Timothy Griffin

A Dose of Hard Truths Don't look away. These issues must be understood and addressed.

Sometimes moving forward requires reckoning with uncomfortable realities. My latest.
open.substack.com/pub/davidrot...

That old saw about how "good times make weak men" is true in the sense that stable times with material abundance create reactionaries who want to destroy the systems that protect them because they're too sheltered and stupid to understand that things can get meaningfully worse. Jason CO @jasonc_nc. 2/8/25 I don't think a lot of people appreciate how much of their overall lifestyle and relative certainty is backstopped by a steady, boring stability of systems they don't understand or even realize exist. • 24 L7 1.8K 15K Ill 399K ... Max Dubler @maxdubler True decadence looks like people who are three generations removed from the cultural memory of polio refusing to vaccinate their children against deadly communicable diseases because they don't like needles and don't think there will be any consequences, not queer

So much of our present crisis is coddled, ignorant, and short sighted people tearing down the institutions that protect them because they don’t understand that bad things can happen.

I’m Still Your America Hey, patriot. It’s been a week. As ICE spreads terror through the streets, and Teacup Eichmann presided over the murder of yet another innocent civ...

"I forced the shape of English onto resisting tongues and then dared to call it 'broken.'"

Crusade in Europe, by Dwight Eisenhower

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

YouTube video by Sen. Elissa Slotkin Why I am not sitting down with Trump's DOJ

Today, I sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro informing them that I will not be sitting down with them for their inquiry over a 90-second video I filmed in November.

Here's why.

ICE Cruelty Hits St. Louis Family Here's the full paywall-free version of my post (apologies for technical issues)

Crushing story about a father and husband DHS wants to deport despite "doing it the right way."

rayhartmann.substack.com/p/ice-cruelt...

Opinion | ICE Is Watching You

Read this. We're going to need a lot of smart people to figure out how to undo all of this. If that's still even possible.

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

Two cities under siege Remarkably similar scenes from Boston and Minneapolis, 260 years apart, show a federal government betraying its founding principles.

New at The Watch:

I dug into archival witness accounts of the British siege of Boston prior to the American Revolution.

They are remarkably similar to what we're seeing in Minneapolis.

open.substack.com/pub/radleyba...

Just before the town hall, a reporter asked Ellison about the difficulty states faced in prosecuting federal agents like the ICE agent who shot Renee Good. “The idea that they’re absolutely immune is a misstatement of the law, and it is a dangerous misstatement of the law, because I don’t want any ICE agent or Border Patrol agent or any agent to think that they can just kill people and then that’s it,” Ellison told the group of reporters. Then he asked rhetorically: “What about Ruby Ridge? You ever heard of that one?” Years after an FBI sniper shot Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge, the state of Idaho prosecuted the federal agent. The federal government went to bat for the agent, claiming that he was immune under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. The Ninth Circuit ruled that Idaho was allowed to prosecute the sniper — similarly, Minnesota is also entitled to investigate and potentially prosecute the officer who shot Renee Good. But a different example loomed larger in Ellison’s mind: the Boston Massacre of 1770, where British soldiers shot into a crowd, ultimately killing five people.

“It’s not exactly analogous, but we are talking about local authorities in Boston, prosecuting imperial agents of the colonial power, the central government, in England. And they were prosecuted. Two of them were convicted. John Adams actually represented a few of the imperial officers.” The Boston Massacre, said Ellison, was obviously “in the mind of the framers of the Constitution” at the time the document was written.

“They were thinking about this event, and they would have never conceded the state’s authority to prosecute a federal officer,” said Ellison, going on to add, “The states of the United States pre-date the United States. It is federal courts that are limited. Not state courts. State courts have plenary power.” He finished with a dramatic flourish: “It’s true that the feds are denying us access to the investigative file. It’s also true that there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

I wasn't sure what to expect from a group of Democratic state AGs, but I definitely was not expecting a long monologue about Ruby Ridge and the Boston Massacre www.theverge.com/policy/86588...

The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal Attacking an ally would be a perversion of everything the armed forces have been trained to do.

