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

🧵I think it’s important to understand what disinformation like Sen. Mike Lee’s tweets are trying to do, psychologically/cognitively. In my disinfo class/Substack, I talk about how disinfo often uses “moral disengagement strategies” to manipulate people into accepting harmful conduct 1/

submitted 5 hours ago • 185 comments

In serious countries that are actual democracies, strong mainstream parties force members who do stuff like this to resign, & far right authoritarian parties that do this are shunned from government. Here in 🇺🇸, one of our two parties has collapsed into far right authoritarianism. So neither happens.

submitted 9 hours ago • 115 comments

Understand the Republican Party is all about loyalty tests now. Every outrage is an opportunity to reinforce the dominance of the In group and filter out anyone suspected of disloyalty. They don't need to believe anything that's happening is right, they just need to prove loyalty again and again.

submitted 3 days ago • 13 comments

This is absolutely insane, and criminal. Everyone, especially a Senator representing the state, has a right to speak out. The fact that the agents felt protected in acting this way says everything. We’re quickly traversing a dangerous path

submitted 3 days ago • 979 comments

It's almost like Trump is a criminal with complete disregard for the Constitution who probably should have been held accountable for past crimes so he wouldn't be in the position he currently is to commit new ones.

submitted 3 days ago • 17 comments

The cruelty in today's politics feels horribly corrosive. Bringing up that hard-working immigrant families — undocumented, yes, but not violent criminals — are being ripped apart based on immigration status doesn't bring compassion or even pause, but gleeful cheers.

submitted 4 days ago • 449 comments

This was the plan the entire time and it was always going to be targeted towards Democratic run cities. It’s not about law and order. It’s about controlling by force the areas where Trump does not control by ideology.

submitted 4 days ago • 95 comments

The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world. They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.

submitted 8 days ago • 171 comments

Fake emergencies to justify crackdowns-not very original

submitted 8 days ago • 306 comments

not enough said about how, by turning the national government against states on the basis of ordinary political disagreement, trump is undermining the idea that the union is worthwhile. www.cnn.com/2025/06/06/p...

submitted 9 days ago • 337 comments

This whole thing has been a secret war against knowing stuff and the people who know stuff.

submitted 9 days ago • 14 comments

NEW: We obtained DHS data that shows the US knew only 32 of the 238 Venezuelans deported to a prison in El Salvador in March were convicted of US crimes, only 6 of those violent. Trump called them “savages,” “monsters” and "the worst of the worst.” www.propublica.org/article/trum...

submitted 16 days ago • 47 comments

The Trump administration is engaging on an all-out assault on the institutions, workers and standards that make learning and knowledge production possible, in the hopes of securing political dominance forever. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

submitted 19 days ago • 69 comments

in addition to being brazenly unprincipled, this is evidence that the conservatives KNOW trump is a mad king, but still want to imbue him with royal authority — against the well-documented history and tradition of the united states — out of their blinkered devotion to a narrow ideological project

submitted 24 days ago • 84 comments

“who are Republicans spending time with online and what do those people believe” is a story that the media has completely ignored for years and we might be in a different place if the public was actually aware how many of those people are outright Nazis

submitted 25 days ago • 31 comments

Trump: “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls…They don’t need 250 pencils, they can have 5.” Also Trump: accepts new Air Force One worth $400M from Qatari royal family.

submitted 35 days ago • 173 comments

So let me get this straight: masks are bad and un-American if worn to fight a pandemic, but good if worn by people claiming to be government agents when they kidnap people off the street

submitted 36 days ago • 1025 comments

what is fascinating to me is the number of people whose “knowledge” of government appears to just be an accumulation of cliches and stereotypes + an inchoate sense that if something is big and costly then it must necessarily be “wasteful”

submitted 38 days ago • 216 comments

This was the same thought I had.

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

No other democracy has electoral institutions that make the least informed individuals in randomly important geographic locations the pivotal voters. This isn't a problem of democracy. It's a problem of single member districts, presidentialism/Electoral College, and statehood/federalism.

submitted 47 days ago • 7 comments

It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, — to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves. Samuel Adams

submitted 51 days ago • 18 comments

Again, no. The Framers anticipated & feared tyranny in all its forms. What they did not anticipate was that Congress would be full of cowards who cared so little about their own power that they would let a runaway Mad King steal it without even lifting a finger to stop him. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

submitted 53 days ago • 66 comments

Again, faced for decades with the fact that their actual substantive policy positions are wildly unpopular with large supermajorities of voters, the Republican Party has chosen, time & again, to punt on democracy rather than meet the median voter where she is on the issues: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

submitted 56 days ago • 2 comments

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” Hannah Arendt

submitted 58 days ago • 49 comments

I don't really care what the "political consequences" are of fighting for the proposition that everyone is entitled to due process before they are removed from the United States and sent to a Salvadoran prison. It's not really a principle if you only adhere to it when it's politically expedient.

