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Authoritarianism feels surprisingly normal — until it doesn’t

Authoritarianism feels surprisingly normal — until it doesn’t

Gisela Salim-Peyer writes: The disintegration of a democracy is a deceptively quiet affair. For a while, everything looks the same. Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the Venezuela of my childhood, during the…

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The surrender of America’s chickenshit elites

The surrender of America’s chickenshit elites

Adam Serwer writes: “We have to speak out against this bully,” Jimmy Kimmel said in an emotional monologue after returning to ABC on Tuesday. The network had suspended him, under pressure from the Trump administration, for remarks last week in which Kimmel appeared to inaccurately suggest that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a conservative. Kimmel choked up when discussing the violence and praised Kirk’s widow, Erika. But he also warned his viewers—an audience four times larger than usual—that Trump and his…

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The Trump regime runs on tech accelerationism

The Trump regime runs on tech accelerationism

Jacob Metcalf writes: United States President Donald Trump has notoriously never used a computer or had an email address, yet is proximally responsible for an unprecedented, rapid, and dangerous technological transformation of the federal government. The speed and drama of the first months of the second Trump administration are inextricably linked with technology, from executive orders intended to clear any obstacle to industry’s efforts to advance artificial intelligence, to the increased use of surveillance technologies to scrutinize visa holders and…

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‘Stand back and stand by’: Right-wing extremists outside government currently have very little to do

‘Stand back and stand by’: Right-wing extremists outside government currently have very little to do

NBC News reports: The number of right-wing terror attacks in the U.S. plunged dramatically in the first half of 2025, while the amount of political violence from the left creeped up, a new study found. The report on terrorism and political violence by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research group, found that, through July 4, “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.”…

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The indictment of James Comey: You can’t keep the facts out of a criminal case forever

The indictment of James Comey: You can’t keep the facts out of a criminal case forever

Benjamin Wittes writes: The conventional approach would be to go through the normal pretrial motions, and specifically to file a motion to dismiss based on an allegation of vindictive prosecution. This would be one of the most powerful such motions ever filed in an American court—the abusiveness of this indictment having little parallel in the modern history of the Department of Justice. It would be powerful just based on the public record: the president’s public statements and specific removal of…

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Kristi Noem fast-tracked millions in disaster aid to Florida tourist attraction after campaign donor intervened

Kristi Noem fast-tracked millions in disaster aid to Florida tourist attraction after campaign donor intervened

By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica For months, the complaints have rolled in from parts of the country hit by natural disasters: The Federal Emergency Management Agency was moving far too slowly in sending aid to communities ravaged by floods and hurricanes, including in central Texas and North Carolina. Many officials were blaming Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, whose agency oversees FEMA. “I can’t get phone calls back,” Ted Budd,…

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At UN, Colombia’s president compares Trump with Hitler

At UN, Colombia’s president compares Trump with Hitler

The New Republic reports: Colombian President Gustavo Petro this week called for criminal proceedings against Donald Trump, whom he compared to Adolf Hitler while speaking before the United Nations General Assembly. In Petro’s final speech before the U.N. in New York on Tuesday, he observed (according to a live translation from the U.N.) that the world is in a “different situation” than it was when he first addressed the international body in 2022. “The old societies of Europe are collapsing,”…

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A million-year-old skull rewrites human evolution, scientists says

A million-year-old skull rewrites human evolution, scientists says

BBC News reports: A million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study. It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we’ve come to believe, they say. The scientists claim their analysis “totally changes” our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early…

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Hegseth orders hundreds of military leaders to attend unprecedented meeting in Quantico, Virginia

Hegseth orders hundreds of military leaders to attend unprecedented meeting in Quantico, Virginia

The Intercept reports: Hundreds of generals and admirals have been ordered to Virginia in the coming days, according to four defense officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. The conclave of general and flag officers is unprecedented and alarming, the sources said. The officials said that the military’s top brass were, on Wednesday, instructed to report to a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, on or around September 30 to meet with Secretary of War Pete…

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ICE shooter ‘was most certainly an edgelord, an irony guy,’ said friend

ICE shooter ‘was most certainly an edgelord, an irony guy,’ said friend

Ken Klippenstein reports: On the off-chance the shooting wasn’t what it looked like, I reached out to people who knew the gunman, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn. Three who knew him since at least middle school agreed to speak to me on the condition that I not name them, corroborating their friendship with photos and other records. Their accounts paint the picture of someone with a vaguely libertarian bent who despised both major parties and politicians generally (including Trump) but who didn’t…

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DOJ official pushes prosecutors to investigate George Soros’s Open Society foundation

DOJ official pushes prosecutors to investigate George Soros’s Open Society foundation

This is, without any exaggeration, exactly how Putin and Orbán proceeded — using antisemitism to discredit the idea of civil society and political opposition, and as an excuse to undo the rule of law. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/u… [image or embed] — Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) Sep 25, 2025 at 11:14 AM The New York Times reports: A senior Justice Department official has instructed more than a half dozen U.S. attorney’s offices to draft plans to investigate a group funded by George Soros, the…

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Top GOP and White House allies are working behind the scenes to prevent Epstein vote on House floor

Top GOP and White House allies are working behind the scenes to prevent Epstein vote on House floor

CNN reports: Top congressional Republicans and White House allies are working behind the scenes to prevent a politically charged floor vote to release the government’s Jeffrey Epstein case files next month, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. The intensifying effort to halt that floor vote comes as Reps. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, declared on Wednesday they have the 218 votes needed to compel one when Congress returns. That final signature on…

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What happened as DOGE tore through the offices of federal workers

What happened as DOGE tore through the offices of federal workers

Wired reports: In August, months after Elon Musk left the federal government, the director of the Office of Personnel Management offered the first hard estimate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s impact on the civil service. The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees than it had at the start of the year, he told reporters. Most resignations were attributable to the incentives DOGE had offered the federal workforce to resign their positions. The total figure…

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U.S. fighter jets scrambled to intercept Russian warplanes near Alaska

U.S. fighter jets scrambled to intercept Russian warplanes near Alaska

CBS News reports: U.S. fighter jets were scrambled Wednesday to identify and intercept four Russian warplanes flying near Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement. NORAD said two Russian Tu-95 long-range strategic bombers and two Su-35 fighter jets were flying in the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), which is international airspace that abuts U.S. and Canadian sovereign airspace. NORAD responded Wednesday by sending an E-3 early warning and control aircraft, along with four F-16s and…

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