Critical Rationalist

Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic called “The Cruelty Is the Point” should hold a place of honor. Rarely has a single piece so completely captured the zeitgeist of a movement. Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer wrote.

FYI American mainstream TV, 70 years ago. (Nov. 1956) Two years after Brown v. Board, still eight years until the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

The eight law firms that concluded corrupt bargains with Trump are slowly learning what a grotesque error in judgment they made. Democrats plan to investigate these deals will be following the November elections. Skadden has already received a first wave of document production demands.

Markwayne gets a monument on the Washington mall.

Michael Fanone's take on Lindsey Graham is one of the most powerful I've read:

For example...

Remember Ken Chesebro, the (now convicted felon) lawyer behind the Florida 'fake electors' scheme? He managed to get reinstated to the bar. acis.flcourts.gov/portal/court...

Over the past 13 years police in the United States have killed approximately 16,000 people. Over the same period in the UK, the figure is 34

The 500 richest individuals on the planet added a record US$2.2 trillion to their fortunes in 2025 alone, while more than two billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. The charity Oxfam International, based in Nairobi,

estimates that the super-rich in high-income countries extract around $30 million per hour from low- and middle-income nations, where roughly 85% of people in the world live.

"Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress." - W Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 403

"I'm here to call bullshit on the President of the United States. The problem here is that the person who's supposed to be leading them spends more time talking about his Maria Antoinette ballroom than he does sitting in the situation room trying to get us out of this war." Sen. Duckworth, Veteran

I wish this were a bit. Science and antiscience are not the two sides of science. Much of the criticism you are receiving is because people were not born yesterday and they actually are familiar with disinformation campaigns and science denial

You should definitely read this ...

This can’t be presented as just a controversial policy choice. It’s unambiguous bigotry as policy. Hegseth believes black and brown Americans, and women, do not belong in positions of military leadership, and has overruled his own staff to remove them. Assault on fundamental principles of fairness.

It's still pretty safe, but not as safe as it was a month ago, when the lunatics started taking over. FAA staff are total professionals, but they are only human. Forcing two controllers to do the job of four, not fixing equipment outages promptly, etc., will sooner or later lead to disaster.

I'm a pilot. Fully-staffed ATC, FAA maintenance staff, and NWS are absolutely crucial for safe flight. Musk's idiots are sabotaging all that. They have zero aviation experience. They don't have the slightest idea what they're doing. I shudder to think what could happen next.

“Chronic hunger” at American concentration camps reported by USA Today. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

The launch of an important new public resource. The Anti-Corruption Tracker: Mapping the Erosion of Oversight and Accountability www.justsecurity.org/117267/anti-... The Tracker is a living document that will be continually updated. A screenshot below gives you a sense of the Chart and its data.

Oh

When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.

than Afghanistan or Iraq. But if recent decades have taught anything, it’s that the absence of tyranny is not freedom but chaos; that war is a likelier agent of disintegration than of renewal; that America knows how to destroy regimes but not remake societies. Democracy can’t be installed."

He is shifting 𝖓𝖆𝖗𝖗𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖛𝖊𝖘. His 𝖌𝖔𝖆𝖑𝖘 never change: 1. Serve himself, vvPutin & Netanyahu 2. Enrich himself thru corruption, grift & abuse of power (bribes, extortion, threats) 3. Distract from utter disaster in the homeland (Epstein truths, economy, incompetence) 4. Stay out of jail

The NYT style guide

4/9. The Iranian operation in 2020 was designed to help Donald Trump get elected.

2/ Epstein received $6.7 billion thanks to the Wall Street Bailout of 2008, American taxpayers paid off the liabilities of an obscure offshore company called Liquid Funding Ltd. that was chaired by Jeffrey Epstein. Paradise Papers leaked in 2017. bsky.app/profile/crai...

2015: Trump Tower Moscow Felix Sater emailed Michael Cohen: “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected...Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this.” craigunger.substack.com/p/36-the-gol...

substack.com/@johnbatchel...

A former ICE agent is blowing the whistle: Academy training is "deficient & broken." He claims he was ordered to teach cadets to bypass the Constitution & enter homes without warrants. ICE reportedly cut 240 hours of legal, firearms, and use-of-force training.

👇👇👇👇

There is a certain % of ppl whose brains are wired to abhor ambiguity and uncertainty. They seek structure & predictability and will seek out authoritarian leaders - church, significant others, govt to simplify the world with clear “solutions” to complex problems.

The huge increase in the ICE budget isn't for immigration enforcement. Trump is forming his own SA/SS/Gestapo/Stasi. Fascism is here, and we're only six months into this nightmare.

Bare bones, bare minimum starters: -a daily press conference at the same time that catalogues and highlights the latest ICE abuses, with video evidence if possible -a dedicated team of state lawyers and prosecutors who can be available as legal advisers to people caught up in ICE interactions

A woman recording an ICE agent tells him "Shame on you." The agent responds, "Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" "Learned what?" she asks Then he knocks her phone out of her hand

Not to mention grossly insufficient training.