ryanjanus.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

“The man made the Nazi salute and to offer any plausible deniability means he and his followers can use that doubt and turn it against us, accusing us of overreacting or reading into things that aren’t there.”

submitted 113 days ago • 161 comments

As I wrote last week: "As other information sources fall, Wikipedia’s stubborn independence becomes more vital than ever. The attacks from [the right] aren't just about an online encyclopedia — they're part of a broader assault on any information source that refuses to be controlled."

submitted 128 days ago • 37 comments

I wrote about how the Trumplican court attack on net neutrality is about way more than just "net neutrality" It's about completely dismantling whatever's left of already feckless U.S. corporate oversight and consumer protection

submitted 132 days ago • 9 comments

The US used to export democratic ideals to the rest of the world. Now we export democratic backsliding:

submitted 132 days ago • 270 comments

As ever, the loss of something good and useful for Americans is framed as a loss for Democrats — in the mass media, everything becomes just a political football to be kicked back and forth instead of examined for its impact on everyday citizens regardless of political party.

submitted 133 days ago • 135 comments

Something about this has really got to me. It is just such a slap in the face - this is what we're worth, is it? Arguably the largest connector of human beings in the world, flooded with literal friction between each and every one by a billionaire addicted to growth. Death cult shit. Disgraceful.

submitted 135 days ago • 119 comments

Interesting.

submitted 135 days ago • 18 comments

20 years ago we were suing teenagers for millions of dollars because they were torrenting a single Metallica album and now billionaires are demanding the free right to every work in history, so that they can re-sell it. The law only ever serves capital.

submitted 493 days ago • 184 comments

Me, a public health person, just sitting over here reflecting on the fact that the US has experienced a 7% increase in infant mortality post-Dobbs. Like, do you realize what that says about this society from an ethical perspective? That we made policy choices that caused this? #PHEthx

submitted 149 days ago • 37 comments

In a sense, this is the real culture war and the rest is window dressing. The GOP has rebranded itself as the Trash Party. Their fundamental promise isn’t really anything about policy. It’s that you have permission to be vulgar and stupid and hateful and not feel bad about it anymore.

submitted 149 days ago • 9 comments

Why would Americans have confidence in the judiciary when the highest court repeatedly demonstrates that it doesn’t care what the law says?

submitted 149 days ago • 31 comments

Judith Butler is 100% correct. The word "woke" is pure reactionary bullshit. Its contemporary meaning also distorts history by making it seem as if every positive cultural change of the past 200 years has happened naturally, without agitation by people considered, at the time, dangerously "woke."

submitted 150 days ago • 80 comments

so are we gonna get 70 Atlantic/NYT essays scolding this clear celebration of an unrepentant killer and noting it as an indicator of nihilistic societal breakdown or naw

submitted 153 days ago • 31 comments

I am going to depose these self-involved, half-baked shills. There isn't a damn thing either of them can do about it. 8 figures for two people that exist only to reinforce the powerful - many of whom are their friends - while pretending to be bold truth tellers. Pathetic! Loathsome!

submitted 153 days ago • 23 comments

Fascinating paper. "In eight of the twelve cases under study, inequality was trending downward in the years before the elections that brought to power leaders who moved against democracy."

submitted 153 days ago • 15 comments

if you kill a disfavored person in the street the leaders of the republican party will try to make you a national hero. absolutely not an ominous sign for the future.

submitted 153 days ago • 214 comments

Luigi got them shook.

submitted 154 days ago • 753 comments

"regulations are bad" is one of the biggest PR coups of the right, because it does the neat trick of sidestepping what the regulations are actually for the vast majority of regulations are easy to defend on their own merits, so you pivot to attacking the entire concept instead

submitted 154 days ago • 28 comments

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the claim that "culture war" issues like integration or "the gay agenda" were arms of a nefarious "Marxist conspiracy" against white Christian American "patriots" was the central, animating narrative of Cold War US fascism. www.cnn.com/2024/12/12/p...

submitted 154 days ago • 36 comments

simply can't make it up

submitted 154 days ago • 205 comments

This was my main takeaway from my spine surgery saga last year. I spent hours on the phone, coordinating between the hospital and UHC, scouring Reddit for tips, asking to speak to supervisors, etc. It was a more challenging puzzle than anything I’ve done at work, as a lawyer or a journalist.

