Top recent posts by Online Political Thinkers on Bluesky

IT'S OFFICIAL: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York State, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New York City have formed the Northeast Public Health Collaborative. The collaborative will issue their own vaccine recommendations and coordinate public health efforts.

This is the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era but it also has significantly less popular consensus behind it than the second Red Scare. It's being done on behalf of a minority faction led by the most unpopular president in modern history. Organizing against this can win.

The Third Reich didn't last 1,000 years. Pinochet was ousted with a referendum. And the US isn't exactly dealing with the smartest, most competent fascists. Those of you insisting that 2025 is forever need to read a book, touch grass, go to therapy, anything other than trying to make others quit.

I can tell this site needs more sports knowers because everyone's been yelling about canceling Disney+ and Hulu all day and I literally haven't seen anyone yelling about canceling the new ESPN app, which was just rolled out and the success of which is existential for ESPN.

The key problem with what Ezra Klein says here is that he fails – or is unwilling – to grapple with the fundamental reality of the political conflict: The movement that dominates today’s Right fully rejects the very idea of “living here with each other” as equals. That’s their defining position.

If you wrote a "Trump distances himself from project 2025" story in 2024 you are either a dupe or one of our enemies. They are cackling with laughter that the media they're now destroying enthusiastically helped them dupe the voters

WOW. Judge Kelly takes the Trump admin to task for their outrageous effort to deport children in the dead of the night. Not only does he say their justification "crumbled like a house of cards," he also says the admin was not engaging in "conduct ... that reflect[s] good faith."

Important to keep remembering and repeating that Kimmel didn't mock Charlie Kirk or celebrate his death in the monologue. He mocked the president's lack of feeling and criticized the regime.

MAHA vs the U.S. corn lobby is going to be a real Let Them Fight situation

When America eventually gets out of this, it needs to make business leaders fear to break the law. At minimum Teddy Roosevelt levels, possibly more. Many are apparently operating under the belief that lawbreaking and rights violations are all upside for them, no need to worry about consequences.

What we're seeing in the "don't sign up for protests" discourse is what Paulo Freire described as the convert's failure to trust the knowledge of the oppressed. As the convert tries to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, they refuse to let go of a world where they were the authority by default.

I'm not trying to tell you it's not going to suck but this is more or less what the path to most of the good endings looks like: 1) isolated, unpopular president with few allies 2) entirely transactional and lightly committed collaborators 3) deeply committed domestic and international opposition

A Congresswoman calls for everyone like me to be locked up. The world's richest man proposes I be subject to a Nazi medical experiment. I no longer flinch at the sight of the soldiers with assault rifles on my commute. A billboard for AI tells me "keep thinking." One cold brew with oat milk, please

I've lived in both a full blown autocracy (China) and one of the great resistance states (SK) a) if you were *actually* practicing security, none of this would be on this highly visible public platform. b) courage is an important part of resistance, organization is an even more important part

If this is what it took for you to be pushed into fascism you were probably already there

Pour one out for the @nytpitchbot.bsky.social. Satire is dead in a world where the real "reporting" looks like this

Free idea that literally every Democrat in Congress could and should get behind today: Impeach Brendan Carr.

This is a disgusting, horrifying weaponization of the courts to continue the administration’s persecution of Mahmoud Khalil for free speech

the most interesting part of this reporting is that they didn't pull him off the air for what he had *already* said, they pulled him off the air for what he was *going* to say, which, i expect, has them in quite the pickle now, because he's unlikely to be *more* conciliatory after this

A cybertruck for your face

I think ABC thinks they found a compromise that doesn't really cost much and I think they're wrong

Charlie Kirk’s murder has rapidly become a pretext for a large-scale attack on opposition political speech www.slowboring.com/p/magas-scar...

It’s deeply unfair to call today’s fascists “fascist” or “Nazis” just for doing bad things German Nazis did in the 1930s to advance their fascist project. And you better not say “fascism” or the fascists will come for you too!

House Democratic leaders issue a joint statement calling on FCC’s Brendan Carr to resign, labeling his actions a “corrupt abuse of power.”

Wrong on both counts ! 1) Kimmel said that, over the weekend, the "MAGA gang" was "desperately trying to characterize the kid as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." And that's true, it's exactly what they were doing.

We know it’s wrong, the accusation doesn’t have merit, the law and principle are on our side, we have a lot of money to cover legal fees and weather any fallout, but he might get mad at us, so we had to. We anonymously leaked to the press that we felt bad about it, that counts for something, right?

Posobiec, Kirk’s frequent co-host on his podcast and a regular speaker at TPUSA events, was one of the key instigators of Pizzagate in 2017. His career started to really take off when Alex Jones started having him on his show. Doing politics the right way.

