We asked activists from authoritarian regimes what they wish they’d known sooner. Here’s what they said Activists from Hungary, El Salvador and Turkey offer advice to the US about what they’ve learned about authoritarians

“I didn’t expect so many people would be so risk-averse.”

I’ve summed up and contextualized all of these critical AI pieces & more in one place — “From AGI to Workslop: What I Read About AI in 2025.” mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-i-read-...

This is what government censorship actually looks like: defunding entire fields, deporting researchers, and quite effectively chilling speech that helps people understand how our information systems are being exploited and calls out powerful people and platforms for their bullshit.

These are good moments to remember that the CEOs of all the biggest companies in America are happy to go to White House dinners and slap this guy’s back. They do not care about this. Remember this, years from now, when they want you to forget.

I've been saying for the better part of a year that Trump is on a mission to decriminalize corruption. To make it the legal equivalent of jaywalking.

I feel that more strongly now than I ever had.

ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record. Under a zero tolerance policy, the first Trump administration separated immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. New data suggests separations are happening all over the count...

Some 600 immigrant kids have been sent to federal custody by ICE this year.

A 17-year-old was detained at a traffic stop because officers couldn’t make contact with his dad, who is deaf.

Another kid ended up in a shelter after making a wrong turn.

This is why I support freedom of expression.

Appropriately, it is the chaos of a system that supports free speech that gives rise to the grand process of democratic self-governance and the ideally upward arc of human progress and flourishing.

Yesterday a Stoppard play, today a tweet.

The Guardian view on the inequality emergency: why a Nobel prize winner’s warning must be heeded | Editorial Editorial: Rising economic division is destabilising nations and eroding accountability. Joseph Stiglitz’s G20 blueprint offers a way toward global economic renewal

So pleased @theguardian.com's editorial board agrees with our expert committee that it makes a lot of sense to establish an International Panel on Inequality.

We are in an inequality emergency, and there are ways to lessen it.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Happening now near Canal Street, federal agents had been staging inside a fed owned parking garage, now being confronted by a group of protesters. masked agents are looking on from above.

Now here’s the kind of news you drop going into a long holiday weekend. Maybe no one will notice. 🤡

@nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

One of the most annoying things when I was a student in Russia was that foreign students had a higher price than other students at museums, concerts, etc

Now we’re doing it 🙃

Photos from St. Paul today captured by MPR photojournalist Kerem Yücel. He filed them even after being hospitalized after being injured by a less lethal munition.

I hope folks realize that between Trump, Kushner, Hegseth, Witkoff, Noem, RFK, Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, this country is almost entirely undefended.

NYPD Confirms Involvement in FBI Probe Targeting Volunteer Observers in Immigration Court An FBI document referred to activists at immigration courts as “anarchist violent extremist actors” and cited a "sensitive source with excellent access” to an encrypted chat.

The NYPD confirmed its involvement in a counterterrorism investigation that spied on a private Signal chat of volunteer observers monitoring ICE activity inside NYC’s immigration courthouses.

www.thecity.nyc/2025/11/21/n...

On the other hand, it is a win for white nationalists when @nytimes.com cravenly launders white nationalist tropes and injects them into the broader discourse in easily digestible form

It performs rage for profit but generates real anger in the audience. That anger feeds real political behaviour. Performative signals become grievances, and the disordered discourse migrates from the feed into institutions and streets.

Although the scale of this is still to be assessed, this is the inevitable outcome of the monetization of the algorithm. Rage-bait becomes a personal revenue model. Nothing about this should be a surprise.

They’re doing to America what they did to Christianity | Bill McKibben Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent: the evangelical perversion of Jesus’s message of radical love to one of hate and aggression

Rightwing MAGA Christianity has about as much relation to the gospels as MAGA politics does to the Constitution.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Tomorrow morning, the DC Circuit will consider whether Trump violated the First Amendment by ejecting @apnews.com from the White House press pool after it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Very glad that the AP is fighting this. knightcolumbia.org/blog/the-fig...

Never forget this: The forces rigging our economy, undermining our democracy, polluting our planet, and stoking hatred are counting on you to give up. Cynicism is how they win. Stay clear-eyed and ready for the fight ahead.

"Mariana Times" supports deporting Zohran Mamdani but

This account is based in India

the last 24 hours on X, summed up:

Anyway, do not help the Sam Altmans of the world steal Machine Learning valor to prop up a bunch of gross plagiarism machines that have all our worst biases and failings baked in.

The late Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once described conspiracy as “the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” When people can’t access or even learn about the actual mechanisms by which elites control our lives and fortunes, they resort to stories. Those stories are often wrong — they can, in fact, be dangerous — but they come from a genuine and rational impulse to make sense of a world in which power really does operate through networks of personal relationships and constantly evades democratic accountability. The Epstein case is fascinating precisely because it collapses those distinctions. It was an actual elite network, operating through personal relationships and mutual protection, flying on private jets and meeting on an exclusive tropical island — more or less what the paranoid style typically imagines. And — and this is really key — it involves, in ways we are getting glimpses of but do not yet fully understand, the sitting president of the United States, whose former chief political adviser, former labor secretary, current attorney general, and others were all tied in.

Here is @katz.theracket.news, sanely explaining why the Epstein case matters a lot (pace David #$*&@#)(*$ Brooks)

The chaos and noise all around makes it real hard to focus on the obvious, which is why everyone needs real journalists like @katz.theracket.news

theracket.news/p/why-the-ep...

A social sciences and humanities reading list on AI in education 🧵

AI in education amplifies existing biases against marginalized or vulnerable groups

AI in education is not evidence-based but based on speculation and proof of concept claims

Kelly: "I never expected after serving 25 years in the Navy flying combat missions over Iraq and Kuwait, flying the Space Shuttle, that now I've got to worry about my personal safety and that of my wife, Gabby Giffords, who was already nearly assassinated, because of something the president said."

Church members flee as federal agents arrive at east Charlotte place of worship Witnesses say one man was detained while doing yard work while his wife and child were inside.

Just vile: "About 15 to 20 church members were doing yard work on the property while their children played games and their spouses cooked meals... The agents asked no questions and showed no identification before taking one man away, whose wife and child were inside. They attempted to grab others."

Astonishing to stop and realize that, at any given moment, bands of masked men armed to the teeth are storming churches and daycares, terrorizing entire communities—and that most of the country's political establishment barely blinks.

The crime is not what we were doing protesting in the 10th floor elevator lobby of 26 Federal Plaza.

The crime is what ICE agents are doing on the other side of the door.