Alito and Thomas are clearly steeped in Fox...but...I mean, Alito and Thomas are also very very powerful and influential, and Fox and RW media is influenced by them, too. it's not just one way.
he/him, bylines Public Notice, Chicago Reader, Observer, CNN.com. Poetry collection: Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda, 2024) Substack: www.everythingishorrible.net Poetry: https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/poetry-publications-noah-berlatsky
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Alito and Thomas are clearly steeped in Fox...but...I mean, Alito and Thomas are also very very powerful and influential, and Fox and RW media is influenced by them, too. it's not just one way.
it's not because they're new. it's because they're old.
this is kind of the problem with Will's "it's all the media" argument in general. media is powerful...but, like, where did the audience for right wing media come from? why do people find these messages congenial?
here was a brief period of a few decades where the court was a defender of multiracial democracy, but that was really an aberration. remember the court in the past declared Black people had no rights and imprisoning Japanese Americans without cause was fine.
The thing is that the Supreme Court is functioning much as the SC has always functioned—as the final, greatest institutional support for bigotry and hierarchy. 1
When the lawyers OK this wording IN THE MIDDLE OF LITIGATION, you know it’s solid.
wrote my mediocre poem for the day.
I had almost completely forgot I wrote the intro for this. It was a fun project!
"Biden—a longtime Zionist—seems to have seen Trump’s indifference to human rights and justice as an opportunity and an excuse."
he is an adjudicated sexual assailant...and he's also been credibly accused of domestic violence.
artists aren’t the fucking bourgeois or “elite”. every artist i know can barely make rent. every artist i know is one severe enough hospital bill away from being homeless. we’re not all banksy or andy warhol. sick of this idea being passed around as we deal with companies exploiting us constantly.
Oh, I'd mostly disagree. I think Charles Mills is right and the constitution is a white supremacist document. though I also think that changed with the post reconstruction amendments and the second founding. which is why the current court hates the second founding.
but these are minor quibbles.
Thomas believes that white supremacy should apply to everyone but Clarence Thomas. etc.
I mean, there's a little variation. Gorsuch thinks that white supremacy should be maintained except in regards to Native Americans.
and yes, that very much includes Thomas.
roberts and his goons are openly and I believe consciously racist. They see their job as to buttress white supremacy.
the theory of jurisprudence is that the goal of the law is to maintain racial and racist hierarchy. The Roberts court believes that non white people must be kept out of higher education because their proper place is in prison.
It's not really inconsistent if the goal of the Constitution is seen as the violent maintenance of white supremacy. which is clearly the view of the conservative majority on scotus.
SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool
I mean, there's a fair bit of evidence that her children are all bad people.
NEW: There is a case for House Democrats moving now to impeach RFK Jr., even if spineless GOPers won't go along with it. And I examine that case in my OUR LAND newsletter. link.motherjones.com/public/41447... ***Sign up for a FREE trial subscription to OUR LAND at davidcorn.com ***
it's not a passive crisis. it's a deliberate assault.
Trump, John Roberts, and his robed Christofascist klan buddies are working together to shred the constitution and create a white supremacist state.
I think @jonathanbernstein.bsky.social is right; it's not a constitutional crisis. It's a sustained, deliberate attack on the constitution. and unfortunately the conservative supreme court justices are leading the attack. 1
I've been trying to explain the Project 2025 "worldview" for like 3 years now. And this is pretty much it.
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
Maintaining a mocking rage so I don't weep.
When you go to Home Depot, make sure to wear a suit and tie and have your US passport peeking out of your suit jacket in lieu of a pocket square and the masked men will typically let you proceed quite quickly to the lumber department. - Brett Kavanaugh
This was a crime.
If you don't need reasonable suspicion to detain someone, you can literally detain *anyone.* www.huffpost.com/entry/suprem...
obviously, Ivana's accusations were discussed in the media—that's how I know about them! but it would be pretty reasonable to have wall to wall headlines every day of the last ten years in the NYT about trump being accused of raping his wife.
really expected more people to be pointing this out, but nope. the media just has not done a great job of making people aware of trump's long list of horrific actions.
Watch the clip. Maybe I'm wrong. But you could easily view this as Cuomo delivering a threat from Trump, the functional equivalent of "vote for me or the city gets it."
