alisonsk.bsky.social

democracyforward.org/action/donat... www.democracy2025.org/donate

WaPo gets over the line with the confirmation first:

Blunt but not inappropriate. (Civility has to take a back seat in moments of crisis.)

In one day, two politicians - Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vucic in Serbia - with ties to Trump have lost surprise elections thanks to high turnout. The rise of the international far-right is not inevitable.

Leaders of the No Kings movement are already gearing up for the next major grassroots campaign: Making sure congressional Democrats don’t wimp out. My first piece at @newrepublic.com! (Reposted to update link card) newrepublic.com/article/2168...

i wrote about the GORP

Keisha Lance Bottoms winning in Georgia is important locally, regionally and nationally, but there are million$$$$ of reasons not to vote for "prolific litigant," Rick Jackson. (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Jail jail jail jail jail

It's bleak that Serious News Outlets will tie themselves into knots writing headlines that obscure the horrors of a story while @people.com just waltzes in and calls it like it is.

Rick Crawford WENT NUTS on Warner and Himes for disclosing that Russia is trying to target pro-Ukrainian lawmakers. www.politico.com/news/2026/10...

Please do not describe it as an "attack ad" in which Acton's "estranged mother" "calls her a liar." It's a "taboo-breaking ad accusing Acton of lying about being raped as as child"

We put up an interactive graph re: X conversations re: the (discovered to be fake) Wedgewood polls. Several "rigged election" narratives are emerging around this case. We're working on an analysis, but making this graph available for folks who want to explore faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Spot...

How David Sanger portrays accepting personal bribes from Russia to betray Ukraine (and all of Europe). This is the problem with those memory-holing 2016. This is LITERALLY what was on the table then. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/u...

LOLGOP and I have been re-releasing our Ball of Threads on how the 2016 Russian attack led us to the fascist place where we are. We're doing so, in part, bc the past tactics remain true, such as the way it led Trump to destroy the FBI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWIE...

DOJ, which can no longer be trusted, staged photo ops, putting these people in shackles, with no proof of intent, which is required for a criminal charge. NYT does stenography. Also ignores that what DOJ is asking CA to do would actually be a crime.

Huge follow-up reporting to my scoop: The Guardian confirmed America Next—the conservative nonprofit founded by Bobby Jindal that was offering students $ to disrupt El-Sayed events—paid a firm registered to Tommy Teepell’s dad Timmy $250k for “canvassing and influencer marketing” against El-Sayed.

She calls it a "crime wave" of agents lying in affidavits to arrest Democrats. Sounds fair.

Absolutely stunning that in the NYT’s latest major story on Elon Musk single-handedly trying to save the GOP there is NOT ONE WORD about how he is the world’s most vocal white supremacist and advocate of ethnic cleansing.

Really is incredible how much damning evidence against him is out there and just sort of shrugged away.

"'The Constitution's high threshold for impeachment failed to contend with partisan politics,' [Froomkin] said. The mechanism is broken, he argued, because lawmakers 'place their partisan loyalty above their oaths.'" www.newsweek.com/impeach-dona...

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA): "At this point in time in 2022, a little over 200,000 Virginians had voted. At this point in time in 2026, approximately 450,000 Virginians have voted early."

Fixed it for Trump.

"You hired half the Third Reich to staff your office ... If John Lewis were marching today, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club" -- here's a supercut of Jon Ossoff SMASHING Mike Collins during tonight's debate

Not going to data mule Trump's TS post attacking Somalis in MN, but remember that one of the lawsuits Renee Good's family filed likens Trump's attacks on Somalis to the Klan. emptywheel.net/2026/10/04/c...

He is explicitly calling for pogroms. (I ask again: at what point will our major news organizations finally acknowledge that he is either mentally ill or a vile racist or both?)

"Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon" by @rickpildes.bsky.social is essential reading on the violent overthrow of the Reconstruction constitutions—and the Supreme Court's acquiescence. Equally important, Rick makes a powerful case for the value of majority rule for bringing about inclusion.

October 6, 2026

The government *still* isn’t tracking how often immigration agents detain U.S. citizens. We are. 500+ Americans have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or held against their will in Trump’s second term. Our tally is almost certainly an undercount. THREAD (content warning: violence) ⬇️

This is essential. But has everyone in DC forgotten that Trump has a veto for the next two years? That word does not appear here once. The next two years have to be about getting everything lined up for 2029. And not overpromising deliverables in the meantime. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

October 3, 2026

How out of the loop am I??? I didn't even know about this concert

This breathtaking NYT story about Trump's Russian entanglements includes three people who've been part of the operation to cultivate Trump since 2015: Bryan Lanza, Sheikh Tahoon, and Kirill Dmitriev. This is literally the culmination of the original plan. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/03/u...

It's Oct 3. The midterms are a month away, but early voting has already begun in some states. Mail-in ballots will start circulating soon. Some of the usual suspects are already pushing the same "rigged election" rumors we've all heard before. This year, you can play along at home. bingo.cip.uw.edu

Under Marco Rubio, the State Department is being by pro-Russian Nazis using State to foster fascism worldwide. edition.cnn.com/2026/10/02/p...

Thread.

We need to stop reaffirming that we don't expect Trump administration figures to face legal accountability for their misdeeds. Expectations produce reality. We need to start creating the expectation that they in fact will—indeed, must—face legal accountability.

I am here in Congress as Democratic Senators prepare to hear live testimony from those hit hardest by the Trump admin’s delegalization campaign—the largest effort in US history to strip protections and status from immigrants, many who have lived here for years.   Over 1 million are already impacted.

The main reason you haven’t heard about campus sexual violence in a few years is because Trump and SCOTUS have made it much, much harder for survivors to come forward. You might vaguely remember that Title IX was a big battleground in his first term. And that we lost.

NEW AD: Listen to this sh*t.

Klobuchar has Schmitt dead to rights: "The game in fact was in Maryland. For a senator to have false information & imply, based on confusion about name of a team, that you were in another city & somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia & call you a 'dirtbag' deserves an apology"

And he wants to do it again!

We desperately need a truth and reconciliation commission. It’s not simply about accountability, which may be stymied by Trump pardons. It’s about fully understanding and processing how far we fell as a nation, accepting that we put our faith in the wrong people, and knowing to never do it again.

"Beyond Neoliberal Administration," my forthcoming chapter in Building Democratic Capacity (Cambridge University Press, edited by @blakeprof.bsky.social, @joshuamacey.bsky.social, @ksabeelrahman.bsky.social, and Bijal Shah, forthcoming 2027), is now posted to SSRN. papers.ssrn.com/abstract=752...

This serves as advertisement for Alex Gibney’s documentary, Musk, opening October 9. Pass it on.

WATCH: “They’re trying to put a Christian mask on these ideas.” As J.D. Vance’s pimp Peter Thiel brings his secretive Antichrist lectures to NASHVILLE, here’s Gil Duran telling @chrislhayes the tech oligarchs are really “computer-worshipping satanists who don’t believe in God” using Christianity

In honor of Don Jr's new Russian benefactor, @lolgop.bsky.social and I are bringing back our Ball of Threads. emptywheel.net/2026/09/21/i...

🚨 New Working Paper! 🚨 Do voters *like* local prisons? Are prisons that good for the economy? After years of data collection (+ using a novel estimator?!), @nottone & I find new prisons: • Reduce Republican incumbent vote shares 1-3pp • Decrease per cap. incomes >$2,500 osf.io/dnwke 🧵👇