Matthew

I’m old enough to remember when you said “we need to abolish ICE.” After everything that happened this month (let alone the last 8 years), how did you move from that to thinking we only need milquetoast reforms ICE will obviously ignore while rolling in the billions you’re currently giving them?

Long before the occupation, we were told a lie about Minneapolis It's the same lie we've always been told about each other

I wrote about the railroad tracks in Minneapolis, about where they go and why

thewhitepages.net/p/long-befor...

I broke down the ICE “reforms” being proposed by Dem leadership. tl;dr: They totally avoid touching ICE’s funding, in key ways actually increase ICE funding and instead focus on meaningless busywork like “body cams” and “more training”.

The Democrats cannot even bring themselves to talk about reducing the ICE budget (which was TRIPLED out of the blue and no one knows how exactly such sums could ever be spent even on the vast network of concentration camps and private contractors) to, say, its already-record 2024 levels.

Bonus, here's @equalityalec.bsky.social on @democracynow.org just this morning talking about body cams and his book Copaganda.
bsky.app/profile/demo...

tapping the sign www.discourseblog.com/p/enough-is-...

Andrew Cuomo could’ve spent the years since his resignation making amends and helping New Yorkers.

Instead he hounded the women who spoke out about his serial harassment, fought to keep his book deal millions…and advised a foreign crypto exchange that broke US law.

These are the people we should be spending most of our time on when we're mad about something "the university" does

The shame of Columbia University In surrendering to Trump, it's opening all universities to Trump's tyranny

The Shame of Columbia: violating academic freedom

“Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught.”
open.substack.com/pub/robertre...

New from Columbia's President, as the school meets Trump's demands to violate academic freedom:

"…we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make."

"Standing together for Columbia,
Katrina Armstrong"

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) points out that IMLS accounts for just 0.0046 percent of the overall federal budget. “We’ve generally had bipartisan support in Congress,” said the employee. “The vast majority of our budget goes to libraries, so every state gets money, every Congressional district and every county. Generally speaking, public libraries are universally applauded. Even during the first Trump administration, when they called for our elimination, Congress would turn around and not just fund us—they increased our funding every year. We didn’t even ask for more money.”

This is the part to really hammer home, about IMLS and about library funding in general:

Libraries have, largely, had strong bipartisan support for decades. What we're seeing right now is against the will of the people. M4L and the like are loud, but few. And yet.

news.artnet.com/art-world/do...

A news headline from U.S. Education News reads, "Columbia Yields to Trump in Battle Over Federal Funding." The subheading states, "School to ban masks, empower police and rein in controversial academic department." The byline credits Douglas Belkin, with a timestamp of March 21, 2025, at 4:01 pm ET.

Columbia University has destroyed itself. A shameful dark day.

archive.ph/1elJh

I wrote about Chuck Schumer. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is fine meme, but with dog saying “So I have a book coming out”

Chuck Schumer right now:

Only takes 23 Senate Democrats to remove Chuck Schumer from leadership and replace him with someone willing to fight

chuck schumer needs to go. the democratic party leadership is useless. they are not opposition, they are complicit. if you care at all about this country or anyone in it, you NEED to vote against this bill

Dems for Some Reason Expect Trump to Follow the Law on Detention of Mahmoud Khalil “I expect the Department of Justice to work within the confines of the law,” said Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who counts Khalil as one of his constituents.

Statements from prominent Democrats suggest much of the party is taking the Trump administration’s targeting of Khalil in good faith.

Which... maybe isn't the greatest idea.

Reed noticed abundant searches for information on current events. “In the early days of Covid 19, ‘coronavirus’ was one of the top searches, and there were a lot more for ‘online education,’ ” she said. “Some of the searches will break your heart too: seeing ‘gun control’ as a top search, ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety.’ But it’s important children have that access. And the way organizations are implementing stopwords, so much access is restricted.” Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director of Library Futures, agreed that digital censorship obscures data without leaving a literal gap on the bookshelf. Until recently, she said, “no one knew what a database was, so they came for the books.” But, Halperin noted, once so-called parents’ rights groups and conservative organizations focused on data providers such as EBSCO, ProQuest, Sage, Cengage Group, and Follett Content Solutions, they took steps to scare entire organizations into compliance. According to the Neo-Censorship report, this resulted in content providers implementing “local controls” on databases, particularly related to health and race. “Under even the smallest of threats, the companies have provided the tools or have secretly put on the tools—we don’t know—that apply the content blocking on these systems,” Halperin said. “It’s more wide-reaching than banning a list of books” because a stopword may be assigned to an entire database and restrict every student from that term.

I propose a new rule:

Library vendors don't get to call themselves our partners if they aid in the censorship of material

Christ almighty, what are we even doing 📚

www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

This is just the most incredible effort by REAL Democratic leaders in our city. Over 150 of them across every borough. We are going to beat this monster once and for all.

👀 🚨🚨 House Dems want hold the line vs Musk/Trump and are calling our @schumer.senate.gov:

"If Chuck Schumer can’t get us a better vote, he should resign."

House Dems are hearing us - let's keep pressuring Schumer/Senate Dems - #NotOneVote 4 Musk/Trump (202) 224-3121 www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/p...

"We need to insist that crisis demands a response, not the feigned continuation of normalcy."

"No matter how atrocious the fascist encroachment gets, they rely on the continued flow of daily life, of money and people and activity to create the continued illusion of normalcy. "

Look, folks, this is it. The entire ballgame. Either we're a Republic of laws & the Constitution, or we have a dictator. This is fascism, & the impeachment vote should be happening today. Every single university president in the country should be out, in front of microphones, condemning this.

It’s imperative that we understand that longing for the return to what was already an atrocity is not freeing us. We can fight for the world we want instead of begging for the previous (also) oppressive arrangement.

see, here's the thing. columbia could hold a big press conference tomorrow, saying this is absolutely unacceptable and we will do anything legally possible to protect our students. Or they could shrug and say they had a warrant, maybe, we think, and we didn't like that guy anyway.

There is a real, genuine 1st Amendment crisis in the United States right now.

The government is openly retaliating against anyone with a viewpoint it doesn't like: Pro-Palestinian protesters, law schools teaching Black History, pro-immigration public service loan forgiveness seekers.

The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder whose wife is eight months pregnant—is a blatant assault on the First Amendment and a sign of advancing authoritarianism under Trump. He must be released now.

the leap from disappearing the undocumented to disappearing visa holders to disappearing green card holders to disappearing naturalized citizens to disappearing natural born citizens is no leap at all, but a series of tiny steps

block the path

Civility is a weapon when wielded by those who demand politeness while enforcing brutality. They call for decorum as they cage millions, for measured debate as they rain fire on cities. The contradiction isn’t accidental. It’s how power masks violence with a smile.