submitted 154 days ago • 19 comments

Inbox: ‘Wanted’ posters of healthcare CEOs wheatpasted around lower Manhattan ahead of today’s Goldman Sachs Financial Services conference. “Those who would steal from us have names, faces, and addresses. Justice will only come from the working class,” per anon communique.

submitted 155 days ago • 215 comments

just try and read this without also picturing a hot dog suit. i dare you

submitted 155 days ago • 17 comments

"[S]ome of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired."

submitted 156 days ago • 7 comments

We shouldn’t accept that a CEO killer must get a national manhunt when cops don’t solve most murders at all. A migrant teenager was just murdered in NYC, cops just killed a guy here — the lives of these other people are worth just as much as that CEO.

submitted 158 days ago • 855 comments

Every anti-trans-care argument falls apart when you ask why it doesn't apply to any other medical decision

submitted 162 days ago • 45 comments

fondly recalling how after Jan 6 Congress went home for a long weekend, didn't start impeachment proceedings for a week, which then took another month

submitted 163 days ago • 157 comments

Meet the Ideologue of the “Post-Constitutional” Right Russell Vought, one of the architects behind Project 2025, believes there is nothing left to conserve. He desires revolution – and to burn down the system. New piece:

submitted 169 days ago • 99 comments

me to the legal minds who reassured us that the best way to defend the rule of law was to allow trump to slow-walk the prosecutions in order to adhere to DOJ proceduralism instead of arresting him on January 21, 2021

submitted 171 days ago • 75 comments

I don't understand why it's simply too much for a prosecutor to hold firm that the President is not above the law until courts tell them otherwise. The reliance on OLC memos for dismissal makes it even worse by reaffirming that the President's appointees, not the courts, decide the law.

submitted 171 days ago • 60 comments

It makes you think about the motives of the people who commission these sorts of articles!

submitted 174 days ago • 49 comments

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro and several aides indicted on charges of attempting a coup in 2022, police say.

submitted 175 days ago • 119 comments

I don’t want to throw shade, but I would like the folks who kept telling us that there’s no evidence pervasive mis- and disinformation have negative impacts to account for the likelihood that prominent spreaders of BS will be running the agencies that protect public health, intelligence, etc.

submitted 177 days ago • 26 comments

NEW: Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a @propublica analysis found. www.propublica.org/article/segr...

submitted 178 days ago • 188 comments

The United States has oligarchs now. Not merely rich people with more personal influence on politics than poorer people have, but a few extremely rich people closely connected to the national leader who act in government-like roles despite never being elected or nominated to any official position.

submitted 182 days ago • 287 comments

I remember back in 2021 when a bunch of US legal establishment types reacted with horror at the prospect of prosecuting Trump because that's icky banana republic stuff. the reality is the opposite

submitted 182 days ago • 84 comments

Yes, we will carve out some stuff for the true heroes.

submitted 182 days ago • 126 comments

I would like to reiterate: We own everything. The broadcasting equipment, the supplements, the intellectual property for Brain Force Plus. We are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

submitted 182 days ago • 1501 comments

Also, part of the reason we did bought InfoWars is because people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars. And those people were right. This is the funniest thing that has ever happened.

submitted 182 days ago • 797 comments

darkly funny that the end result of qanon was making a pedophile in charge of law enforcement

submitted 183 days ago • 325 comments

There's a reason democracies don't let people who tried coups back into power.

submitted 183 days ago • 1190 comments

One conversation that I hope the next four years prompts is how to best cover the radical right as researcher and journalists. The field rests on the idea that what we cover is "fringe." It clearly isn't. @jaredlholt.bsky.social had a good piece on it postthroughit.substack.com/p/thoughts-a...

submitted 187 days ago • 10 comments

Another thing I’ve heard is Politics reporters are competitive in a way that extremism/disinfo beat just isn’t. Those of us reporting on extremism, the “fringe” groups and the disinfo that fuels them have never really been that way. No one else wanted these stories. And we needed each other.

submitted 186 days ago • 6 comments

as long as journalists and pundits act as if they are amateur political strategists & not people trying to understand and tell the truth about the world, they are going to take the implicit view that voters can never be wrong, which then demands endless explanation of their morally blameless choice

submitted 188 days ago • 149 comments