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jonsteinman.bsky.social
dad, dog walker, Nebraskan @ProtectDemocracy.org *and because time is short, cofounder of workfour.org Skeets my own
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We’re either actively engaged in war on Iran without Congressional authorization or we’re not but maybe kind of!

The president’s favorite henchman, fresh off detaining and threatening elected officials & their staffers, is now ordering elected officials to vote the way he tells them to

The Senate Majority leader is lying

Trump’s attempts to dehumanize large segments of the American people in order to use military force against them fits the classic definition of “tyranny,” and right wing rhetoric using the phrase “third world” to justify it is no accident (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

“We’re all gonna die” perfectly sums up GOP policy priorities: They don’t really care if kids are educated or the environment goes to hell. They don’t care about violence run amok. Just a mad scramble to cash out and let future generations suffer the consequences. www.wsj.com/politics/ele...

this is obviously something to take seriously but i am also struck by how the white house’s only move is to double down, no matter how unpopular or politically disastrous it might be

This is what fascism looks like - using a conspiracy theory about a dehumanized outgroup as a pretext for seizing political power and wielding arbitrary authority. What you read about in the history books is happening right here, right now.

Yesterday was a great start, but only that. Lawless regimes are not stopped in one afternoon.

If someone tells you this charade was to celebrate the military show them this photo. Who and what do you see at the center. This propaganda shot cost millions of dollars to produce. Every element is intentional.

The Tea Party protests in April 2009 had about a third of a million people involved, and the political media treated it like a game changer for the Obama presidency. The No Kings rallies were AT LEAST ten times bigger than the Tea Party protests. Will the press keep pretending Trump is popular?

“No Kings Day”: A compilation

I have thought about this guy’s comment for almost five years now: “when do we get to use the guns” Ruling Republicans haven’t merely denigrated their opponents for years, they’ve gleefully nurtured a violent, malignant political culture. www.cnn.com/videos/polit...

Padilla: If this is how DHS responds to a senator with a question you can only imagine what they're doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California.

He's not "Trump's top general"; he works for us and swore an oath to the Constitution

this is the second poll in two days (after Quinnipiac) that has Trump's approval number in the 30s

The successful MAGA-fication of the US military would be an extinction level event for our democracy

How long until the soldiers that self-identified as anti-Trump are reassigned to shitty duty stations, denied re-enlistment, or administratively discharged?

Why does anyone believe these dangerous dingdongs? How many times are all the Charlie Browns in Congress & the press gonna let Lucy pull the football on them? It’s getting ridiculous. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Politicizing our military while militarizing American streets, Trump is taking yet another page from the Authoritarian Playbook. The risks ahead are existential for our democracy. Congress must step up, and the public has options too. Read our latest: www.ifyoucankeepit.org/p/sowing-con...

"The National Guard is trained to support national defense and respond to emergencies like natural disasters — not to act as a domestic police force," Ariela Rosenberg, @jonsteinman.bsky.social and @rlullo.bsky.social write. open.substack.com/pub/protectd...

Trump threatens to use “heavy force” against anyone who protests his military parade this weekend, and note that he makes no exception for peaceful protesters

We are fast becoming a law optional society favoring the crooked and violent

Every day the authoritarianism grows worse - Christopher Rufo calling for the Trump administration to "dispatch unmarked vans to follow key agitators and snatch them from the streets while the media are not looking" christopherrufo.com/p/trump-shou...

"Nobody’s going to spit on our police officers," says Trump, who four months ago pardoned people who beat police officers with pipes, flagpoles, baseball bats and 2-by-4s at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A disgusting man truly in his element, explaining in minutiae the brutality he desires. A sane president would be working to bridge divisions and restore peace instead of throwing more guns and gasoline on the fire.

The last time National Guard troops were deployed to a state over a governor’s objection was to deal with racists. This time it’s on behalf of them.

Trump has federalized at least 2,000 National Guard forces and reportedly plans to deploy troops to Los Angeles over Governor Newsom’s objections. If that happens, it will be the first time since 1965 that a president has sent troops into a state without a state request. 1/19

OK, I know more about the CA case and we have more information on the deployments coming out, so a few thoughts. 1. This is a massive overreach of POTUS authority. Using Section 12406 to federalize/deploy military forces w/out also invoking the Insurrection Act is literally unprecedented. 1/

Today, WH Border Czar Homan said California's Governor and LA Mayor Bass could be arrested if they interfered with ICE. This, after the arrest of a NJ Congresswoman & a Wisconsin Judge. This isn't what democracy is supposed to look like. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Last night, the White House invoked questionable legal authority to order National Guard and possibly active-duty troops into Los Angeles against the governor’s wishes. This deeply troubling use of military force on U.S. soil demands urgent scrutiny.

Let's be clear what is going on: After Elon correctly confirmed that the Big Ugly Bill would put a bigger hole in the deficit, Stephen Miller incited a panic he wants to use to pass the bill as a promise to impose martial law on Dem cities and states. www.emptywheel.net/2025/06/08/t...

Delusional

More communities will be inspired to resist. More armed personnel will be deployed. This summer will be brutal.

Pete Hesgeth — who wants to rename the Navy ship that honors Medgar Evers, a WWII veteran who landed on Omaha Beach — is using that same beach for a photo op in which he promises we will “never forget” the veterans there. What an unbelievable asshole.

This is so jarringly unAmerican that I sort of hope it wakes some normies up. It is occurring in a context where military-style equipment is being used to enforce immigration roundups and conveys the notion that we are increasingly living in a police state.

State AGs that believe in democracy and the rule of law could create a multi-state task force to track rightwing extremist violence, and hire purged federal officials to staff it. Tackle a growing problem while spotlighting for voters how dangerously lawless Trump actually is

Now a domestic security service detaining opposition politicians and union leaders

It’ll be interesting how the Trump administration’s remarkable ability to magically bring Abrego García back to the United States will bear on its arguments in other cases about how it really has no ability to influence the detention of others at CECOT.

Straight from the playbook. California is first, but all blue states will eventually fall in the crosshairs, along with blue cities in red states. Organize, fight back. No amount of accommodation will change the authoritarian. Newsom tried to bro it up with Trump; Columbia bent a knee. Dumb ideas

We don’t need to back off the American Gestapo and we don’t need to respect its agents. People exercising state violence are not entitled to anonymity. Nor are the people directing the state violence.

remember, this guy ran illegal medical experiments on autistic children using castration drugs and lost his medical license because of it

Banks are aiming to issue cryptocurrency. Lawmakers just put a line in the GENIUS Act saying when a bank issuing crypto goes bankrupt, crypto investors get paid before regular depositors. In other words: your savings account becomes crypto’s bailout fund. www.levernews.com/cryptos-new-...

Republicans don’t mind if he destroys government capacity or slurps up all the sensitive data. They don’t care if he’s impregnating everyone he can or Nazi-adjacent. But when Elon tells these profligates that their numbers don’t add up they lose their shit

Hitler purged the SA after securing power; Putin crushed a set of post-Soviet oligarchs early on to establish dominance. And inevitably something emerges to fill the void (the SS, more oligarchs) So it will be interesting and terrifying to see which scumbags come up on top with this regime next