We talk about a fascist president and fascist representatives, but we need to call SCOTUS a fascist-dominated court: they believe that allowing the government to resume racial profiling was something that required *immediate action* (and, as @mjsdc.bsky.social notes, the arguments also are poor).
Trump's wife Ivana in a deposition said that Trump assaulted and raped her. www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...
Every single Democrat should instantly condemn him for this and demand a retraction and apology. Blow it up. He's supporting domestic violence! It's nightmarish!
It makes me mad that youtube buried our last episode of cancel me daddy because we dared talk about NSFW topics. it was in no way salacious and it was a frank and needed conversation about government policy. and yet it is the least viewed episode in months. youtu.be/lwRGW0Jb9TI?...
BREAKING: By an apparent 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court halts an injunction that had prevented immigration agents from racially profiling Latinos in central California. Sotomayor, dissenting, says the decision is "unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation's constitutional guarantees."
Two more days to pick up my and @devi.bsky.social's lesbian urban fantasy series for cheap, either as discounted individual books or as a bundle! Warlocks summon beautiful butch demons, sorceresses bind handsome weretigers, and Arthurian knights rise from the dead. itch.io/s/159661/cha...
Somewhat noncequitor but it dawned on me after reading this that Trump is a bit like Lukashenko and our country is becoming a Belarus, but with a lot more inventory. And… Berlatsky is a great resource.
"Biden’s administration claimed that their goal was stability in the region. It would perhaps have been more honest if they said that they were attempting to stabilize and perpetuate ongoing Israel dominance of the Palestinians."
"Biden—a longtime Zionist—seems to have seen Trump’s indifference to human rights and justice as an opportunity and an excuse."
BREAKING: A unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit upholds the $83.3 million jury verdict for E. Jean Carroll in her defamation case against Donald Trump. ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/is...
trying to find a james baldwin quote, which google's ai insists does not exist. and then I found it and of course it does.
Fuck around and find... Actually, odds are, he learned nothing.
yes, I discuss that in the piece!
Newsom and Seth Moulton are two who have been flirting or more than flirting with embracing transphobia. Fetterman and Gallego co sponsored the ugly anti immigrant Laken Riley act.
this is a bad idea unless you love misery, atrocity, and death.
some Ds are now flirting with the idea of embracing some of trump's second term policies—transphobia, attacks on immigrants, etc.
Biden decided to double down on the abraham accords rather than returning to a policy of (even nominally) working for freedom/justice/a state for Palestinians. the result was (predictably when you stop working for peace) war, genocide, and horror.
wrote about one area where Ds continued Trump policies last time—namely Israel/Palestine—and why we really, really should not do that again. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/dont-repea...
or the vmas; sorry.
I guess they performed together at the grammys!
If it’s run for profit, then it’s profiting off of … us. When I hear that the post office lost money, I think this: Good. We already paid for it. Why on earth should it make even more money from us? Who would keep the money? Would we see it?
I have seen it happen on occasion, but it's the exception not the rule.
it's possible he'll vote against maga next time around...but motivated reasoning means people are extremely, extremely reluctant to acknowledge that they made a poor choice in the voting booth.
notice he doesn't blame trump, but "government." No suggestion that he fucked up and should have voted differently. 1
What if Democrats had defended immigration over the last few years instead of running from it?
so...I think Rs would be very uncomfortable with a fight where they had to go to the wall for rfk, who many of them already clearly dislike and have tried to restrain.
RFK wanted an antivax ghoul; Rs turned the guy down, which is why RFK got in a huge battle with the CDC director in the first place.
Trump's made a couple statements suggesting he's uncomfortable with what RFK is doing. so...I think Trump likes him to some extent, but might also not mind having an excuse to defenestrate him are you aware that Rs blocked RFK's preferred CDC pick?
When I was an immigration and border reporter, people didn't just accuse me of straight up making shit up - they outright gaslit me and threatened to have me put away for my "paranoid delusions"
kenny g and doja cat is peak jewish music collaboration
I will always be passionate about protecting gender non-conforming and queer children. I’m still working on healing from life-altering trauma I suffered as a trans and gender nonconforming child and I never want any kid to ever have to go through that like I had to.
what if I told you Pritzker has been trying to get Schumer to act like there's an emergency?
