Matt Eckel

I’m a Congressional Candidate. I Was Assaulted by ICE. An interview with Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic House candidate in Illinois, who was violently thrown to the ground twice at a peaceful protest in Illinois on Friday morning.

As I told @newrepublic.com, "Once last week, twice today, ICE has picked me up and thrown me on the ground. Honestly, it doesn’t compare to what our neighbors who are trapped inside the Broadview processing facility are going through. They’re committing crimes against humanity there."

statehood for DC on demand and without apology. If you live outside the district and care about democracy, a thing you can do is to decry the actions of the federal government under Trump to senators and representatives and urge them to support statehood for DC and withdrawal of Trump's forces there

Flashback to my ‘morning before school’ entertainment.

R

Paradise by the Dashboard Light and I Gotta Feeling.

It is very poetic that on the latest BTB from @iwriteok.bsky.social about Eichmann there’s an ad transition joking about how Mitsubishi didn’t flee Berlin at the end of the war (they were far away doing… other things) which then immediately cuts to an ad for Mercedes-Benz.

YouTube video by bunsonh Blue Highway - Union Man

Which side are you on? youtu.be/tpTP3XCqGLA?...

Arete: The Battles of Alexander the Great on iOS App Store, Google Play, and on Steam.

Just a reminder my hex-and-counter game, Arete: The Battles of Alexander the Great, is now on 3 platforms: iOS, Android, and Steam (PC and Mac)!

iOS: apps.apple.com/us/app/arete...

Android: play.google.com/store/apps/d...

Steam (PC and Mac): store.steampowered.com/app/3570700/...

I'm old enough to remember when the mainstream narrative around Obama's election was that the U.S. had become a "post-racial society."

People just inventing whole decades of history to get mad at, completely divorced from anything that actually happened.

I suspect that all selective universities could still break even just teaching and abandoning research. The federal money pays for research, which has expanded a lot. It would be a horrible tragedy if the money went away, and what it would mean is the end of scientific research and many hospitals.

Right, there's no longer interstate travel even for verifiable citizens. The Constitutional Crisis continues apace.

vance is a detestable liar and an open enemy of the constitution. the central load bearing factual claim here is completely false and even if it wasn’t the constitution contains two explicit guarantees of due process

www.ctinsider.com/waterbury/op...

My heart goes out to every international student in the United States. Foreign students have helped make American universities the best in the world. Without them America will suffer.

In the ancient world, there were several ways that a city could be "sacked" by hostile invaders. Not all sackings involved the city being essentially leveled as in Carthage in 146 BCE or Jerusalem in 70 BCE. My understanding is there was also the concept of a light sacking.

Vision 2030 in the Home Stretch: Clear Achievements yet Limited Accountability Vision 2030 has made undeniable progress in building a Saudi economy that can “live without oil”—but with five years to go, the program is in danger of enriching elites while overlooking the needs of ...

I have a new report out with @carnegieendowment.org on the current state of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 project, highlighting areas of achievement but with an argument for greater bottom-up accountability to curb its excesses (spending and otherwise).

carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

Today’s BTB from @iwriteok.bsky.social on Versailles is a lot of fun. Also reasonably sure when “Denmark” comes up it’s meant to be The Netherlands.

For MSNBC, I wrote about the JFK Library's temporary closure and what it made me realize about Trump's fixation on the Kennedys:

He's haunted by the specter of a predecessor he can never eclipse and has an animus toward anything that bears Kennedy’s name.

/1
www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

A Belgian Congo Plan for Ukraine Plus a conversation with Phillips O’Brien

Trump's "plan" is both depraved and unworkable paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-belgian-...

Can't say I'm exactly loving how very closely and specifically the mismanagement of Mars in it is paralleling the governance of my own country right now, but the current season of @mikeduncan.bsky.social's Revolutions, on the Martian Revolution of the 23rd century, just keeps getting better.

Owned A “devastating” (Nation) examination of how a cabal of tech-billionaires is colluding with once-idealistic journalists to create an entirely new media ...

OWNED is out today. The result of years of research into tech, media, the right, it traces how billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen have used their wealth to influence the media to their ends.

I hope you check it out

Bummer for Eoin that his book on reactionary tech billionaires buying up media isn't more timely. If only it were "highly relevant" or "part of an unfolding and constantly worsening nightmare" you'd probably consider it an urgent read and preorder at this link. Oh, well. Too bad.

Friends just shared this with me

The thing about “patriotic education” is that if you have to lie about America to love it then you probably don’t really love it. Ultimately their objection to the flawed universalism expressed in the declaration is the idea that the flaws were bad or that the universalism should be realized.

In letter, Jewish groups urge Trump not to enact 'widespread persecution of immigrants' (RNS) — 'Please do not enact policies that would turn places of solace into places of fear,' the letter reads.

"A broad group of prominent national and local Jewish organizations has sent a letter to President Donald Trump voicing stern opposition to his immigration policies and urging him to abandon plans for what they describe as “widespread persecution of immigrants.”
religionnews.com/2025/01/27/i...

Sorry just one more thing - the point of historical remembrance isn't for any group to "feel bad," it's to understand what happened and why and how it's shaped the society you're still living with. But that requires reflection so I can understand why some are uncomfortable with it.

In the last week he twice did what looked to many like a Nazi salute while thanking voters for saving civilization, tweeted a bunch of Nazi puns, and told Germans at a far right rally that they should move beyond feeling bad about the whole Holocaust thing.

Anyone who talks about "warrior ethos" instead of "soldiers duty" relishes the viscerality of violence and has no interest in the rest of what a military does. Violence is the only means of their politics