a "mob of rioters."

Trump is trying to rewrite history and turn criminals into patriots. It's scary and dangerous.

A federal judge in Chicago had to tell Trump's faux-tough-guy Border Patrol chief not to tear-gas trick-or-treaters. America has sunk so far so fast it's astonishing.

My column:

www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...

One year ago

Opinion: Why I'm handing in my Pentagon press pass Tom Bowman has held his Pentagon press pass for 28 years. He says the Pentagon's new media policy makes it impossible to be a journalist, which means finding out what's really going on behind the scen...

A powerful personal testament from Tom Bowman of NPR about the Pentagon attempt to exert complete control over all information. Protecting classified is of course fine. But when neither Fox News nor NY Times sign up to your policy, you should ask yourself if you are getting something very wrong.

This is by 9 former CDC directors. Things aren’t good for public health if former CDC directors are jumping in the conversation.

It would be very easy for ICE to make clear who its officers are and to display valid law enforcement creds. They’re choosing not to, to intimidate and spread fear. This is not how law enforcement should operate in a free society.

Replacing the head of Bureau of Labor Statistics with a stooge, proclaiming that crime is up when it’s down, and taking over the Smithsonian are all about trying to take over facts.

But facts are facts whether or not Trumpists agree.

"Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

From a Harvard psychology professor - to his great credit

How I Came to Be in the Epstein Files A conspiracy wrapped in a conspiracy theory wrapped in an enigma

glad he got to the bottom of this for us

It is an extraordinary loss of intellectual expertise that the American people invested millions in developing

Every scientist who earns a graduate degree in the US is the product of an investment by the public

This is like setting money on fire

Every Trump trade "deal" is a defeat for the US. They all cost US consumers money unnecessarily. None will bring real benefits to the US. All will slow our economic growth and undercut our competitiveness. All weaken the global trading system. Many include impossible promises. Economic malpractice.

It's simply amazing to me that the U.S. spent 70 years (1945-2015) constructing a post-WW2 military, economic, and social world order to its liking, only to turn around and decide it was actually the victim of this order the entire time.

We are seven months in, and the speed with which vital civic institutions are capitulating to authoritarian demands we once would have regarded as inconceivable in an established liberal democracy is jawdropping. I hadn't thought I was polyannaish about America, but it's really stunning.

Sanity, Madness and the American Promise A view from Finland

“In a sane world, voters would have grasped that they were gifted a unique country…. to pursue self-governance and expand freedom—an exceptional experiment…to be embraced, improved and cherished rather than tossed away to the whims of a malignant sociopath.”

open.substack.com/pub/america/...

Big Law Firms Bowed to Trump. A Corps of ‘Little Guys’ Jumped in to Fight Him.

A reminder that our profession is not just big firms, and that countless lawyers are stepping up in this critical moment. GIFT LINK
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/u...

Farm worker who died after California Ice raid was ‘hardworking and innocent’, family says Jaime Alanís, 57, died a day after falling off a greenhouse roof during an immigration raid of a cannabis farm

“My uncle Jaime was just a hard-working, innocent farmer. He has his wife and daughter waiting for him,” Duran wrote.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

History Shows Why Birthright Citizenship is so Important The 14th Amendment aimed to overturn restrictive state laws while making the Constitution more inclusive.

"the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause’s broad inclusivity is well-established and indisputable, and it should be a point of national pride, which represents Americans’ commitment to a multi-racial democracy" - @unlawfulentries.bsky.social (2/6) time.com/7300066/why-...

There is absolutely no law that allows the President of the United States to unilaterally impose a tariff to interfere with a criminal case in another country.

Important story: not just because of the fact high level Republicans in government lied to the public to justify an illegal deportation, but because it shows how politicization of the civil service is making it functionally impossible for them to demand integrity and the rule of law.

Whenever one of these stories pops up about unidentified federal agents, my first question is, "Are they really federal agents or just random people impersonating law enforcement?"

In my humble opinion, that's not a healthy dynamic in a democratic society.

Donald Trump gives people permission to be their worst selves. His politics are not just representative, they are generative. His words seep into people’s souls and slowly corrode whatever potential for human decency ever resided there.

worth pointing out, again, that a 20% tariff on Vietnamese imports alone (our sixth-largest trading partner!) would have been considered the worst trade war in modern American history pre-Trump. Instead it is now treated as a "deal". How far we've fallen.

The reason I now believe ICE should be abolished is not that I don't think we need some kind of agency to deal with immigration and customs, but rather that this particular agency has so soiled its reputation and is operating so far out of bounds in a democracy that the only solution is to end it.

In a sane world, there’d be massive outcry to a US president threatening arrest & deportation of a winning Democratic New York mayoral candidate. Instead, it’s just treated as a normal Tuesday.

For the record, Trump’s threats are another disgraceful attack on an American citizen & the rule of law.

I'm writing this post in high dudgeon because what the Court endorsed today is unamerican and contemptuous not just of the role of the judiciary but also of the responsibility we have as a nation to those in our custody and those we subject to punishment.

I'm mad as hell. You should be too.

Maybe, just maybe, the conduct of masked and armed ICE agents is contributing to the surge in public distrust and unwillingness to cooperate.

I don't know whether Mahmoud Khalil is a good or bad guy. I don't know whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a good or bad guy. What I do know is that they are entitled to due process, because if they're not, Trump's little masked men can detain any of us regardless of whether we're good or bad guys.

Does ICE Mask Its Agents to Protect Them from Targeted Violence? The Department of Homeland Security defends its practice of masking its agents and concealing their identities on the grounds that they would otherwise be the subjects of targeted attacks. It has not ...

New from me this afternoon at Cato: ICE agents now wear masks and hide their identities. A reasonable response to threats of targeted violence off the job? Or an attempt to take on the unaccountable and terrifying trappings of a secret police?