Top recent posts by Online Political Thinkers on Bluesky

Disqualifying thehill.com/homenews/hou...

The Iranian schoolgirl, the cancer patient whose clinical trial was cancelled, the African AIDS patient who can't get treatment anymore — none of these are "real" to our media elites. Can't imagine themselves in that situation or visualize it. But "panic at the fancy gala!" on the other hand,

Anyone currently on our side who still thinks Reagan was great can safely be ignored about everything

On this day ten years ago, Ted Cruz named Carly Fiorina as his running mate, transforming US politics for several hours

A real photo of Kid Rock addressing service members at the Pentagon today. Nice summation of where things stand in the United States.

Posting this on the app that helped foment J6 and is also famous for an AI bot that makes kiddie porn that's owned by the world's most vocal white supremacist who puts his thumb on the scale of the algorithm is uh, well, it's something

Fun fact: The Elvis impersonator who was arrested for sending ricin to Obama often recommended my work on Facebook. Fortunately (for me!), he was innocent. A different Elvis impersonator sent the ricin to frame the innocent Elvis impersonator b/c the latter falsely claimed to be a member of Mensa.

This woman, who also represented three J6 defendants and well as Roy Moore in one of his defamation suits, is one of the people they hired to be an immigration judge; a person who will have to decide on gender-based violence cases.

Middlebrow media enjoyers rise up. We want art with complex stories and emotional nuance featuring characters with interiority and yes we also want them to solve a murder or be a spy or kill a vampire or something

This insightful thread made me reflect on how I, a Gen Xer, was socialized to think about the political agency of ordinary citizens...and how those historical "lessons" that I'd imbibed, drawn from the history of the 1960s and 70s, just don't ring so true to today's young adults.

Given this argument, I assume it's too dangerous for the President to go golfing anymore, right?

This is just so silly. Again, the WHCA is an independent organization that picks its own venues and would have no obligation to ask the White House to host a smaller version of the Dinner in the currently nonexistent ballroom. The President has to leave the White House sometimes!

I've been led to understand from decades of US gun violence that there's a variable window of "too soon to politicize this" during which discussions of gun control are verboten. It doesn't seem to apply to advocacy of the illegal demolition of a White House wing to build a party room out of bribes.

County commissioners in Utah are meeting today to decide whether to approve a massive data center -- one that would require double the amount of energy the entire state uses. And no public input is allowed. www.sltrib.com/news/2026/04...

Ball room is a bipartisan preoccupation, as we know from recordings of LBJ's calls to his tailor

We're at 56 years and counting of a GOP-appointed SCOTUS majority, since 1970, and it's effectively self-perpetuating now. When presidential wins alternate near evenly. It doesn't take a partisan preference either way to see how insanely unhealthy that is. It's indefensible on neutral principles.

I kinda forgot about this guy. Sent 3 bombs to CNN and eight years later CNN anchors were dressing up in tuxes and gowns to go celebrate the president that encouraged the bombings.

pretty much the worst idea i've ever seen

wrote about the supreme court, and why expanding it needs to be the first things Ds do in 2029 if they have a trifecta. the court is a fully committed to fascism. replacing a fascist president is good, but it's useless if you don't address the court. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/ds-must-ex...

hey goldman just circling back to this on April 27, 2026

Trump is directing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to prioritize cases of discrimination against white men, but commission staff are "struggling to find complaints with merit"

It's all so stupid but worth underscoring even this event literally wouldn't fit, even his planned ginormous edifice isn't big enough for it. The WHCD is obnoxiously large, there were 2500 people in that room. On his own plans the throne room monument wouldn't fit more than a thousand.

an interesting thing about this phenomenon a) leftist journalists are also prone to it b) the British have developed some kind of at least partial immunity

The mainstream media constantly draws false equivalence between Dem gerrymandering retaliation and GOP gerrymandering without ever noting the Dem efforts are happening because of voter referendums and the GOP ones in defiance of them

I'm sorry, the US situation is still not remotely comparable to the Chinese one, as evidenced by the thousands of academics publishing criticism of the government online under their real names.

This is wildest shit I've seen.

"yeah half of asia is revolting against the collapse in living standards but we managed to denuclearize iran" good luck on that pivot to Asia bro

Rufo's lies have subjected people to death threats and caused schools to close because of bomb threats.

The rule that the whole line of succession can't be assembled in the same place at the same time lest they all get blown up together is such a well-known staple that Battlestar Galactica just borrowed it for a sense of narrative institutional familiarity.

Glad @paulwaldman.bsky.social wrote this. Trump isn't inviting people to try to kill him exactly, but he relishes it when it happens. His narcissism spins it up as another sign that he is the most importantest man to ever live. www.publicnotice.co/p/white-hous...