1. He can fire all the prosecutors he wants but still a long way from getting a conviction without evidence. We'll see. 2. He's getting crazier by the hour now, isn't he? This is on top of talking about re-invading Afghanistan and no one is allowed to criticize him on TV...and that's just today.

What was the problem with Sesame Street again

Elected officials are the chosen officers of the people, they carry a democratic mandate, they are oath-sworn to uphold the Constitution, which makes civil disobedience by them potent in a way private citizens are not.

One notable difference: It took Putin two years to shut down a late night comedy show that made fun of him. Trump has shut down two in nine months. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppets...

Starting at 8:30 EST, @immcouncil.org’s own @naynagupta.bsky.social will be testifying at a shadow hearing held by Congressional Democrats on the impact of Trump’s mass deportation policies. Check it out! www.youtube.com/live/m47GZMk...

kinda wild that there were four years in power to safeguard against all of this happening and the threat was seen as defeated not imminent

"I have 40-plus years left on this planet Earth. I don't want to live like that. I don't think any of us do. I think it's more about how do you want to wake up every day and tell your kids what you did in this time period." Found this deeply moving from @bencollins.bsky.social 🥹

Nothing to worry about, just a GOP governor saying his state has to redistrict to favor Rs before 2026 or lose money to his state www.yahoo.com/news/article... Authoritarians frequently exploit state power to make it impossible for opposition parties to compete on a level playing field

Military lawyers have warned that President Trump's strikes on two drug boats might not have been legal, possibly raising risks for the service members involved, "but believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined." www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

Ilya Shapiro declared a free speech crisis because he called Black women "lesser," students questioned if that bias meant he'd teach his law classes unfairly, Georgetown determined it was a speech issue and imposed no consequences, then Shapiro quit in a huff calling himself a victim of censorship.

they’re also kind of fucked now because sinclair wants a public apology and a donation to TPUSA out of him, both of which seem, uh, unlikely

You guys they're just really concerned about women's sports

“Democrats need to let it be known that any and all Trump accomplices who carry out corrupt or illegal actions on his behalf will face accountability later. It’s the only language these authoritarian thugs will ever understand.” newrepublic.com/article/2006...

oh hey look it is the entirely predictable trump response to capitulation

Not many people know this, but one of the powers that the Framers of the Constitution came THIS close to granting the President was the ability to decide who would host late night television shows. It's only thanks to Ben Franklin's last minute intervention that this was taken out of Article II.

New from @lioneltrolling.bsky.social www.unpopularfront.news/p/this-is-it

The Roy family knows that parks and cruises is where the rubber meets the road

The rapidity with which the GOP went from “the government shouldn’t pick winners and losers” to “the President should decide who hosts late night shows” should probably shape how future historians write about the pre-Trump GOP.

one of the fine distinguishing features of Bouie as a columnist is that he very much Does The Reading

see stuff like this fascinates me, because it has nothing to do with what Will - who is a literal target of neo-Nazis - has said. it's purely the imagination of people who want to believe that the target they've chosen as a target for harassment and bullying is a bad person and so they're justified.

The parallels between what’s happening now and what happened after Putin was first elected are inescapable.

It turns out that the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd was not at all interested in facts, but rather were far more invested in controlling other people’s feelings.

Why is he so bad at this

I am not a “doomer”. What I am is someone who expected this fever to break a long, long time ago. And I do fear we underestimate how much worse it is going to get before it gets better, and the price that each of us is going to have to be willing to pay.

Stop treating pretextual claims seriously

They're attacking popular things, publicly brutalizing everyday people, and alienating even Trump-appointed judges. It'll get worse before it gets better, and we can't rely on almost any elected official to lead, but we can push their goons out of our communities and out of office. We can end this.

every person on here is going to Go Through It at some point over the next few years, mostly in public. be kind

More of this, please.

The firing of Karen Attiah is an absolute disgrace for the Washington Post, the culmination of their Bezos-driven submission to MAGA.

again, as somebody who has actually lived in a dictatorship and worked with dissidents from across the world, this kind of whiny cosplaying by academics pretending they have some secret knowledge of resistance is very annoying.

'elderly sexual predator' does cover two of Cuomo's key bases of support

now, my mild doomposting and feeling sorry for myself being done, i do think this is both a massive overreach that will blow back and also a sign of fear and weakness. coupled with the farcical circus they've made of charlie kirk's death, i'd bet approval ratings take a further dive by next week.

you guys wanna see a dead body

it has been frankly pretty wild to see how almost every member of this administration has been given complete autonomy to write checks that trump's ass has to cash

i will be honest, i'm not feeling great about things at the moment, but i do think that the growing realization on the right that everything trump is now doing could in the future very easily be used against them is kind of interesting

"mom, why is JD Vance an autocrat?" "because people didn't like his movie, dear. now put the sandbag up on the street."

also, if I’m not mistaken, the FCC chair just affirmed his plan to end free speech in America in a reply to the guy who played the wheelchair kid on Glee

"Mr. Jacobs, a moderate from Long Island, was so opposed to the governor’s endorsement that he told associates in recent days that he would sooner resign as chairman than back Mr. Mamdani." I think maybe do that, then? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/n...

to put it in perspective, trump is within single digits of nixon's disapproval rating when he left office. lots of things have changed since 1974, but trump is, in fact, profoundly unpopular and getting more so every day.

comedy may no longer be legal, but at least fraud is

kimmel isn’t the guy you kill, he’s the guy you buy

boy Josh Shapiro, man...

