Ryan Daugherty

CNN homepage: headline says Bondi Democrats trade insults during combative hearing

So grandma, when authoritarianism came, what did the media do?

Well, honey, they framed everything as a battle between two sides, and never actually said one side was undermining the rule of law, damaging institutions, and creating a new Fash Tech Oligarchy™️ that was unaccountable to the people.

This is torture. The US is torturing children. Children whose words and whose art contain infinitely more humanity than the people keeping them detained.

"It's OK to Be White" has been a slogan for literal Nazis for some time now, if you want to know where the Republican Party is at the moment

Springfield, too, has been given new life by immigrants. A once-thriving manufacturing hub, its fortunes so collapsed that in 2012 it was regularly called the unhappiest city in America. In 2014, seeking to stem population decline, the city launched its “Welcome Springfield” campaign to attract immigrants. Haitians, many of whom had been given T.P.S. status after a devastating 2010 earthquake, responded. As new manufacturing jobs were created in the city, more immigrants followed. Many Haitians who settled in Springfield had children. The city stopped shrinking; in 2023, there was a tiny population increase.

On Sunday evening, Rose Goute, a Haitian restaurant, was almost deserted. “People stay home,” said Jean Philistin, a 50-year-old who was there picking up takeout. “People are scared.” He said he was less frightened than many others because he became a citizen a few years ago, though he wasn’t sure how much that would matter. “The worst thing is, since you’ve got an accent, or since you’re Black, they can stop you for no reason.” Philistin had been a civil engineer back in Haiti and now worked refurbishing houses. He has two teenage children, both born in America. “I don’t know why they hate my community,” he said sadly.

MAGA is a movement of America haters who despise this country and are conspiring to destroy it

Anyway congrats to our Free Speech Champions(tm) who helped usher in the most censorious American government since the Palmer Raids

screenshot of text from Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: "The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive - because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force."

bars

Americans have a habit of trying to compare all authoritarianism to Nazi Germany. I think in some ways i think it is comforting to view authoritarianism as a foreign ideology. If you want to understand our current authoritarian moment, you need to look to our own past, not to Europe 1/x

Speaking in Paris at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, Langston Hughes declared: “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know.”

Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics

”College kids are the real threat to free speech” was always for rubes and marks who wanted the freedom to be bigoted without repercussions. If you are still writing that at this point you are incapable of acknowledging actual threats or high on your own supply.

Our elites decided Charlie Kirk was a watershed event that changed politics forever, but the repeated murders of people who weren't in their contacts is a point of debate they grudgingly have to concede might be an issue

This administration would defend Tim McVeigh if they thought he was a Trump voter

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him.

White. Hot. Rage.

Months into this, not one person in ICE or CBP or DHS or the White House has suffered a single visible consequence. Not fired, asked to resign, impeached, reprimanded, not even suspended, let alone arrested. Things will continue to deteriorate until that changes. That's it, that's the whole story.

“Everyone should be allowed to carry a gun for their safety but the government can murder you in the street if you have a gun” is an incredible endpoint for the conservative moment

The courage of the people in the streets of Minneapolis and the cowardice of a political opposition that has no leader willing to join them, in that city and across this country, is awe-inspiring in every possible sense of the term

Who ICE is "protecting you" from:

state-sponsored child trafficking

A culture where this kind of overt we're-breaking-the-law-and-have-to-hide-it can happen and filter down the ranks and go for months before a whistleblower reveals it, as opposed to everyone immediately going "hell no that's crazy and illegal," is not fixable or reformable. Burn it to the ground.

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

I've seen some folks giving into doomerism by citing the US's history of paramilitary violence shutting down fair elections in the South, and I want to add some historical context to support Jamelle here (as an historian of Reconstruction paramilitary violence)

i think powell's response here is a demonstration of the folly of the idea that democratic accountability requires presidential control. what if the president is not acting in the public interest? you want independent agencies to be able to push back and pursue their *congressional mandate*

hi, political philosopher here! this is not funny, central banks only do this when they're in extreme distress

And make no mistake, this is the fault of senior Republican leaders who did not impeach and remove Trump in 2021 and conservative justices that gave Trump a blank check prior to 2024

An op-ed that a couple of colleagues and I wrote up about the undermining of local democracy in Indianapolis.
www.indystar.com/story/opinio...

what this should make clear to everyone in this country is that it does not matter who you are, there's no "it could never happen to me"

you can be a white woman who drives around with stuffed animals in her car, and they will still kill you in cold blood and call you a domestic terrorist

masked, unidentified goons who assault and murder with impunity. a literal gestapo.

Storming The U.S. Capitol Was About Maintaining White Power In America On Wednesday, after weeks of refusing to accept the outcome of the election, President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol of the United States as members of…

I wrote this on 1/6/21 while watching a mob of white Americans storm the Capitol, worried race would be sidelined in discussions of Jan. 6.

“They do not simply come in defense of Donald Trump. They come in defense of white supremacy.”

I hate how right I was.

fivethirtyeight.com/features/sto....

January 6: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy Discover the real January 6 story: peaceful protest turned tragedy, Deep State entrapment, media deception, and President Trump's triumphant pardons restoring justice to patriotic Americans.

The Whitehouse's new Jan 6th page is filled with lies, misrepresentation, and reality denial. It's a clear attempt to rewrite history and frame Trump in heroic terms. www.whitehouse.gov/j6/

Just passing this along because I keep hearing speculation that someone in the Venezuelan government (Delcy, presumably) cut a deal to get rid of Maduro in part to cut ties with Cuba, which was Maduro's project and not one shared by her