Reporters from across newsrooms in Chicago are collaborating to collect visual evidence of federal agents detaining people & using force in Chicago. Send videos to tinyurl.com/chicagojourn..., or get in touch via email chicagojournalists@protonmail.com.
I honestly miss the dog whistles. It was actually better when people felt the need to mask their racism.
interesting thread
Interesting shutdown politics thread by health policy expert and former OMB official Topher Spiro.
RFK is quite unpopular; criminalizing vaccines is not popular, and splits Rs in the senate (probably in the House too.)
if Ds decide that the budget ask should be fighting for the health of americans, the ask should be at minimum firing RFK before the vote is taken.
just as an example...what is the point of fighting for health care subsidies as long as RFK is in office determined to wreck public health?
I mean: www.npr.org/2025/06/16/n...
and if that sounds like an exaggeration or like paranoia...I'm not sure where you've been for the last six months.
you cannot talk about health care subsidies when you are a corpse lying at the bottom of a ditch.
if the fascist gestapo riddle you with bullets, issue salience is less important because you cannot talk about any issues because you are dead.
issue salience is important, but what is also important is keeping your blood inside your body so you can actually hold power.
maybe fighting armed gestapo on the streets of the capital is not as popular as fighting for health care subsidies. the thing about armed gestapo on the streets of the capital is that they can in fact just shoot members of the opposition party, and then polling doesn't actually matter that much.
like, "we will only fight on health care subsidies because it polls well, and will just ignore the military takeover of the US in preparation for ending elections. then we will win the election!" there is a simple logical error here. can you find it!?
traingulating the best thing to fight on is not a good strategy when trump's attempting to destroy democracy and imprison democrats.
so that's thing 1. thing 2.
like, "keep doing what you're doing" is not in fact a way to increase your shit popularity. if it was your popularity wouldn't be shit!
Schumer and Jeffries are not going to regain their popularity by saying, "we need to fight...but only on health care subsidies." this is what they're already doing, and it is why their approval is somewhere south of bubonic plague and cockroaches.
The D base is calling for *a fight on important principles* and for a *courageous stance against fascism.* they are in fact enraged *because some Ds are acting like they can only fight on stuff like health care subsidies.*
like, yes, certainly, fight on health care subsidies. but choosing *only* to fight on health care subsidies is the sort of thing that would signal to everyone that you've got just normal policy disagreements with trump. which is not adequate right now. 2
a couple things here. first, health care subsidies is not the passionate fight the D base is calling for, and it's also not a fight that's going to get media coverage. 1
This is what the appeasers and capitulators don't seem to get (or perhaps willfully deny): You're not going along with one awful thing, you're setting the baseline for the next awful thing, and the expectation that you'll acquiesce to that. Which forms a new baseline... Call it out and say no.
oh, I don't think that's true. he's vice president; mostly he's doing what trump tells him.
Donald Trump absolutely HUMILIATED at the Us Open. Just absolute endless booing.
Who knows? but I'd guess like Vance there's a mix of opportunism and sincere commitment to hate.
Also Bluesky was heavily represented today re the volunteers, tablers, people who donated, attendees, and of course the organizers. Everyone take a bow because social action is also Blueskyism (sorry to the haterzzz).
What a #postmodern time to be alive in. #WATPTTBA
yes, he wants money/power. but he wants money/power in order to ethnically cleanse the US.
Vance's bigotry is I think more considered/dwelt on/examined. He's an ideologue.
in a lot of ways I think Vance is more of a true believer than Trump. trump's bigotry and hate is mostly that of the blowhard at the end of the bar. it's sincere (and super dangerous) but not thought through.
I think Thiel just urged vance to embrace and have faith in his own hatefulness. (the urging was no doubt more convincing since it was backed up with an offer of money and power.)
hillbilly elegy is a very racist and cruel book. there's a patina of empathy and conscience, but at it's core it's quite hateful, and very much congruent with trumpism.
or, yes, he's cynically embracing trumpism for power. but...also I think he was in fact radicalized and encouraged to embrace his own racism by thiel, etc.