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Category: Politics

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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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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Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of some of its AI and data services in mass surveillance of Palestinians

Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of some of its AI and data services in mass surveillance of Palestinians

The Guardian reports: Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, the Guardian can reveal. Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the…

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The rapid MAGA media takeover

The rapid MAGA media takeover

David Karpf writes: American mass media has been transformed in these early months of President Donald Trump’s second administration. We’re about 35 weeks into a term that will last for 173 more, and in that time, we have seen a tech titan gut a once-great newspaper in an apparent act of capitulation to the commander in chief, government accounts gleefully spreading hateful memes on X (the far-right platform owned by a billionaire tech oligarch), a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump…

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Noem and Lewandowski — ‘worst-kept secret in D.C.’

Noem and Lewandowski — ‘worst-kept secret in D.C.’

New York magazine reports: The story of [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi] Noem and [her de facto chief of staff, Corey] Lewandowski goes back to 2019 on a remote Pacific island off northwestern British Columbia. They had arrived via helicopter as guests of the multimillionaire Republican donor Foster Friess, who was hosting his annual deep-sea-fishing fundraiser. Noem was a rising conservative star recently elected governor of South Dakota after an eight-year stint in Congress, while Lewandowski was the former…

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Ukraine’s plan to starve the Russian war machine

Ukraine’s plan to starve the Russian war machine

Anne Applebaum writes: In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese. Jewelers, I…

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Trump says Ukraine can win back territory from Russia, shifting his position on the war

Trump says Ukraine can win back territory from Russia, shifting his position on the war

CNN reports: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Ukraine could restore its borders from before Russia’s invasion and that he believes NATO member countries should shoot down Russian aircraft if they enter their airspace, escalating his rhetoric against the Kremlin as its war in Ukraine drags on. Taken together, Trump’s remarks on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly about shooting down Russian aircraft and his later post on Truth Social about Ukraine’s borders seemed to reflect a significant…

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