Lily Mason

Exclusive | Trump Administration to Drop Defense of Law Firm Sanctions The Justice Dept. plans to abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders that targeted Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey.

If you are a client of a firm that folded in this fight, you should know that not only were they morally wrong, but they were also strategically dumb www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

Speedrunning all the great blunders of the past

I think the truly damning thing about the Dem comms response is that they had months to prepare for today and there's zero coordination, no unified message. Just every D leader responding like they quickly hammered out a statement in a panic at 6 am this morning

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I'm hiring a postdoc (from Aug 1) to help build a new research program on politically sustainable immigration policies at Notre Dame.

Looking for a social scientist with strong quant skills, familiarity with new computational tools, and interest in public-facing research.

It is difficult to overstate how quickly & thoroughly & shamefully we have normalized “the president can use federal funding as a cudgel to punish blue states & only blue states on his whim” in our polity & society. Yet another thing that would have ended any other presidency in the modern era.

Huh. Imagine that.

Yeah Sean likes to write about things he hasn't read.

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across.

If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers.

If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

The irony is that this behavior is extremely 1990s women’s diet culture, in which you hurt yourself just enough to look the way you think other people think you should look.

When @lilymasonphd.bsky.social & I sent Sean the proofs of our book, after he had cited it disparagingly, but hadn’t read because it wasn’t out yet, he wrote back half an hour later to say our book’s content didn’t change any of his misleading critiques. Maybe he fed it to an LLM for a summary?

these people treat being called racist like it is a slur, and treat slurs like they're mere differences of opinion

Also that's what abstracts are for?

Maybe I’ll just keep posting this every time we learn of another violation of our 1st amendment rights (from our actual government) to remind us of the 152 prominent writers who were so bothered by “cancel culture” (post #metoo and #blm that they wrote an open letter about it back in 2020.

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature. This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w

Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"?

www.techdirt.com/202...

Universities were once entirely populated by white Christian men of means. Every step toward social equality meant fewer white supremacist and misogynistic ideas were considered true by default, and competition for jobs grew more challenging. They want to go back.

Conservatives spent years complaining about ”safe-spaces” and “liberal snowflakes” only to turn around and show they are absolutely terrified of ideas they don’t like (“racism is bad” “gender is fluid”) and willing to use state power to avoid the slightest discomfort.

The snowiest of flakes.

Some may be saying, “yes, we knew this”, but we don’t really know know until we see data like these.

And something we may not have known that this paper shows is that once a person gets into the right wing silo, we’ve lost them. Changing to the chronological feed does not bring them back.

Masnick: "This is what so many of us kept pointing out throughout the 'Twitter Files' hysteria: the 'free speech' grift was never about protecting individuals from the state. It was about protecting a specific type of speaker from the social consequences of their speech."

What Are Heterodox Free Speech Warriors Doing About Trump's Censorship-Industrial Complex? Nada Trump is issuing subpoenas demanding social media platforms hand over data about ICE protesters but the 'Twitter Files' agitators couldn't care less

In the midst of the most aggressive and alarming federal assault on the First Amendment since the Palmer raids, the Biden-era free speech warriors have focused their outrage on . . . the injustice of releasing the Epstein files.

The stages of online samples in my research career:
1. too difficult/expensive/unrepresentative
2. too expensive but representative
3. pretty affordable but less representative
4. cheap and full of bots with garbage responses
5. wide price range and maybe full of non-people pretending to be people

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

Opinion | The right’s obsession with American "heritage" is all about who get to be seen as "white" Philip Bump: What Elon Musk was really getting at when he incorrectly claimed “American culture” is of “English-Scotts-Irish origin.”

To the extent it existed, the nativist era of consolidated European whiteness Trump and his allies pine for — the era of “greatness” they’d like to resurrect — was an anomaly and an outlier in U.S. history. www.ms.now/opinion/elon...

I don't know what to do but just keep repeating it so I don't go insane: the rise & eventual total domination of RW media is the single most significant political development of my lifetime and the entirely of the US political & media elite resolutely refuse to discuss or even acknowledge it.

Like this. "You must strategically abandon the specific issues that the right has rendered toxic & focus on others."

But then ... why wouldn't the right just be able to do the same thing on those other issues?

Report: Staff at Dilley raiding cells to confiscate kids' letters and drawings detailing conditions inside

ProPublica published children's letters and drawings documenting their sadness and suffering at Dilley. And Dilley staff are now retaliating by confiscating kids' letters and drawings.

www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...

A graphic in pink, blue, and green that illustrates how recent many Black History events are to the current day -- ranging from 1619 to 2024.

I'm sure we've all seen the graphic that lays out the United States ' relationship with slavery. It's good, but I never thought it was quite impactful enough. So I made my own.

I've used a few key events, including my birth, to highlight how recent these events are in history.

1 square = 1 year.

The drunk uncle theory.

You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there

Governing with Words by Dan Gillion

Political scientist Dan Gillion analyzed presidential speech and found that Obama talked about race and racial issues less than any other modern president

Anti-feminist ideology ‘increasingly relevant’ to national security: CSIS - National | Globalnews.ca Officials with Canada's security and intelligence agency told MPs the ideology 'can function as an enabling factor along pathways to violent extremism' but is not itself a threat.

CSIS/ITAC saying what researchers have been saying for years: "anti-feminist ideology can function as an enabling factor along pathways to violent extremism"

globalnews.ca/news/1166168...

Picture of No Option But Sabotage

My book—No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis—comes out today!

It's the result of 3+ years of research and 150+ interviews with 100+ activists and experts.