If Team Trump really understood public opinion, they wouldn’t focus their messaging on “he needs a ballroom.”They’d focus on the other parts of the structure. “Trump needs a bunker. Doesn’t he seem like the type of world leader who ends up in a bunker?” 100% public approval.

framing this story as "a challenge for the new CEO" is insane

An epic D&D campaign where you battle the Yuan-Ti across the multiverse: Snakes on A Plane

Democrats “don’t expect the media to take our side in any political battle… but we do expect them to take their own side in the fight for constitutional freedom. There is only one party in America trying to censor and control the press.” @raskin.house.gov to @gregsargent.bsky.social.

Important new dog news

At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I think congressional Republicans might force a short-notice vote on Trump’s palace ballroom, and that it’d be a terrible omen of the usual suspect Dems defected to provide them bipartisan cover. www.offmessage.net/p/do-not-aut...

Claiming that America’s top national security priority is building the president a special ballroom to host parties would be ridiculous in normal times. It is decadent farce in the midst of a geopolitically significant war, one the president started and is losing. Yet said with a straight face.

the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed

WHCD is not one of the rituals that define US democracy, it's exhibit A that institutions like CNN are shirking their obligations to US democracy.

like i think some UK/US posters should talk to people in Asia. it's fucked www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/w...

There legitimately felt like there would be a push toward autism acceptance in the 2010s that coincided with larger acceptance toward transgender people. I wrote my first book in the afterglow of this. But I am tempted to write now about the backlash toward neurodiversity in the 2020s.

In any assassination and terrorist event, it's important to have factual clarity about what happened. Alas, as with two earlier assassination attempts, Trump insists on muddying the water by lying. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

i mean i don't think we're going to like the world we see if Hormuz is closed for another 2 months

the unfortunate thing is that people find it hard to realize that basically subsidizing demand in the West basically means less oil for the East, primarily because it's a commodity shortage.

ICYMI yesterday: I wrote about one of the defining - and most dangerous - stories of our time: America’s tech barons are openly and aggressively siding with authoritarianism. An exploration of what is fueling their radicalization to the right – and why it is happening now:

Lmao keep telling me that Dem leadership shouldn't be criticized. Dump this fool. He's a Republican at this point. This isn't some partisan bullshit, this is protect the country

Reacher series are a rare excpetion to this as lib airport lit. In one of the Reacher books Reacher, as part of a plot line of helping a family without health insurance, says to a Russian operative who spreads disinformation online: “when I said I would let you go? That was Fake News.” & shoots him

new levels of slopulism

About as directly as you can possibly intervene to raise electricity costs for Americans.

Everyone's like "public shaming doesn't work" "making an example of guys who behave anti-socially doesn't work" until they see a video of a grown man stealing a baseball from a little girl, then suddenly it's like "this guy should be tarred and feathered and hung by his feet from the scoreboard"

For many years, I worked with someone who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton Jim Brady spent the rest of his life trying to make sure other families didn't experience gun violence Instead of addressing that deadly scourge, Republicans want a ballroom

Makes no 1A difference if Kimmel had joked about assassination. But he didn't. It was plainly about his age and health. He's got one foot in the grave, which is the ur platonic archetype of a "that guy's really old" joke. Plus "even his wife doesn't like him," which is the most basic of trash talk.

They are laser focused on stealing more money from us at the same time they're spiking gas, healthcare and food costs.

Missed it at the time, but this WSJ hed is a great example of cultural confusion. Calling somebody of the same generation but slightly older than you 'big brother' in Chinese doesn't imply any special closeness or friendship! It's a social norm! www.wsj.com/world/china/...

they like him and want to help him rule over us like a king

The only difference between the assassination plots against Obama and those against Trump is that Trump’s security consistently lets these guys get closer

to be clear this is a starvation play to try to prompt the uprising the big brains feel they’re owed

in plain english: while you don't want energy to be so expensive that it makes life unaffordable, you want prices to serve the role of a informal rationing system to prevent over-usage of energy

Scroll down for why he was there. For a ride in an Apache, because Hegseth thought it would make the libs cry.

How did the meaning of "ceasefire" change from "fire ceases" to "some acts of war continue, and there's still some exchanges of fire, maybe it kills some people, but like not as much as before"? What is the official threshold for a ceasefire that is merely "strained" or "uneasy" rather than broken?

i straight up don't understand why the ratio of the restaurants matters. am i stupid today

Once again putting my motion on the table, since the impeachment clause looks like a dead letter, for a majority vote next year to defund the entire Executive Office of the President. If Republicans embrace the fiction of the 'unitary executive,' let Trump fulfill that vision by operating solo.