BS. Sen. Lummis feels the same way: speech she agrees with from people she likes must be free from verbal criticism she doesn’t like, while speech she doesn’t agree with should be unconstitutionally censored. The GOP has been remarkably consistent about that, even if it’s not how they worded it.

NEW: "Every election cycle, assuming we still have elections in this country, the content of broadcast news might drastically shift depending on which political party controls the censorship office." @makenakelly.bsky.social talked to the experts and they were pretty blunt.

turns out media consolidation might have some downsides for megacorps

I watched every Jimmy Kimmel monologue since Charlie Kirk was killed and all I got was this sinking feeling

At Yale, Vance attended a lecture by a billionaire that changed his life. He saw negative comments about the movie adaptation of his book. Then a “falling out with the elites.” The elites are not Yale or the billionaire. The elites are movie reviewers. That is really their conception of “elites.”

it's still very funny to me that tankies purport to believe a joke about historiography is racist, either because they've fully swallowed PRC propaganda about China's natural place in the world or more likely because other people told them so and they can't read.

This authoritarian vision of the relationship between the press and the public genealogically descends from the fascist conspiracy theory that "the Jewish controlled press" brainwashed the US public into supporting the New Deal, then the civil rights movement, then tolerating gay people, etc.

The thing missing from this @semafor.com reporting is any mention of how those boots taste

The US military will likely find that Charlie Kirk fans wanted to say bigoted things and maybe become podcasters, not sacrifice and put themselves at risk for national service.

You can draw a straight line

theonion.com/netanyahu-th...

The GOP is no longer the party of "small gov't," even tho that's how many voters still vestigially think of them. There's an opportunity for Dems to say something like "they use big government to do bad stuff that hurts people, we use gov't to do good stuff to help people. That's your choice."

You are absolutely allowed to do that. They’ve done it to every sitting President before him.

Well bluesky is a very intolerant place, filled with people who disagree with him, unlike his honorable opposition on the right, who mostly agree, due to their tolerance and openness

hey ma, look i'm on reddit :\

i think this would be a colossally stupid strategy on mike johnson's part, which means he'll probably do it.

The real divide to watch in the coming years: data centers. Environmentalists hate them because they eat up so much energy. But the building trades unions like them because they are jobs.

Reconstruction, even in its later failure, required breaking regular democratic norms and constitutional procedures on a massive scale. 13, 14, 15th were literally ratified at gunpoint! Rightly, but hardly regular. There has to be a counter-purge, you can't reboot the game of democracy without it.

A reminder that most of the country has no idea who this guy is

For context New York voters enshrined the civil rights of transgender people in the state constitution just last year, passing Proposition 1 by a wider margin than the state voted for Kamala Harris

john thune has legitimately been way worse as a majority leader than i expected him to be. both in terms of the substance of what he pushes through, but also in the way that he's not giving any of his caucus anywhere to hide during the midterms.

This is right but what's happening now is also on a larger scale and casting a broader net at mainstream opposition than McCarthy. It wasn't small, but it is possible to overstate the scale of how big that was. I'd say now is the worst since WWI & Wilson, and before that only Alien & Sedition Acts.

Trump’s latest tweet is about Kimmel. “He made a total FOOL of himself, his wife and agent begging him not to do it, while also proving to be one of the Worst Hosts in the History of the Academy Awards.”

"What’s been revealed in the past week is that the current ruling party sees free will and free speech as indoctrination, but believes compulsory moments of silence for a man most Americans hadn’t heard of until his death to be fair game"

Trump posts an AI image of himself trading Intel stock in the Oval Office.

there's also a belief that something you've heard in person is more 'authentic,' even when the person you've heard it from is repeating something they heard at a conference from someone else who heard it from someone else who got it from a New York Times column.

A small thing, but notable: In the last three or four weeks Obama has been posting on social media about our current crisis of democracy with an urgency and frequency that simply wasn't forthcoming from him in the previous seven months of this new administration.

i will say for myself that we're in a very solidly middle class income bracket and we have very definitely been feeling the squeeze getting tighter, i have to assume a lot of other people have, too

Ro Khanna has a history of sucking but I must give flowers to this because he just said it out loud directly instead of passively "this is not who we are" shit we've seen from other Dems. Good stuff.

this is such an egregiously bad decision for basically no upside