radicalcraft.bsky.social

They do not want you to have access to information. They want to be able to hide the truth. They want a disoriented, ignorant, and superstitious populace.

I don’t think I have any? 🤷‍♀️

I would extend this to everyone who finds Trump hilarious.

It is just as legitimate to respond with umbrage & disgust to a "joke" in a place it doesn't belong as it is to laugh. I, for one, find him comprehensively repulsive & struggle with people who say, 'you gotta admit, he's funny.' You do not.

There is no need for a White House press corps. You do not need to be at the WH to report on its actions and, in fact, most of the best reporting on the WH comes from reporters on other beats.

The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?

those who predicted authoritarianism were both dismissed, & deeply misunderstood, by the media

my latest for @newrepublic.com

newrepublic.com/article/2042...

This was a great convo. @polphilpod.bsky.social pushed us into deep territory: The theoretical underpinnings of Miller's worldview, how Trump's unpopularity on immigration gives Dems a big opening, and why we must drive home the point that the GOP should never be trusted on immigration ever again:

It’s also important to remember that destroying the liberal international trading system is one of the top goals of the modern American Nazi movement (and I mean real Nazis). Why? Because they see international trade as the structural basis for global “race mixing”. It’s deep in Neo-Nazi lore.

This is great and I hate being this guy but @projectsaltbox.bsky.social noted this last Friday.

projectsaltbox.substack.com/p/nternal-ic...

Here's How Many Jobs HHS Has Lost Since RFK Jr. Took Over See the totals from NIH, FDA, CDC, and CMS, too

Wow

Since RFK Jr took over, there have been 17,406 job losses at HHS

Breakdown by sub-agency:

FDA: 4,332
NIH: 4,049
CDC: 2,889
CMS: 1,051

The speed and scale at which he has dismantled the US public health and health research systems is truly startling 😢

www.medpagetoday.com/washington-w...

*first

My fist thought when I heard the npr piece.

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.

still remember the "it's too early/hyperbolic/irresponsible to compare these guys to Nazi Germany" Reasonable Posters - whom, I imagine, are waiting for the renovations to be completed before they update their priors

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...

A fake ICE tip line reveals neighbors reporting neighbors A Nashville comedian’s deportation hotline, set up as a joke, has gone viral among viewers who say it shows the “banality of evil personified” in the U.S. immigration crackdown.

New: A comedian set up a fake ICE tip line as a joke. Then 100 calls flooded in: neighbors ratting on neighbors, a teacher reporting a kindergartener. Fans say the viral TikToks revealed deportation's "banality of evil." Conservatives say he should be in prison wapo.st/4kM4qbF

“I Have Lost Everything”: The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps Cities often take belongings — including important documents and irreplaceable mementos — when they conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. ProPublica gave notecards to people across the country so th...

We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.

“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a man in California wrote.

(Published Dec. 2024)

This interview is powerfully useful and can help you talk to other people in this moment. I've used the knowledge frames in here already today in conversations w/others to great results.

“Nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.” - Andrea Pitzker

Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.

Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

There is so much pent up demand for joy and to believe in the future.

The entire premise of Pizzagate is that elites use coded language to conceal their crimes. Were they? Maybe, though "pizza" sure seems like a stretch. In reality, what's striking about the files is that Epstein and his associates were very openly referring to young girls as young girls in his emails. One compared a girl to Lolita. Peter Attia, longevity influencer, joked about low-carb pussy' Donald Trump drew him a birthday picture shaped like a young naked woman. Epstein himself wrote, to a redacted person, "Your littlest girl was a little naughty." The Epstein class didn't need code words. They had impunity.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files contain genuinely damning material suggesting decades of elite impunity, institutional failure, and the abuse of vulnerable young women. That's real, and it matters. Going down some 9/11 rabbit hole takes the legitimate rage the Epstein case should produce and converts it into tangential content. Conspiracizing builds audiences, not coalitions for accountability. And it leaves the public conversation stuck on whether "pizza" is a code word rather than on why so few people have been prosecuted.

DerekeThompson wrote after quote tweeting Cenk, "I worry that the social penalty of announcing that you believe in nonsense is going down.” It tabsolutely is. For a lot of big influencers, professing belief in what brainwashed mainstream institutionalists call "conspiracy theories" has become a reliable way to signal independence, attract attention, and harvest engagement. You can rack up Substack subs as a delusionalnment nutjob and earn a very nice living.

It’s been a while since I wrote about conspiracy theories but since Cenk Uygur took the Epstein drop and used it to justify becoming a 9/11 truther, I had to. The last two weeks saw the resurgence of Wayfair & Pizzagate— and those theories aren’t travelling as QAnon anymore, they’re everywhere.

Happy Holidays to >half the world this week! Happy Mardi Gras/Pancake Day/Paczki Day/Carnival, Gong Xi Fa Cai to all celebrating Lunar New Year, & Eid Mubarak to all honoring Ramadan. In a better world, the #NYT would run a story on an exhausted but well-fed NYC family celebrating all 3 this week.

It is such a problem that "concentration camps" and "death camps" have been collapsed into one in the American imaginary, because no, I don't think the Trump regime is building death camps at the moment.

But concentration camps also kill.

Eight decades after freeing Europe from the Nazis, America is now freeing Europe for the Nazis.

Glad I stumbled upon this. I’d like very much to see (if possible; it might not be) a global snapshot of where all of the money in the world currently sits, in investments, holdings, etc.

*strike “has”

Not only is the party sitting out, but the larger media has institutions are in alignment with the regime’s framings, and the (not presently) opposition party’s passivity. Coverage of the elite would lead one to see little—coverage of the people shows much more.

Dereliction of duty not to, imo.

Former Prince Andrew’s arrest, Yoon Suk Yeol’s sentence and the power of accountability In many democracies, criminal suspects are often held accountable — even if they’re politically powerful, even if they’ve served at the highest levels.

In rapid succession:
- former British royal arrested
- former Korean president sentenced
- former Norwegian PM charged
- former French and Brazilian presidents imprisoned

And then there’s Trump and the Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

@hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social we are waiting!

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