Paul Konstant

Both frames have relevance in analyzing Trump and his administration. It’s helpful not to get too wedded to one over the other.

Trump is a nationalist, a fascist, and an authoritarian strongman type of leader.

Trump is also in power in large part because he serves transnational capital interests.

Oh... i'm well versed in this... establishing dominance ... she's the alpha

Thousands of you shared heartbreaking and maddening stories with me about rising health care costs. But the fight is far from over.

If you're willing to record your story, we can make sure GOP lawmakers see and hear the direct impact of their policy failures: wintheera.myctbl.com/share-your-s...

For One Day at Least, Long Live the King King Charles III shows us—but, really, congressional Republicans—what actual accountability looks like when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein.

"Johnson won’t swear in Grijalva. It is a reminder how much Trump doesn’t want those files released. It’s also a reminder that the Republican party is now a full co-conspirator in the coverup. Epstein has become a Republican problem, not simply a Trump problem."

www.thebulwark.com/p/for-one-da...

Data as association (ie data acts as evidence associating a person with other things and claims) rules everything around me

Whenever Dems suggested doing this (or even hinted as Biden did in the runup to the 2022 midterms), the media leapt into action to declare it to be a hideously unpopular overreach that would surely boomerang on Dems if they went through with it

ICE sent into frenzy to return longtime Trump golf employee mistakenly deported to Mexico A longtime former employee at one of President Donald Trump's golf clubs was mistakenly deported to Mexico, The New York Times reported — sending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into a mad sc...

Here it is.

Proof that Trump hires illegal immigrants.

Alejandro Juarez showed up at his routine ICE check-in and was deported to Mexico.

Turns out he was a 10-year Trump golf club employee.

Noem now saying it was a deportation mistake & scrambling to get him back.

Pentagon admits to war crimes and violations of international law.

That's the real headline here and should be a major one.

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo

“I’m an American citizen so leave me alone”

“Alright, we just got to verify that”

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

I’m sorry, if someone has a birth certificate that proves they were born here but a mobile app with face recognition software disagrees, they will side with the app?

What?

“This shit is not new, it’s just more overt now."

Almost everyone Rolling Stone spoke to for this story asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retribution.

More: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

'We Have to Be Good or ICE Will Get Us': Takeaways From Chicago Children Caught in Immigration Raids - Bucks County Beacon Some Chicago parents and teachers say children were traumatized by a recent immigration enforcement action involving tear gas.

‘We Have to Be Good or ICE Will Get Us’: Takeaways From Chicago Children Caught in Immigration Raids | Some Chicago parents and teachers say children were traumatized by a recent immigration enforcement action involving tear gas.

Record Vietnam Rains Kill Nine, Forcing Thousands to Evacuate Widespread flooding across central Vietnam killed at least nine people and damaged more than 100,000 homes in the tourist hubs of Hue and Da Nang, as the Southeast Asian nation endures another bout of...

Hideous flooding in Vietnam, where five feet of rain in 24 hours nears world-record

Life and death on an overheated planet

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I’ve been thinking a lot about a new kind of polling I’d like to see. We have polling that measures public opinion, which is obviously important, but I’d love to see a little more empirical work on public knowledge: what do voters know about politics and policy?

Feels like so many of our convos are revolving about how voters respond to what politicians are doing, or what parties’ positions on issues are, without much actual empirical sense of what they actually know about those topics.

Donald J. Trump & @realDonald Trump I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!! 475 ReTruths 1.67k Likes Oct 29, 2025 at 5:45 PM

I’ve written an entire book showing how centrist economists & techno-optimists provide a permission structure for climate propaganda, creating an overlapping false consensus that we can keep using fossil-fuels and still deal w climate change anyway.

Here’s a good example of that dynamic 👇

2/ My list is ongoing. Here's what I've put together so far.. It's a🧵:

bsky.app/profile/gott...

Maaaaan, this. So much this. Every time there's any kind of actual in-depth survey we find that the American people are *abysmally* ignorant about even the most basic political facts, but the pundit class just immediately forgets & proceeds with political analysis based on subtle policy differences.

The masks they pretend they need ain't the ones that could save their lives.

This is an excellent piece, and gets into ideas about the importance of reading fiction that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

DOJ quietly vanishes entire sentencing memo after accurate description of Jan. 6 attacks In the span of hours, both prosecutors were locked out of their government-issued devices. Then, the legal brief penned by the pair was withdrawn without a word.

DOJ quietly vanishes entire sentencing memo from federal docket referencing Trump posting Obama's address, calling Jan. 6 a 'mob'

lawandcrime.com/high-profile...

So this story is super duper interesting for a whole ton of reasons, but one big one is its a very rare glimpse into the private valuation of high-end exploits held by major defense contractors

bsky.app/profile/lega...

Mike Johnson Lies to Reporter’s Face About If He’s Seen Protest Video House Speaker Mike Johnson played dumb about a video he was already asked about days prior.

It’s not clear what’s worse: the idea that Johnson would hear a report about the use of excessive force against a faith leader and never think about it again—or that he actually expects Americans to believe he never heard about it in the first place. trib.al/tKL2i8J

Sudan’s paramilitary killed hundreds including hospital patients in Darfur, residents say Sudan’s paramilitary forces killed hundreds of people including patients in a hospital after they seized el-Fasher city in the western Darfur region over the weekend, according to the UN, displaced re...

Systematic execution of hundreds in a hospital in Darfur, as RSF/Janjaweed take over the city of El Fasher (population ~250k) in Darfur.

That adds to an estimated 150,000+ death toll from fighting, plus many more from famine.

But Sudan is one of those places the outside world cares little about.

sorry @electriceden92.bsky.social just had wired overdose that day, whichever day of the many days we have these days, good piece, yes

bsky.app/profile/elec...

I called everyone in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book. What I learned about rich people, conspiracy, Ghislaine, stand-up comedy, and evil from 2,000 phone calls.

Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book is one of the most cursed documents ever compiled in this miserable, dying country.

And, yes, Trump's name is in it.

In any case, the bigger problem was that pundits outsourced holding Trump accountable to courts that voters were not going to follow, EVEN THOUGH a great deal was public by April 2024 (which even Dems on HJC remained ignorant of).