J Spider Hunter

Incredible reporting on a deeply depressing story of corruption in Congress Anticorruption politics is what brings down authoritarians around the world, but it's hard to do that when you're corrupt too (even if less corrupt) www.propublica.org/article/nava...

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.

🧵🧵🧵 The NY Times posted a 15-minute video today in which I got to tell NYT what’s wrong with its coverage. They said they saw my critical posts on Bluesky and invited me to do a video with them to air my grievances. Weird, right? I didn’t hold back. I blasted their sanewashing of MAGA extremism.

“.. the latest chapter in Gaetz’s high-profile sex scandal that ultimately derailed his nomination by President Trump as U.S. Attorney General.” @miamiherald.com www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...

NEW: ProPublica revealed that the FBI was circling Sen. Collins over a defense contractor’s donations — until Trump gutted the unit in charge. Collins has since mustered a defense with a series of incorrect and misleading claims.

We go through the indictment of a defense contractor that helped ProPublica come up with a story that looks really bad for Maine Senator Susan Collins & assess the evidnece joycevance.substack.com/p/a-bad-tues...

Meet Milan Knežević, whose party signed cooperation agreements with United Russia. He was convicted (later overturned) of supporting Russia's attempted 2016 coup. This month, he met several GOP politicians at the RNC midterm convention. thenewsground.com/jay-patel-mo...

“Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting.” BRUH.

Trump's covert surveillance of anti-ICE protesters is much worse than we thought. I dug into this and found that DHS agents secretly spied on over a dozen meetings of left-leaning groups, all protected by First Amendment. The details are unnerving. 1/ (new piece) newrepublic.com/article/2144...

NEWS: Developer of Trump Tower Tbilisi is half-owned by a Georgian-Russian oligarch with deep Kremlin ties who still holds money in sanctioned Russian banks. thenewsground.com/shadowy-russ...

Russian model Kira Dikhtyar sent Epstein at least 40 young women and girls over the course of a decade. After his death, she resurfaced as a child-protection advocate and built ties to a Trump insider and Vladimir Putin’s longtime mistress. My investigation: youtu.be/z3nKRIP9d0E

And there’s evidence for this theory. I recall Mamdani got Republican voters. Not a lot, but you don’t need a lot. Going back gulp 20 years Obama ran as an outsider—last time that’s happened in a general—and won Indiana. It’s the centrist Republicans centrist Dems keep chasing who rarely show up.

[Exit Queen.]

Trump just fired all these people www.justsecurity.org/146430/elect...

One of the biggest lies of the AI bubble is that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta are "growing because of AI." In reality, they're using the continued growth of their other business units to cover the meager returns from AI, and the massive waste of their trillion+ in capex.

Roosevelt spent years educating the public about the tyranny of courts. These institutions exist primarily to preserve the current order. And throughout history, this is how courts have been everywhere. And that is why courts in most democratic countries are strictly limited in their powers.

KARL: Rs are gonna make you the poster child for the D Party MAMDANI: Let them. We don't have to ask ourselves what life looks like if a socialist wins. I won last year & over the course of the last 6 months what we've delivered for working people are the very things we were told were impossible.

Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.

Newsom Nix (NOO-səm niks), noun 1. A political maneuver in which one loudly champions an unachievable version of a reform in order to quietly kill the achievable one. 2. The art of occupying both sides of an issue by ensuring that the side you appear to favor has no chance of success.

"Gish Gallop" is a debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_ga... I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI. 1/

NEW: @elisethomas.bsky.social reveals multiple links between Viory, a video news agency supplying national press agencies across Africa, Asia and the Middle East and Ruptly news agency - a branch of sanctioned Russian propaganda outlet Russia Today. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/06...

Pelley took direct aim at Bari Weiss, the network’s controversial editor-in-chief. “She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley said, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

🚨BREAKING: The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said in a yet-to-be-published proposed rule Friday that it’s drawing up plans to radically crack down on mail voting by sending ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Bang the drums of impeachment. www.rawstory.com/samuel-alito...

The perception of those who listen to Republican propaganda is that the Democrats, who are mostly led by center-right neoliberal corporatists, are basically all Marxists, no matter how far that is from the truth. To say the Harris campaign moved left is to accept that frame and spread that lie.

If the campaign truly had made defending trans rights a part of their campaign, if they had promised to stop aiding the genocide in Gaza, if they had run on universal healthcare, and they lost? …OK, maybe you could say they moved left and lost. But they were out there with the Cheneys. Be for real.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

In an unusual flight path, jet flies into World Trade Center.

Said Leonard Leo behind closed doors the last 30 years. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

From May 2021:

Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-...

1. ICE has not paid for detainee medical care for 7 MONTHS The termination of payments to providers has coincided with a MASSIVE SPIKE in detainee deaths. This is a health crisis and a moral crisis. Follow along for details. 🧵

1/ The world faces a catastrophic cliff-edge shortage of oil due to the Strait of Hormuz blockade in the next four weeks, analysts warn. This will cause a deep recession, fuel rationing, the shutdown of entire industries, and oil prices potentially as high as $370 per barrel. ⬇️

I wrote up the Comey indictment. www.popehat.com/p/the-comey-...

Yes, Republicans are challenging the results of Virginia’s redistricting referendum, and this is a concern But they keep turning to the same MAGA judge in Tazewell County, whose decisions have routinely been overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court So the will of the voters will likely prevail

They think you're stupid.

Amanda Ungaro was 16 when she was flown to the US on an Epstein plane. She later became close to the Trumps On Apr. 8, she went on X to threaten legal action vs Melania “and your pedophile husband” On Apr. 9, Melania made that odd public statement about Epstein www.miamiherald.com/news/local/c...

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. 12/

It’s because he is an absolute traitor to what he told us he would be. And now we can see those same fault lines forming in Maine with Platner and Dems are like, “who cares about the rotten person, we have numbers to meet.” And I ain’t playing that game anymore.

☀️ It's #SunshineWeek, a time to celebrate freedom of information and the public's right to know! To recognize the occasion, here's a thread of some @rcfp.org resources to help journalists and others access public information:

I read the “Save America Act,” so you don’t have to. Most of the media apparently *hasn’t* read it because, if they had, they would be sounding the alarm about the provision in Point 1, below, which almost none of them have even mentioned. I hope this summary helps raise awareness. 1/

"Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle." On who's really in charge: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-no-wor...

A new lawsuit alleges Google’s chatbot sent a Florida man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemi...

The Republicans seem to be prepping an argument that any domestic terror attacks in the aftermath of their Iran attacks will be the fault of Democrats for shutting down DHS funding, so I'd like to remind everyone of this appointment:

Our Pulitzer-winning "Friends of the Court" series began with this story that revealed how SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas had, for 20+ years, been treated to undisclosed luxury vacations by real estate titan and GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. (Published April 2023)

Stephen Colbert said that the FCC and CBS - which is in no way a compromised or complicit organization - wouldn’t allow him to broadcast an interview with Democratic State Rep James Talarico. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/a...