Aaron Y. Zelin

Kurdish Collapse in Northeast Syria? Key Things to Watch Washington Institute experts assess the immediate fallout of the Syrian government’s advance into SDF-held parts of the northeast, including mutual disinformation campaigns, implications for the Islam...

How will the Syrian government handle the fight with IS in the northeast? Several factors could make the northeast mission more complicated than what Sharaa and his supporters have dealt with elsewhere, writes @azelin.bsky.social.

ICE kidnapped a 5-year-old and sent him alone to a facility in Texas. Hell isn't hot enough.

Full text: Charter of Trump’s Board of Peace No mention of Gaza, which bolsters ToI's reporting that US also envisions panel helping resolve other conflicts worldwide; member countries must pay $1 billion for permanent spot

I’ve been reading Trump’s "Board of Peace Charter," and despite the name, this isn’t a multilateral institution, it’s a centralised structure built entirely around the authority of one person (Trump).
www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-ch...

This is insane not just the explicit "go break the 4A" substance but how they knew how bad it was, acting in guilty paranoia to cover it up and suppress the written evidence.

This isn't how running a government agency works. This is what a criminal conspiracy looks like, because that's what it is.

Under the new conservative consensus on presidential power, Trump is welcome to refuse to investigate when government agents shoot Americans in the face, and he is welcome to try to charge their loved ones with crimes. He can openly blackmail government officials to manipulate the economy or to silence political opposition. No one can stop him from directing the Justice Department to indict his enemies for non-crimes while ignoring or pardoning the actual crimes of his political allies. He is free to be a tyrant, because the boss is the boss. But to me, it seems unlikely that the founding generation, in rebelling against a monarch, was looking to replace him with an even more wretched class of despot.

Wrote about how John Roberts and Donald Trump have turned the Department of Justice into a corrupt mobbed up law firm whose only purpose is to enable Trump’s persecution of his enemies and protection of his allies www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional!

ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

They are so desperate to instigate a violent confrontation that they will now attempt to break down your front door and enter your home without a warrant. State terrorism at its finest.

This is a photo of someone being tortured, not someone being restrained

Spraying pepper spray directly into the eyes of a detained person who’s already fully subdued

Yesterday, I interviewed a tech guy who told me something too important for me to wait until the podcast comes out for you to hear it:

Many free AI detectors have especially high false positive rates because they make money selling software that "humanizes" writing. 1/2

I refuse to accept anything other than the resignation and immediate retirement of all of these fucking corporate candy-ass Democratic cowards.

They’ve lost the right to do anything but get out of the way and live in disgrace for the rest of their days.

Heartbreaking cruelty visited upon children in our name

As I always say: The greatest predictor of belief in misinformation is not stupidity or ignorance, it's over-confidence.

This is a global far right power grab, so the sooner everybody realizes that and puts aside their deeply outdated notions around national identity, which got us here to begin with, the better. The only way out is through, but the only way through is all of us fighting these climate warlords together

Fury as Amazon Ring Cameras Are Hooked Up to ICE System Online activists are telling owners of Ring Doorbell cameras that it's time to get rid of their devices, which can be used by ICE.

“Safety experts and tech critics have long condemned the Ring devices for security risks and privacy violations, not to mention their role in building the largest civilian surveillance network in US history.”

This man is talking about stealing a country at gunpoint from nations the US is allied with. Of course Europeans hate us. You would feel the same way if you were in their place. American voters put this man in power, he didn’t seize it this time.

I don’t think people understand how hard it is to find an issue that polls in the single digits. It’s close to impossible.

screen shot of trumpcensorship.com dashboard including timeline, map, and bar charts in red, white, and blue

‼️ Today @americansunlight.org launches TrumpCensorship.com, a public dataset visualizing 200+ censorship actions by the Trump Admin against journalists, researchers & citizens since his 2nd term began.

From our weekly "Last Week in Censorship" monitoring → one interactive archive you can't ignore.

Taking away USAID and then forcing OpenAI on people wow

This is what happened in our neighborhood yesterday. ICE snatched a human being off of our streets, roughed them up badly, and then pepper sprayed legal observers as they documented it all. This is a daily occurrence happening all throughout Minnesota right now.

Why Documenting ICE’s Violent Raids is Only Half the Accountability Battle Trump's forceful immigration raids have sparked nationwide unrest, but efforts to catalogue these activities face major hurdles, Chris Mills Rodrigo reports.

Why Documenting ICE’s Violent Raids is Only Half the Accountability Battle
www.techpolicy.press/why-document...

Verified video shows armed men taking control of IS camp in Syria Latest updates from the BBC's specialists in fact-checking, verifying video and tackling disinformation.

Meanwhile...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx...

The double cognitive load of a) the President is deranged, and nobody in power acting he's deranged is stressful, and b) there are millions of Americans who get their news from media sanewashing the President, so they don't *know* he's deranged, so they think *we're* deranged, is ... fun.

3D-Printed Warfare: A New Phase in Jihadist “Do-It-Yourself” Innovation Targeting the West? - GNET

Adding to the dialogue on 3D-printing technologies and jihadist actors, Sergey Elkind analyses the potential security threats linked to the production of firearms and UAV components, highlighting risks for Western countries.

“our tech doesn’t do any of the things we claimed the past few years, but we still need you to use it or the line will go down”

I grew up hearing stories from my father about how folks abducted by Franco’s secret police would routinely “escape” to the roof of police HQ and “commit suicide.” The obviousness of the lie was itself an intimidation tactic.

Re-upping this chart from @propublica.org in April 2025, since measles is surging back into the news.

Nada Atallah for the The National on the Shaddadi ('Sini') prison break, with pro-army tribal fighters most likely being responsible for letting the IS detainees out. Only 120 fighters held in the facility in total, 30 still missing the rest in gov't custody.

www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20...

It is tough here right now in Minneapolis but Greg Bovino crying to the paper about how he’s getting his ass handed to him by plant sale moms has been a real pick me up

“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

This speech is 🔥 and easily one of the most remarkable (and alarming) by a Canadian PM