Jay Marcellus

I’m over a week out since mine and thought I was gaining energy… then basically slept all day today

So much has gone wrong in US press reporting on Trump because the White House reporters are people who have exclusively covered US politics.

They need people who have worked in Hungary, Turkey, etc. The relevant knowledge isn't Reagan factoids; it's the dynamics of competitive authoritarianism.

You’re right but I’m too charmed by Kirby

Kirby is the way.

Reminder that "not acting" shapes the future as much as "acting" does and that not choosing is a choice.

But other than that, how has everyone’s week been

Huh, I didn’t get that. Is that something you’re subscribed to or the standard local emergency alert system? Have gotten the tsunami warnings…

Ahhh thank you, just ordered. So good.

CW: protester being struck in the head by a pepper ball

Footage I took earlier of the moment Reverend David Black, a regular protester outside of the Broadview Detention Center, was shot in the head with a pepper ball by ICE agents on the roof of the facility.

Out of respect for reality and our wellbeing, we probably need way less talk about what “Democrats” should do and way more talk about what “we” can do. We’re not going to look back and wish we complained about Democratic leadership more, especially when we’re clear enough to get why they’re stunted.

Welp this is right on point

DOGE Targeted Him on Social Media. Then the Taliban Took His Family. Afghan scholar Mohammad Halimi, who fled the Taliban in 2021, had worked to help U.S. diplomats understand his homeland. Then DOGE put his family’s lives at risk by exposing his sensitive work for a U...

NEW: After DOGE outed Mohammad Halimi on social media, Taliban intelligence agents blindfolded and took three of his family members to a remote prison.

They were repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized work for the United States.

Texas Democratic legislator to stay in state capitol after refusing law enforcement escort to leave State Rep. Nicole Collier of Fort Worth on Monday said she will remain locked in the Austin statehouse chamber until the House reconvenes on Wednesday morning.

“‘I refuse to sign away my dignity as a duly elected representative just so Republicans can control my movements and monitor me with police escorts,’ Collier said in a statement that called her a ‘political prisoner’ for refusing Republican ‘surveillance protocol.’” www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...

THANK YOU.

Donald Trump threatens to clear encampments in D.C. With D.C.’s MPD now under federal control and the National Guard coming to D.C., the fate of people in encampments remains up in the air.

the analysis in here from people living in encampments is more incisive and direct than a lot of the coverage from national media streetsensemedia.org/article/home...

If an authoritarian gains control of the capital city, it becomes much harder to stop him overall.

Everyone who wants to stop Trump needs to help stop this.

The key connection for today is that Roosevelt was watching fascism arise in Germany and Italy in 1933, and he DESIGNED THE NEW DEAL TO STOP THAT in the US. The works programs were as much about helping democracy as anything.

Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Telling the Truth About the Supreme Court The task of interpreting the law is inherently “political.” But no justice has been this comfortable saying so in public.

I think Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissents are an important exception to the "Supreme Court dissents don't matter" rule of thumb, because she is using them not to argue with the conservative justices, but to explain to the public that the conservative justices are liars and in the tank for Trump

A truly incredible level of organization and care has taken place here. Folks mobilized quickly, shared info, took care of one another, and at the end of the night, took a strategic retreat together. These community members are family members of the workers, are neighbors, are caring strangers

Gotta cut this video later, but here’s a still—chants of “show your face!” And more heckling—about what their wives, mothers think, about putting them on trial after all this, quit your job, you don’t have to do this—

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

i am all for having enemies.
but friends, our enemies are the ppl w power to build concentration camps, ppl w private jets funded by stealing our water for AI, ppl w real power or deep commitment to harm.
not ppl who spent 5 mins voting for someone in a disastrous info environment & no good choices

I'm already seeing centrists and leftists sniping at each other but the blame for this is 100% on the Republicans. This is what they do with power and it is imperative that we work together to keep them as far from it as possible, forever.

Around 100,000 march in Budapest Pride event in defiance of Hungary's ban Marchers gambled with potential police intervention and fines to participate in the annual Budapest Pride, which was outlawed by a law passed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's right-wing governing part...

A nice reminder of the immense power contained in saying “no.” When people refuse to comply, it raises the costs ($$$, political, social, etc) of enforcing authoritarianism. They very well might try anyway, but every person that says “no” is another point of friction.

www.npr.org/2025/06/28/n...

🚨EMERGENCY CALL TO ACTION🚨

If you're in DC, join us in front of the Supreme Court at 11am.

MAGA justices just removed lower court rulings protecting birthright citizenship so we need to turn out call out these justices for paving the way for the white supremacist faction’s agenda.

all of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence about executive power - all of it - can be replaced with a simple flow chart. is the president a Republican? if so it’s ok. if not, it’s presumptively not ok.

As a former Billionaires for Bush street theater performer, allow me to translate:

"I really wanted Lander, who stands for everything Cuomo's against. So I gave Cuomo $250K to fuel his disinformation efforts bec fuck my ethics and fuck NYC, buying politicians for quid pro quo favors is the move."

Me holding the long cover to the side lights on the plane upright with the bulb uncovered above me

Gotta love when a piece of your plane falls off and hits you in the head as you land 🥴 US air travel keeps going great!

illegal war started by a man constitutionally ineligible to be president

The Politics of Eternal Distraction To some Democrats, everything Trump does is designed to distract you

I got a lot of requests, so here’s a gift link to my latest newsletter, about Democrats’ obsession with calling everything Trump does a “distraction.”