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Category: Politics

Trump’s TikTok deal looks like crony capitalism

Trump’s TikTok deal looks like crony capitalism

John Cassidy writes: Donald Trump is a compulsive issuer of executive orders: since January, there have been more than two hundred of them. Some are glorified press releases; others are more significant. “Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security” falls decidedly into the second category. Signed last week, on the same day that the Department of Justice indicted James Comey, it is designed to facilitate the transfer of a social-media platform with a hundred and seventy million American users to a…

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Portland residents scoff at Trump’s threat to send in the military: ‘This is not a war zone’

Portland residents scoff at Trump’s threat to send in the military: ‘This is not a war zone’

The Guardian reports: A visit to downtown Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality. There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and…

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Marjorie Taylor Greene, straying from Trump, reflects an emerging MAGA split

Marjorie Taylor Greene, straying from Trump, reflects an emerging MAGA split

The New York Times reports: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Republican from Georgia, did not appreciate being threatened by the White House over her backing for a bill ordering the release of the Epstein files. So after a Trump official put out word that doing so would be viewed as a “very hostile act,” she called a top West Wing aide to push back. “I told them, ‘You didn’t get me elected. I do not work for you; I…

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The rise of the ‘edgelord’ shooter

The rise of the ‘edgelord’ shooter

Ryan Broderick writes: Most American men under 30 at this point have had a 4chan phase — or at least spent time on an equivalent toxic internet community. Even if the ICE shooter did decide to dedicate himself to antifascism at the last minute — like Robinson may have done — he’s still going to talk like a 4channer and filter those ideas through the prism of ironic edgy internet speak. As I’ve written before, this is the water young…

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A field guide to ‘accelerationism’: White supremacist groups using violence to spur race war and create social chaos

A field guide to ‘accelerationism’: White supremacist groups using violence to spur race war and create social chaos

Demonstrators clash with counterdemonstrators at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017. AP Photo/Steve Helber By Art Jipson, University of Dayton A man named Regan Prater was charged with arson for the burning of Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee, on May 7, 2025. The nonprofit has a long history of involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI stated in a court document that Prater participated in neo-Nazi Telegram group chats online. Earlier this…

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Trump’s politicized prosecutions may hit a roadblock: juries that refuse to convict

Trump’s politicized prosecutions may hit a roadblock: juries that refuse to convict

Adam Serwer writes: According to the law, Robert Morris was a criminal. The second Black lawyer in the history of the United States, Morris was among a group of abolitionists who, in 1851, stormed a Boston courtroom to free Shadrach Minkins, an escaped slave from Virginia. Minkins had been detained under the Fugitive Slave Act and was to be returned to his master. Morris filed a writ of habeas corpus on Minkins’s behalf, but the effort failed because Minkins was…

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Energy Dept. adds ‘climate change’ and ‘emissions’ to its expanding banned words list

Energy Dept. adds ‘climate change’ and ‘emissions’ to its expanding banned words list

Politico reports: The Energy Department has added “climate change,” “green” and “decarbonization” to its growing “list of words to avoid” at its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, according to an email issued Friday and obtained by POLITICO. The words on the DOE list are at the heart of EERE’s mission: It is the government’s largest investor in technologies that help reduce heat-trapping emissions that cause climate change as well as the hazardous pollution from fossil fuels. It is…

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Democrats in Congress are breaking with Israel like never before

Democrats in Congress are breaking with Israel like never before

Axios reports: Some of Israel’s staunchest Democratic supporters on Capitol Hill are wavering like never before as progressives grow more emboldened in their defense of the Palestinian cause. Why it matters: The humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza has soured U.S. public opinion on Israel, and while members of Congress have been something of a lagging indicator, they are now shifting as well. Centrist Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told Axios’ Barak Ravid at an Axios event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on…

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How Trump is treating dissent as ‘domestic terrorism’

How Trump is treating dissent as ‘domestic terrorism’

Ken Klippenstein writes: In NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” President Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.” NSPM-7 directs a new…

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Portland: Anarchic hellscape or a mecca for coffee drinkers?

Portland: Anarchic hellscape or a mecca for coffee drinkers?

Jacob Grier writes: I like bikes. I like coffee. I especially like biking to coffee, which is one of the things that drew me to moving to Portland, Oregon, many years ago. Sometimes I also like giving myself a big dumb project, like, say, biking to 100 different coffee shops. Did Portland even have 100 coffee shops within biking distance that were worth visiting? I didn’t check when I started, but it seemed plausible. So one sunny spring day following…

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Comey indictment sets MAGA retribution dominoes in motion

Comey indictment sets MAGA retribution dominoes in motion

Axios reports: The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has delivered President Trump and the MAGA movement their first real taste of legal retribution — and likely not their last. Why it matters: To Democrats and the legal establishment, the charges against Comey for obstruction of justice and lying to Congress represent one of the most brazen collapses of prosecutorial independence in U.S. history. To Trump’s base, the indictment is vindication — a long-awaited strike against a “Deep State” villain they’ve obsessed over for nearly a…

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The Comey indictment is an embarrassment

The Comey indictment is an embarrassment

Quinta Jurecic writes: For years, Donald Trump has demanded that criminal charges be filed against former FBI Director James Comey. Now the president has gotten what he wanted. Yesterday evening, well after the federal courts usually close their doors, a grand jury in Virginia handed up an indictment alleging that Comey lied when testifying before Congress in September 2020. The news was first announced (how else?) in a post on X by the Trump ally Laura Loomer. The charges represent…

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Los Angeles car wash owner sues for $50m after being slammed and detained in ICE raid

Los Angeles car wash owner sues for $50m after being slammed and detained in ICE raid

The Guardian reports: The 79-year-old owner of a Los Angeles area car wash is seeking $50m in damages from the federal government after US immigration authorities allegedly slammed the US citizen to the ground and detained him for almost 12 hours. Rafie Ollah Shouhed suffered significant injuries during an immigration raid this month, his attorney said, including broken ribs and a traumatic brain injury. The agents “violated the Constitution, California civil rights law, and basic human decency”, V James DeSimone,…

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These countries recognized Palestine, but are still sending arms to Israel

These countries recognized Palestine, but are still sending arms to Israel

The Intercept reports: The day before global leaders convened this week in New York City for the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia joined the vast majority of the world’s nations in recognizing Palestine as a state. At the start of the U.N. session on Monday, France and Luxembourg added their nations to the list. Both the French and British heads of state said that they decided to recognize…

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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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