When the green m&m got less sexy

"unless OpenAI can somehow pull a Tesla" is an important warning here, I'm constantly telling the AI bubble Cassandras that it's super possible to be 100% right about the core business and 100% wrong on valuation because everyone else wants the valuation story to be true in spite of the facts

Facebook is underrated as a brain rot source I think.

it can only good foreign policy happen

TODAY'S TOP STORY: Security Successfully Works As Designed This is apparently a big problem that should prompt widespread blame, sympathy for the not-actually-victims, and major policy change

our constitution doesn’t do a terribly good job contemplating the realities of multibranch civilian control over a large standing army because our constitution goes to some length to avoid having a large standing army

“Every event is justification for Donald Trump getting whatever he wants at any given moment.” - the entire GOP

We have no idea who these people are besides “trust me, bro”. And even if they are criminals (smugglers), it’s illegal to simply murder them on the high seas instead of interdict and arrest them.

Friendly reminder she was one of the few Dems who thought the ICE should get more of your tax money to build more concentration camps and now she also wants it go to the police

Davis accuses the left of dehumanizing MAGA . . . then calls them demons. Posobiec wrote a book about his political enemies called "Unhuman."

sorry, no, this is bad policy,and I say this as a Ontario Green

this is also quite literally what happened in Canada

Do you ever stare at the news and wonder what decade it is

NEW: Group won’t end its lawsuit to halt Trump’s ballroom. The National Trust for Historic Preservation said case rests on questions of executive authority, not national security. “The President must follow the law,” the group’s lawyer wrote in letter shared w me + @jonathanreports.bsky.social

I must say I’m not super impressed with responses that mock my piece for exploring the tech elite’s radicalizing trajectory because “Duh, they’re all fascist nerds, ‘nuff said!” That sort of reflexive anti-intellectualism is quite toxic to the political discourse (it’s also just really mean?).

i do not think they will handle a loss in the midterms well

I followed the MAHA mom rhetoric on this, and I cannot emphasize enough how much this is about their own egos and judgmentalism. They've convinced themselves only sluts and drug users have hep B positive babies. And they resent getting the same treatment. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

“The university ‘limited the work of Dr. Wu, partly closed her lab, broke up her research team, reassigned her grants to her white male faculty colleagues, and left her isolated.’ After the investigation, Northwestern allegedly ‘cut her salary for lack of funding’” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Hurry up the ballroom and bunker so Trump never has to leave the White House" sounds like "We need to take dad's keys so he won't keep trying to drive," except instead of concern for an elderly relative and others on the road, it's propping up a cult of personality that enables authoritarianism.

#PennyHelping, laundry day edition: -kept fresh laundry warm by napping in it -shook creases out of clothes as I hung and folded them -boxed stack of clothes hangers in case they got any funny ideas about attacking

At Tusk: A Q&A about assassination attempts smotus.substack.com/p/on-the-sub...

The Plot to Enslave America

REI workers in San Diego have filed for a union election. "If successful, the location would be the third in California and the 12th and largest REI store in the country to unionize..."

on one hand this is likely going to lead to a blue electoral map nightmare for the GOP on the other, its going to be a physical nightmare for Asia

They like Trump and want to help him

Our era's grand struggle is, to a significant extent, people who value truth and acknowledge reality vs. postmodern liars who say imagining makes real and demand everyone live inside their preferred fiction Any conspiracy theory serves the latter cause, because they detach people from reality more

“It’s too dangerous for the President to ever leave the White House” is not the correct takeaway from this incident.

Iranian schoolgirls have faced more bullets and violence than Donald Trump. So have South American fishermen.

if you think this is bad, wait until elon buys cursor and it runs grok instead of claude

People always talk about how Texas used to be blue. But if Democrats want to win in Texas, they'd probably need to adopt rhetoric like this.

Matt gave a very civil response to this post and now this guy is going all little birthday boy.

"It's that the stakes in 2026 and 2028 are so high that the Democratic Party must be permitted to play legal and constitutional hardball—in fact, that it has a moral obligation to play hardball." publiccomment.blog/p/the-real-f...

can't wait to see kids in strollers and elderly people in wheelchairs getting gassed again, it's been a few months

Still extremely funny that there were people who supported Trump winning in 2024 because they felt he represented a less colonialist direction in US foreign policy than the Democrats

All these fascists say that we need male dominance so that men will "protect" and "cherish" women. But the second a gun is firing, sorry, Mrs. MyName, you're my human shield.

Acrobat has always been awful. Always.