Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

We have had stable, professional, vouchsafed information about the physical & economic world for so long that we entirely take it for granted. It's going to be truly wild to operate in a world where quite literally no one knows for sure what is happening, where there is no fact of the matter.

News article titled "Trump orders firing of BLS commissioner, after large summer revision" by Andrew Ackerman. It reports that President Donald Trump ordered the firing of Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the agency released major downward revisions to May and June jobs data. Trump announced the decision on social media, stating she would be replaced with someone "much more competent and qualified." The revisions removed 258,000 jobs from earlier counts, marking the largest two-month downward adjustment since the pandemic.

Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor statisti s. This is the end of being able to trust the data from the federal government on employment, GDP, or any other critical information. They will only want to produce information that pleases Trump, not the truth. This is how you get a failed state.

Faculty Support of George Mason’s President Draws Federal Investigation

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ.
The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

i’m finding it requires more and more cognitive dissonance to enjoy indulgences as the fascism becomes increasingly omnipresent and suffocating

We are seven months in, and the speed with which vital civic institutions are capitulating to authoritarian demands we once would have regarded as inconceivable in an established liberal democracy is jawdropping. I hadn't thought I was polyannaish about America, but it's really stunning.

The problem with saying “history will remember” is that we are deciding right now whether there will be people in the future

We are also deciding right now whether to train people to be historians

Also, once it’s history, it’s too late

feel like this goes beyond politics and into tech and maybe culture. there's a kind of future blindness it feels like. a focus on both tearing down structural things/institutions and replacing them with nothing. or building things that disrupt institutions/infrastructure w/ little thought to future

the TX GOP is redrawing the congressional map so houston voters won't be able to elect democrats to represent them

houston: you can speak at the public hearing saturday 7/26 at 11am

University of Houston Main Campus
4455 University Drive
Student Center, Houston Room (Room 220)

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

2004-2025 media coverage of climate change

Climate media coverage is falling off a cliff, just as the crisis accelerates.
And that’s not just bad for business, it’s dangerous for democracy. Let’s talk. 👇 1/7

I wrote today about why we should shudder about ICE and CBP adding 19,000 new agents and officers — because we should terrified of WHO would want to join CBP and ICE amid politicized authoritarian images like this: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/four-fears...

The left better start figuring out how to weaponize today's decision rather than just (rightfully) criticizing it.

- Go back into Judge Kaczmaryk's court to dissolve all of his nationwide orders.

- Pass gun bans and insist any order applies only to plaintiffs.

Feels like the so-painfully-obvious-that-nobody-is-saying-it lesson from the night is that short-form video is now one of the chief mediums of American politics — and is arguably now just as important as TV for some electorates. Short-form video is where persuasion and name ID happen now.

This is oligarchy. This is obscene.

While 60% live paycheck to paycheck & kids go hungry, Jeff Bezos, worth $230 billion, goes to Venice on his $500 million yacht for a $20 million wedding & spends $5 million on a ring while his real tax rate is just 1.1%.

End this oligarchy.

The bees from My Girl have endorsed Cuomo

Former critics who once demanded Cuomo resign are now endorsing him A POLITICO review of Cuomo’s touted endorsers found that few of them stood by him in 2021.

This whole, "sexual assault and harassment is bad when Trump does it, but ok when our side does it," is sending a really clear message that the old guard of Democratic leadership only cares about women when it's politically advantageous.
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

Psychology of the Climate Crisis This year, I am teaching the MSc course Psychology of the Climate Crisis at Leiden University. The syllabus is here  and may still change throughout the course. Students’ creative group …

It was a joy to teach my new course Psychology of the Climate Crisis, to a group of great @leidenpsychology.bsky.social MSc students.

Syllabus is at anneurai.net/climate-psyc... (email me for instructor notes etc)

Masked, anonymous men rove the country, beating and detaining anybody they care to, to meet their daily quota. Some of those people are sent to foreign concentration camps, without legal review. You are not allowed to fight back or resist in any way. These men are accountable to nobody.

Democrats: we want to encourage young people to run for office and to inspire the next generation of leaders

Mamdani: hi!

Democrats: This man must be stopped at all costs

I was happy to be a contributor to this important project — a Handbook that aims to help scholars & scientists understand tactics autocrats use, and how best to respond.

It covers practical tips for locking things down, advice for helping targeted colleagues, what to do if smeared, etc.

New York Times: ICE Imposes New Rules on Congressional Visits The policy specifies that ICE field offices are not subject to an existing federal law that allows members of Congress to make unannounced oversight visits to immigration facilities that “detain or otherwise house aliens.”

To be really clear: The reason members of Congress can't just walk right in is because of the guns. Armed DHS personnel won't allow entry. In other words, DHS is using armed force to *break* laws.

Democrats need to wrap their minds around that. Accept that the frog is boiled.

Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event

A similar level of absence in other media, I would guess. A cocoon of familiar stories has become a part of the machinery of denial.

The Presence and Portrayal of Climate Change and Other Environmental Problems in Popular Films: A Quantitative Content Analysis How have popular films responded to – or avoided – the climate and nature crises? To begin to answer this question systematically, quantitative content analysis was applied to 250 of the most-rated...

We found that climate change existed in the story world of just 12.8% of the most popular recent films. In most of those it’s mentioned once, and often minimized 😞 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

It is 100% carrying water for the opposition to participate in this collective delusion that Dems for some reason need to answer for every teen who throws a rock rather than hold the Trump admin accountable for intentionally creating chaos and breaking the law to stoke violence.

They are in charge.

Stack of books with rock on top, photo by Robert Thorson

Judges have announced the finalists for the 2025 ASLE Book Awards in #ecocriticism and #environmental creative writing! www.asle.org/stay-informe... #booksky

Looks fantastic! Congrats!

The world could experience a year above 2°C of warming by 2029 2024 was the first single year to surpass the 1.5°C global warming threshold – now scientists predict that a year above 2°C is possible in the near future

You’re being actively murdered by Big Oil companies and the elected officials they own, who could stop this before it becomes a runaway catastrophe, but don’t want to.

Happy Monday!

BREAKING: Scott Pelley just risked everything to make one thing clear:
The attack on free speech isn’t coming—it’s already here.

Journalists are being silenced, critics are being punished, and most of the media’s playing dead.

This is state-sponsored suppression. This is dictatorship in real time.