It is not up to the armed forces to put a stop to Trump’s ghastly ideas of war against NATO. The United States is not run by the military, nor should it be. Americans, and their elected representatives, must take this burden away from the armed forces—now.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

America vs. the World President Trump wants to return to the 19th century’s international order. He will leave America less prosperous—and the whole world less secure.

“Trump’s megalomania is transforming the United States from international leader into international pariah, and the American people will suffer the consequences for years to come.”

{gift link} www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

It really is mad king stuff, untethered from reality.

He tells the Norwegian leader, you did not give me a prize that you don't control, so maybe I will invade the territory of another Scandinavian country you don't lead.

Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw Will Republicans in Congress ever step in?

Must-read @anneapplebaum.bsky.social:

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

A terrible day.

The U.S. government vs. the free world.

Trump’s Most Dangerous Gambit His irrational obsession with Greenland could lead to global conflict.

Danish and Greenland ministers just left the White House. It did not go well.
I have a long discussion here of Trump's attempt to get Greenland and why it could lead to World War III.

(Gifted.)

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Trump’s Folly The United States has turned dark, aggressive, and lawless.

Peter Wehner is channeling Pontifex maximus “The United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless. It has become…a predator nation. This period of our history will eventually be judged, and the verdict will be unforgiving” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Yes, JD. Let’s ask them if they think a stay at home mom, avowed Christian, and widow of a veteran deserved to be shot in the face and left to bleed out in her own car after dropping her 6-year-old off at school, for the crime of looking out for her neighbors. Let’s ask everyone running for office.

I once supported regime change in Iraq. That’s why Venezuela worries me. When we use our military and roll the dice with the fate of nations, the consequences play out in a much longer time frame than social media trends.

At 19, I thought, “the Iraqi people were suffering under a brutal dictator…in the worst-case scenario, removing him would be a net good. What followed was civil war, mass death, swelling ranks of terror groups, genocide, mass rape, and slavery. “

I wrote about Venezuela

reason.com/2026/01/07/i...

AOC: What we saw today was a criminal murder a woman while she was trying to flee for her life. What we saw today was a manifestation of every American’s worst nightmare: their government turning into a tyranny.

Fallout maps show how an attack on nuclear silos would impact US cities USA TODAY mapped the far-reaching potential consequences of a nuclear strike against America's 450 nuclear missile silos.

I had a really fun time working on the code that was used to make these fallout visualizations for this USA Today article. I will soon be incorporating some of it into the NUKEMAP and probably making a version of this "mass attack fallout mapper" for public use. www.usatoday.com/graphics/int...

The Separation: Inside the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership (Gift Article) As President Trump sought a peace deal and Vladimir V. Putin sought victory, factions in the White House and Pentagon bled the Ukrainian war effort.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts

#giftarticle

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/c...

Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all going to get much, much worse.

So I have the cover story in next month's TNR.

I interviewed the heads of police groups; immigration defense attorneys, ex-judges and ex-prosecutors; former DOJ and DHS officials, and the former head of Border Patrol.

They're all horrified at what we've seen, and they all fear what's coming.

Opinion | Candace Owens Is the Conservative Movement’s Frankenstein Monster

This @michellegoldberg.bsky.social piece is good, as always, but also a perfect vehicle to understand the MAGA circular firing squad, without having to immerse yourself in it 🎁 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/o...

Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State He is descended from Russian Jews—you know, the kind of people who were once denounced as alien and unassimilable. Today, his project is to unleash government persecution of those he deems alien and u...

Stephen Miller is employing state terror in service of the open goal of shifting the ethnic mix of the country. In numerous ways he's doing this at the expense of public safety.

We spent weeks reporting on Miller's real aims. Here's the result. We hope you'll read:
newrepublic.com/article/2041...

The Longest Suicide Note in American History The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy targets liberal democracy itself.

If we can't even identify our enemies then how can we fight them?

Trump's National Security Strategy is the longest suicide note in American history

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

That was some weird shit

Longevity: Sleep more important than diet, exercise Sleep has emerged as the most important factor for life expectancy bar smoking in a new study from Oregon Health & Science University.

“This reinforces the message that sleep is not a luxury or something to be sacrificed; it is a biological necessity on par with, and in some ways more impactful than, other cornerstone health behaviors.”
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/sle...

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