submitted 58 days ago • 414 comments

NEW: In agency after agency, the U.S. government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of policies. By @alecmac.bsky.social

submitted 58 days ago • 90 comments

They’ll never accept it, but everyone who cast a vote for Donald Trump did real, generations-long damage to the United States and the west in exchange for essentially nothing of value.

submitted 80 days ago • 474 comments

There's no logical or moral or strategic defense for what we're doing right now. It's an idiotic plan being implemented with a level of incompetence that has no possible explanation.

submitted 67 days ago • 23 comments

🚨 If you’re continuously stunned by the behavior of gerrymandered GOP representatives in the world of Citizens United, don’t be. Here’s how to think of them: They are no longer public servants. Improving public outcomes is not their goal. Nor do they do better in life… 1/

submitted 71 days ago • 85 comments

The GOP behavior in NC/WI over the past decade-plus shows how little they care about democracy.

submitted 72 days ago • 0 comments

NEW: There's no reason to act like Trump is pursuing a trade policy or an industrial revitalization strategy. These are just sanctions, imposed to intimidate countries and companies into submission like they're universities or law firms. They're what a mob boss would do. prospect.org/economy/2025...

submitted 73 days ago • 131 comments

this is a good post and "decadence" is a good way to think about a lot of things. true decadence is, eg, thinking you could let an insurrection go unpunished and the country would just keep chugging along nbd

submitted 74 days ago • 63 comments

This chart, from Twitter user @nonagonono, is amazing. It shows Trump's "reciprocal trade barriers" are no such thing as they ARE NOT RELATED TO ACTUAL TARIFF BARRIERS. Rather, his magic number is half of the bilateral trade deficit (as a share of imports), or 10%. This is indescribably crazy.

submitted 73 days ago • 15 comments

If you’re upset about the chaos and corruption Trump is inflicting on your country—whether your focus is the nihilistic dismantling of government, the economy, our foreign relations, or his threats to the rule of law—please join the nationwide marches on April 5. Learn more here 👉 handsoff2025.com

submitted 78 days ago • 579 comments

To anyone who is not clear: The First Amendment protected Rumeysa Ozturk when she published her op-ed. The same way it has protected me. Rule of law means that we should be treated equally.

submitted 80 days ago • 347 comments

It’s a tiny step from “We can revoke your visa/green card for speech we don’t like” to “We can revoke your naturalized citizenship for speech we don’t like,” & if you don’t think that’s coming, I ask you again why you think that & who is going to stop the clearly illegal & unconstitutional things?

submitted 80 days ago • 17 comments

The "Is it a constitutional crisis yet?!" discussion is so absurd: Of course you can construct increasingly esoteric definitions for why this current moment doesn't meet your exact criteria yet. But meanwhile, this is where we are: Masked agents of the states abducting people for writing op-eds.

submitted 81 days ago • 46 comments

To admit they did anything wrong would be seen as a betrayal by the in group, so they have to externalise the blame.

submitted 82 days ago • 35 comments

As I type this, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on the "censorship industrial complex," in which they falsely blame academics who study disinfo of "censorship" at the very moment that the Trump admin is proactively threatening people who dissent from its views. It's fucking crazy

submitted 82 days ago • 23 comments

I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they've fired. It can't. But, what DOGE accidentally revealed about themselves in the process is fascinating. 🧵

submitted 86 days ago • 204 comments

There is a deep irony in the fact that they are making Trump, the most checked out person to ever occupy the oval office, the standardbearer for the unitary executive

submitted 87 days ago • 83 comments

If you are visiting the United States, having a negative view of Trump is enough to get you denied entry. If this was coming out of Russia or China, we would deplore such an authoritarian attack on freedom of expression.

submitted 88 days ago • 185 comments

Starting in 2015, almost everyone in the political system has decided to wait for someone else to stop Trump. Too many people don’t want to do it themselves, even when it’s clearly their role.

submitted 88 days ago • 29 comments

Total Article I constitutional crisis/failure, happening right in front of us. Every day, multiple things that should end it all immediately. Maybe someone - anyone - in the vast corps of DC journalists wants to bother asking Mike Johnson & John Thune why they keep violating their oaths of office.

submitted 89 days ago • 0 comments