Lily Mason

RFK’s Anti-Vax Team Readies Its Next Moves “Their game is, let’s really destabilize trust in the vaccine, and make people really anxious about it.”

To be very clear, Kennedy's team is messing with a vaccine which has led to a 99 percent drop in the incidence of hepatitis B, which kills, early and painfully, 25 percent of the people who get it as children. lnk.thebulwark.com/3Xt957M

But who will review the peer reviewer review?

Wild how fast the party of “moral values” had decided to jettison the concept of shame.

Seth Moulton is calling for ICE to be abolished and prosecuted and Jeff Jacoby is writing about the importance of a multicultural society. Wild times.

A really nice figure of population and partisan malapportionment in national legislatures around the world

from Beramendi, Boix, Guinjoan, and Rogers (yassified by The Economist) priceschool.usc.edu/wp-content/u...

America’s Polarization Has Become the World's Side Hustle The 'psyops' revealed by X are entirely the fault of the perverse incentives created by social media monetization programs.

X's location "transparency" feature showing many MAGA accounts are based internationally reveals what we already knew: The world is using American social media and American politics as a slot machine and social media companies are directly incentivizing this:

www.404media.co/americas-pol...

Do Americans judge acts of partisan political violence impartially? No. We show that Democrats and Republicans exhibit clear partisan bias: both see the same violent act as more justified when it targets the other party than when it targets their own side.

osf.io/preprints/so...

#polisky

As we all wait for Callais to come down, our piece showing that Shelby County increased the racial turnout gap in most of the covered parts of the country has cleared the replication check and is incoming at JOP.

Gutting the VRA was bad, actually.

Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was. Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.*

The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths.

Underappreciated lesson from 2016: most fake news was run for profit (not ideology) & right-wing fake news thrived because it sold better than left-wing fake news. X takes that to next level with a social media platform designed for right-wing users, intentionally incentivizing right-wing fake news.

Meets Zohran on Friday, dressing like an East Village poet who wrote something called "A Fairest Autumn" by Saturday.

Calling something "scientific orthodoxy" rather than "established fact" or even "scientific consensus" is so incredibly damaging.

In 2023 a photographer from the Newfoundland town of Dildo captured images of a penis-shaped iceberg off the Canadian coast in Conception Bay.

www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

Behind this important reversal is a member of the Coast Guard who saw what was happening and had the courage to leak it to the press. That person deserves serious praise.

Gross and scary. Sorry that happened. And I get it.

At some point we’ll need to deal with the fact that the word “jailbait” exists and most people know what it means.

Understanding Evolving Republican Attitudes Towards Democracy Survey from SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins and Public Agenda Pinpoint Distinct Divides Within Republican Party

New report from us at @snfagora.bsky.social and partnered with @publicagenda.bsky.social finds the GOP evenly divided into 3 main camps: those who think Trump should be able to defy the courts, those who think he shouldn't, and those who aren't sure.
snf-agora.shorthandstories.com/understanding/

So I would say in general when a headline like this happens things would not be going well

The President of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed. "HANG THEM", he posted.

If you're a person of influence in this country and you haven't picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.

EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN CONGRESS should be pressed about Trump calling for their colleagues to be killed

And yet elite mainstream discourse seems to be hyperfixated on how the left flank of the Democratic Party alienates people

Understanding Evolving Republican Attitudes Towards Democracy Survey from SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins and Public Agenda Pinpoint Distinct Divides Within Republican Party

Most Americans say U.S. democracy faces serious challenges. New SNF Agora and Public Agenda data show clear divides among Republicans. Explore the data: buff.ly/cN70XY1

Very important piece here - we really need to escape the pundit-brain thinking that imagines voters think about politics in the same ideological way people who think about politics all the time think about politics. Because they don't.

I’m waiting for the Conversed meme

Understanding Evolving Republican Attitudes Towards Democracy - Public Agenda Public Agenda and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University are working together to understand Americans’ beliefs about democratic practices and principles. Previous work led by the SNF Agor...

New research: Public Agenda, in partnership with @snfagora.bsky.social, finds that Americans are deeply concerned about democracy, with partisan divides sharpened by Republican disagreements about presidential authority and the balance of powers.

Full findings: publicagenda.org/resource/pa-...

Not the point of @gelliottmorris.com piece, but look at this divide among Republicans on social issues. Half of them look like normal people and the other half are way out of step with the rest of the country. There’s a bit of a mirror on the left but much smaller.

From @gelliottmorris.com: “Most voters are simply not that ideological, with the canonical estimates in political science indicating that at best 20-25% of the population thinks about political issues in ideological terms.

Our analysis affirms these findings from the academic literature.”

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025.

US institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom.

open access: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

The Dems have been effectively protecting Americans from the GOPs worst ideas for decades - warning that the ideas are terrible. The GOP finally got to enact its worst ideas and it turns out they are terrible.