Browsed by
Category: Politics

Pam Bondi gets schooled on the First Amendment

Pam Bondi gets schooled on the First Amendment

Politico reports: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared to take aim at recent remarks by Attorney General Pam Bondi vowing to “target” anyone who uses “hate speech” following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed,” Sotomayor said while speaking on a panel Tuesday morning at New York Law School. [Continue reading…] In an editorial, the…

Read More Read More

Israel’s attack on Qatar failed and backfired

Israel’s attack on Qatar failed and backfired

Axios reports: A week after Israel’s missile strikes in Qatar, it’s clear not only that the assassination attempt against Hamas leaders failed, but that it backfired. Why it matters: The strike increased the feeling inside the Trump administration and around the world that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is reckless and has become a destabilizing force in the region. How it happened: Israel’s plan was to take out several of Hamas’ top leaders all at once as they met to discuss President Trump’s Gaza peace proposal. Five…

Read More Read More

UAE got the chips while team Trump got the crypto riches

UAE got the chips while team Trump got the crypto riches

The New York Times reports: This summer, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, paid a visit to the coast of Sardinia, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea crowded with super yachts. On one of those extravagant vessels, Mr. Witkoff sat down with a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. He was meeting Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a trim figure in dark glasses who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth. It…

Read More Read More

Trump’s Harvard cuts threaten a pillar of global basic biomedical research

Trump’s Harvard cuts threaten a pillar of global basic biomedical research

NBC News reports: For more than a century, the humble fruit fly has paved the way for many critical scientific breakthroughs. This tiny insect helped researchers figure out that X-rays can cause genetic mutations. That genes are passed on from parent to child through chromosomes. That a gene called period helps our bodies keep time — and that disruptions to that internal clock can lead to jet lag and increased risk for neurological and metabolic diseases. Those discoveries, along with…

Read More Read More

At Windsor Castle, Trump is haunted by the ghost of Epstein through ‘malicious communications’

At Windsor Castle, Trump is haunted by the ghost of Epstein through ‘malicious communications’

  The Guardian reports: The arrest of four men after images of Donald Trump alongside Jeffrey Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle on Tuesday was “Orwellian” and “ridiculous”, the group behind the protest has told the Guardian. The political campaign group Led By Donkeys confirmed that it was behind the stunt, which saw several images of Trump and Epstein projected on to a tower while a soundtrack questioning the relationship between to the two men was played on a…

Read More Read More

By ignoring Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric and actions, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy

By ignoring Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric and actions, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk left a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being memorialized in mainstream discourse. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dubbed Kirk “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” and a man who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California governor Gavin Newsom hailed Kirk’s “passion and commitment…

Read More Read More

FBI profiler explains why some Groypers have trans partners

FBI profiler explains why some Groypers have trans partners

A self-described FBI profiler (and I see no reason to doubt that that is indeed her profession) who provides commentary on TikTok as “FriendlyHoneyBadger” and YouTube as “Cult College,” sheds light on why some far-right Groypers (led by Nick Fuentes) choose or groom trans partners, countering the assumption that if Tyler Robinson (Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer) had a trans partner then he must be a leftist.    

Republicans support restrictions on free speech

Republicans support restrictions on free speech

Axios reports: President Trump and MAGA spent years lampooning censorship, discrimination against conservatives, and progressive “cancel culture.” Now in power — and riding an outpouring of grief and fury over Charlie Kirk’s tragic killing — they’re enforcing speech codes to punish ideological opponents. Why it matters: Backed by the Trump administration, digital vigilantes are demanding arrests, firings and deportations for anti-Kirk posts and remarks. Zoom in: Any person who celebrates or mocks Kirk’s death — or even criticizes his right-wing views — is being…

Read More Read More

A ‘broken’ trust: FBI agents fired by Kash Patel speak out

A ‘broken’ trust: FBI agents fired by Kash Patel speak out

The New York Times reports: Chris Meyer, a field agent assigned to fly the F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s plane until last month, knew he was in trouble over the summer when a pro-Trump influencer claimed, without a wisp of proof, that he was “THE” main agent in the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation. Mr. Meyer said he was never assigned to that case. Moreover, he added, he was on a lakeside vacation with his family in Virginia when the F.B.I. conducted its…

Read More Read More

The lies Washington tells itself about the Middle East

The lies Washington tells itself about the Middle East

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write: On any given day during the long war in Gaza, a Biden administration official could be expected to assert any of the following: a cease-fire was around the corner, the United States was working tirelessly to achieve one, it cared equally about the Israelis and the Palestinians, a historic Saudi-Israeli normalization deal was at hand, and all this was bound up with an irreversible path to Palestinian statehood. Not one of those pronouncements bore…

Read More Read More

The old San Francisco tech scene is dead. What it’s morphing into is far more sinister

The old San Francisco tech scene is dead. What it’s morphing into is far more sinister

Ariana Bindman writes: While San Francisco’s tech world has always been obnoxious on a cultural level due to its own lack of self-awareness, what it’s morphing into now is downright terrifying. As websites like Teespring continue to peddle pumpkin spice propaganda to die-hard autumnal girlies, OpenAI and Anthropic are sucking up billions of dollars in funding, signaling a new dawn in the Bay Area’s capitalist landscape. Perhaps in a futile effort to keep up, powerful biotech, hardware and software companies…

Read More Read More

White House plans broad crackdown on liberal groups while rooting out ‘domestic terror movement’

White House plans broad crackdown on liberal groups while rooting out ‘domestic terror movement’

The New York Times reports: Trump administration officials on Monday responded to the activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination by threatening to bring the weight of the federal government down on what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on the killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents. Investigators were still working to identify a motive in Mr. Kirk’s killing, but the Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said that the suspect…

Read More Read More

Trump’s ties to Big Tech and his commitment to promoting AI are provoking a MAGA backlash

Trump’s ties to Big Tech and his commitment to promoting AI are provoking a MAGA backlash

Politico reports: President Donald Trump’s AI action plan has set off a backlash from some of the biggest figures in the America First movement — a rift expected to shape the next round of arguments in Congress about how to turbocharge the technology. Trump’s rush toward AI is exposing an important faultline in the Republican coalition: Many of its voters and leaders deeply mistrust the power of Big Tech, but Trump himself has worked closely with industry CEOs to deliver…

Read More Read More

Trump threatens major probe of ‘the left’ over Charlie Kirk assassination

Trump threatens major probe of ‘the left’ over Charlie Kirk assassination

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump boasted his administration has launched a “major investigation” into people on “the left” over the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Trump did not provide details on the probe but teased an upcoming announcement as he tore into his perceived political enemies over the fatal shooting of his close ally in Utah last week. “If you look at the problem, the problem is on the left. It’s not on the right,” he said. “When…

Read More Read More

Fired prosecutor, Maurene Comey, challenges Trump’s claims to sweeping power in lawsuit

Fired prosecutor, Maurene Comey, challenges Trump’s claims to sweeping power in lawsuit

The New York Times reports: Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor who handled criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, is contesting her abrupt July firing in a lawsuit that challenges Donald J. Trump’s claim of sweeping presidential power. Ms. Comey, whose father, James B. Comey, is a former F.B.I. director, says in the lawsuit filed on Monday that she was never given a reason for her dismissal. She contends that no plausible explanation exists other than that she is…

Read More Read More