Bilal Baydoun

We launched an unprovoked attack on another nation, killing their leader.

Imagine if another country attacked us unprovoked bcuz we have nukes & are the only country to have ever nuked an enemy, & our leader is so unstable he can’t be trusted w/ them — and killed him?

Fundamentally unacceptable.

If the assumption of the Israelis is that they can expand the mowing of the graas doctrine out to the entire Middle East, from Tunisia to Iran, permanently, they will end up being wrong sooner rather than later.

legitimately the best site in the world

No one has seriously said LLMs aren’t important or that AI is categorically junk.

Some of us have said that there is something bigger than tech. It’s called power — governance, civic norms, etc — & refusal is absolutely part of how we think soberly about that power. Who has it & how they use it.

I don’t really pay attention to charges of doomerism. I don’t know what it means offline.

I do know that refusing a version of how the future will unfold forecloses on the power that actually shapes that future. That’s not disavowing that tech changes are happening but they are in now a given.

It’s now official. I’ll be publishing my first book, Respectability Politics, w/ @uchicagopress.bsky.social!

Proud to join a press w/ a strong lineage in Black studies & Black politics, including Cohen’s Boundaries of Blackness, which has deeply inspired my work.

Now to get these revisions done.

Opinion | We Have to Look Right in the Face of What We Have Become

Great piece by @jamellebouie.net on the need for ICE hearings. Get it all out there. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/o...

‘America Last’ Corporate Tax Policies Can End With This Congress Opinion: FACT Coalition's Zorka Milin says Congress should raise certain global tax rates that were part of the soon-expiring Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in addit...

I made a case for ending our America-last corporate tax policy here: news.bloombergtax.com/tax-insights...

This merger would further concentrate media ownership in fewer hands, at a time when the president and his allies seem to be repurposing regulatory tools meant to protect the public interest to influence media companies' business and editorial decisions.

This deal should be roundly rejected.

Pennsylvania House Committee Advances Essential Legislative Package to Support Local Journalism and Civic Information The bills follow legislative models that are helping to support local news in a growing number of states.

... We've also championed state-level funding initiatives that create local "Civic Information Consortiums" & journalist fellowships that put more reporting boots on the ground in local communities nationwide.

Pennsylvania legislators just advanced a model, based on a similar success in New Jersey.

Yeah, part of what's weird here is as recently as fall 2021 Bezos was funding the expansion of the Post by *40* editors, which is nearly unheard-of for a mature news org. Read this memo -- and note that every single person who signed it was gone by end of 2025 www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2021/09/2...

In whatever democracy reform package/effort emerges out of this, we cannot give short shrift to public media as vital democratic infrastructure. It has to be front and center.

Today’s layoffs at the Washington Post should not be understood in a vacuum.

News outlets nationwide have suffered for decades under a profit-maximizing logic that ignores the media’s civic role as a trusted messenger.

The reaction from our Director of Democratic Institutions @bilalb.bsky.social ⬇️

A lot of people cannot just start a paid newsletter or become freelancers to sustain their careers. The sports, metro, and international desks did work that requires *team* resources, like legal checks, documents, access to archives, and long-term beat experience.

Democracy Dies in Darkness. That’s why we love this new UV Lamp! (sponsored)

The Washington Post Is in Freefall—and There’s One Person to Blame Today’s layoffs at this once-great newspaper were nowhere near inevitable. But Jeff Bezos was never committed to the paper’s best traditions.

There was (and remains) a real journalistic opening for a super-robust news operation that isn't doing false equivalence. That's what's needed in the Trump era. That could have been the Post. Except its owner doesn't want that. newrepublic.com/article/2061...

Any newspapers that pose a threat to their billionaire owners are going to get the Grover Norquist treatment. They will be made small enough to drown in a bathtub. And the owners will use same pretexts—efficiency, viability, “waste”—to justify this ideological project.

What we’re witnessing at the Washington Post is the folly of entrusting self-interested billionaires with any democratic institution, especially a free and independent press. We need to a) permanently bury the myth of billionaire saviors and b) build a world-class public media system.

Yes.

To be clear this is a joke and not a direct quote from the Bezos Zoom call.

Journalism is valuable because of its benefits to the polity, not how much it contributes to GDP. Talking about newsrooms only in economic or financial terms is a slick way to obscure that. Viability to what end? Presumably, one would want a newspaper to remain viable so that it can be a newspaper.

If you cut all the journalists you can just run sponsored content at every desk. Sports Desk by DraftKings. International Desk by Northrop Grumman. Or maybe the reporters can wear ad jackets like NASCAR drivers. That would be great for viability.

Yes but this wasn't inevitable. The internet destroyed key sources of revenue like classified ads (e.g. Craigslist). But we could insulated journalism from market failure by standing up a robust publicly-funded media system. We still can! Commercialism was always an existential threat to journalism.

This. The economic justifications we get whenever a newspaper is decimated are always ideological. "Viability" is a euphemism that treats journalistic organizations like profit-maximizing firms and nothing else. Democracy isn't viable without journalism.

Newspapers provided news as a club good economically (non-rivalrous but excludable). The internet broke that. Now it's a public good. What you want is non-profit and/or public funding to produce news regardless of profit. The hope was Bezos would operate like that given his vast wealth. He didn't.

This set of essays, led by @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social and @adambonica.bsky.social, is really important. Folks should spend time with them.

And their response to the responses reads like two scholars tired of bringing loads of evidence to a fight where some folks are just bringing vibes.

Opinion | ICE Is Watching You

"The gun and the phone are both weapons, one a tool for violence and the other a tool of control." @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/o...

A remarkable and chilling insight from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

every epstein file drop underscores how elite power operates through shared socio-economic networks, regardless of people's ideological differences, populist posturing, or public feuds

Washington Post Plans Cuts to Reshape Newsroom

Laying off dozens of journalists to make to make a newspaper "self-sustaining." Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/b...