Gavin Aronsen

What's going on over here these days

MOVIE PITCH: Cossetted European princess can't attend Harvard because of trump, ends up going to Alabama/FSU/ASU. Parties, culture clash, does she pick the rich jerk or the sweet poor guy, uptight roommate, teaches butler how to twerk, badabing badaboom that's a wrap. Gimme a call, Netflix.

They kidnapped people and should be treated like kidnappers.

Again, my wife lost her excellent job at a nonprofit Seattle hospital because the trump administration simply stopped paying medicaid reimbursements at the beginning of the year, throwing it into complete financial turmoil

the cuts are already here

ICE is entrapping people who are here legally---telling them to report to the Immigration Office to advance their status--and then abducts them for deportation without due process. This can't be legal.

Need to dox this anonymous dem

There’s just so much shady shit in this story, but this really sticks out. Folks in NLRB’s IT unit were so freaked out by what they saw DOGE doing that they wanted to notify the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Then this happened:

not going to say the timeline would have turned out way differently if elite universities had just told Elise Stefanik to fuck off a year ago, but it probably wouldn't have hurt

House voted 216-215 to adopt this rule 👇

White people love bells

I wish news outlets would stop credulously embracing the “fighting antisemitism.” It’s so clear that’s a red herring for a broad based assault on higher ed.

Earthquake Batters Myanmar and Thailand; High Toll Is Feared as Buildings Topple The 7.7-magnitude earthquake near Mandalay, in a country already torn by war, was felt across Southeast Asia, and experts warned there could be tens of thousands dead.

At least 10,000 dead feared in Burma/Myanmar after 7.7 quake www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/w...

Dear students, faculty and staff, We are writing to inform you about a deeply concerning situation involving one of our international graduate students at the University of Minnesota. We learned that, on March 27 at an off-campus residence, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained a graduate student enrolled on our Twin Cities campus. We are actively working to gather more details about this incident.

Well, UMN has officially been hit. We just got an email from our president that an international grad student was detained yesterday. No further details provided.

This. Is. Crushing.

No matter your station in life, there is astoundingly little separating you from those men in that cage behind Kristi Noem. No charges, no attorneys, no hearings, no trial. Just conjecture and brute force could be enough to justify completely dehumanizing you, too.

image showing edsec mcmahon, ron desantis, and kim reynolds.

Ron DeSantis is there sitting next to Iowa Governor, Kim Reynolds. Both seated directly behind EdSec McMahon.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Meta used at least 16 of my books, and numerous articles, to help train the AI it will use to make billions.

Authors, search your name here:

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

HIV could infect 1,400 infants every day due to US aid disruptions Survey data suggests that over a third of organizations that relied on US funding for HIV had already closed by February.

Trump changes have "forced more than a third of global organizations that provide essential HIV services to close" by February, and "hundreds of thousands of people are losing access to HIV treatments as a result." www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/18/1...

Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow As the administration does its best to hide public records from the public, Wired magazine is stepping up to help stem the secrecy

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

One senior Democratic Senate aide notes that the party spends “all our time fundraising off of taking the fight to Trump and Elon; so what are we supposed to say to our own people when we demonstrate to them that we aren’t able to put up even a minimum level of resistance?”

🚨BREAKING | Columbia University Sued Over Student Record Disclosure*

Mahmoud Khalil, detained pro-Palestinian Columbia graduate, & 7 other students have filed a federal lawsuit against Columbia University, Barnard College, & the U.S. House Committee on Education & Workforce.

Here’s what we know 🧵:

WSJ Breaking News 2h ago The Trump administration is cancelling roughly $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University over allegations of antisemitism

You can have the cops come beat the shit out of your students to prove you’re not a filthy commie and they’ll still do this to you and all you’ll have done is show everyone what a pathetic little coward you are. Might as well do the right thing the first time

what the actual fuck

DOGE has been sending their mass emails from a misconfigured server, causing DOGE emails to fail SPF (Sender Policy Framework) validation.

This means that agencies are probably marking DOGE emails as spam.

I literally reported this Wednesday.

UPDATE: Meta is continuing to censor anti-Musk ads. It has removed a Facebook ad calling for a boycott of Tesla, saying that it violates the company's policy on "unacceptable business practices"

muskwatch.com/subscribe

The final question was “what is it like inside the mind of a billionaire” and the answer was “my mind is a storm. It’s a storm.”

Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data at IRS

🚨 SCOOP: DOGE is seeking personal taxpayer data at IRS, sources tell me. 🚨

Trump admin is pushing IRS to agree to an MOU that would give DOGE access to granular data on every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country.

so special ed programs are getting gutted because their internal documentation used the term "transition" when talking about helping disabled kids enter the working world. they're literally striking at that word wherever they see it.

BREAKING

Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson just issued an order preventing the Trump administration from:

1. Deleting CFPB data

2. Firing CFPB employees

3. Transferring money from CFPB's reserve fund

Right after the order was issued, nearly all CFPB employees were placed on administrative leave

So much that's happening rn is so in line with QAnon fantasies, which include how the followers ignore real examples of stuff like this