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

abolishing ice needs to become a democratic litmus test. centrists will push back on this notion. too bad. its a decision point like opposing the iraq war was.

submitted 37 minutes ago • 9 comments

Randy Fine makes a living being a complete psycho so the only purpose of putting him on air is to demonstrate that Republicans are fine electing total psychos which serves a purpose I suppose

submitted 1 hour ago • 2 comments

Nonviolent political movements are often more successful than violent ones, but then you also have countries like Russia, where peaceful dissent was crushed and now it's an autocracy. Just throwing it out there.

submitted 11 hours ago • 31 comments

A tangent, perhaps, but are we really blacking out the faces of cops? They’re a local SWAT team, not CIA paramilitary officers. They’re public servants, or supposed to be. A huge part of the discourse right now is how bad it is for Feds to be covering their faces. This shit had to stop.

submitted 11 hours ago • 8 comments

Tell me how this isn’t a declaration of civil war, threatening to deploy militarized federal officers explicitly to places that oppose him politically?

submitted 12 hours ago • 20 comments

Governors Pritzker and Hochul should mobilize Army National Guard units now to protect Illinois and New York residents from hostile federal interference in state governance. If the WH tries to federalize them in response, that's fine, but there will now be significant complicating factors.

submitted 12 hours ago • 13 comments

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.

submitted 13 hours ago • 70 comments

I'm trying to imagine a Democratic president saying openly and proudly that he would be sending federal agents to target the 'Republican Power Center' in Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. We would be in the midst of a civil war before he'd finished saying those words.

submitted 14 hours ago • 392 comments

He’s gonna send the troops into our cities to create violence as a pretense for shooting us to control the violence.

submitted 13 hours ago • 102 comments

Not an exaggeration

submitted 13 hours ago • 7 comments

A senator celebrating the murder of political opponents should be expelled. Not debated. Not excused. Expelled.

submitted 15 hours ago • 552 comments

Very cool that LA has imposed a curfew on Downtown and Chinatown for an entire week, murdering local businesses and costing millions to enforce, all to ease the pressure on the armed goons of an illegitimate tyrant who openly wishes to wreck our city.

submitted 13 hours ago • 17 comments

While millions of Americans were protesting Trump on Saturday — with thousands in Minnesota literally risking their lives to do so — Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries were in the Hamptons with the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Anna Wintour and Nicky Hilton for the wedding of Alex Soros and Huma Abedin

submitted 16 hours ago • 98 comments

This is just depraved stuff. I never thought I'd see this shit from sitting politicians. You expect some evil shit from people like Henry Kissinger or Giulio Andreotti, but even then, they were cold and pragmatic. This generation of politicians is defined by being loud, dumb, and illiterate.

submitted 16 hours ago • 13 comments

ICE raiding a crowded supermarket in Rosemead, California with no identification, indistinguishable from cartel hitmen, pulling high caliber rifles on unarmed US citizens trying to ask questions about wtf is going on. #3E #StopICE

submitted 1 day ago • 451 comments

I don't get the Hakeem Jeffries things. He always strikes me as uninspiring, vaguely cowardly and just not that sharp. Like who listens to this guy and is like, "YES. This is the leader for this moment."

submitted 18 hours ago • 13 comments

A right-winger -- a registered Republican, a Trump voter, an evangelical anti-abortion activist -- assassinates a Democratic official. Republicans respond by blaming the left. Democrats respond by blaming ... no one.

submitted 18 hours ago • 67 comments

I just looked into this. Unsurprisingly, Charlotte and Los Angeles have weak police oversight bodies, while Savannah doesn't appear to have any at all. Will say it till I'm blue in the face: Strong, empowered, independent police oversight boards or commissions make an enormous difference.

submitted 18 hours ago • 6 comments

It's both. Everyone is aware of the chilling effect brought by billionaire owners, but less discussed is the fact that earning a BA in journalism, an MA in journalism, then going straight into journalism is a bad way to learn history, political science, public policy, governance or data analysis.

submitted 19 hours ago • 1 comment

It's pretty obvious that a lot of US mainstream media either doesn't recognise authoritarianism or doesn't want to call it out. Either way, it's an excellent way to destroy trust in your institution.

submitted 1 day ago • 486 comments

How many reporters are currently working on tell-all exposés about their own organization, detailing all the acts of cowardice of their editors and publishers? I won’t ever buy your book about Sleepy Joe Biden, but I’d absolutely devour a book about the internal collapse of the NYT or CNN.

submitted 1 day ago • 150 comments

Underneath all of those articles is a deep fury that Bluesky punishes instead of rewarding lazy and/or hostile engagement farming. Try to build a following here with trolling and slurs and you'll find yourself in a ghost town. To them that is simply intolerable.

submitted 23 hours ago • 51 comments

Just a massive violation of the constitution ongoing in California and it sure appears that no amount of protest or reliance on rule of law is going to stop them. The Republicans are waging war they are occupying our streets with military and they will not leave until they are forced out.

submitted 20 hours ago • 5 comments

Dem leaders want to work with Republicans. Republicans want to destroy Democrats. We know this. So here's a takeaway from the protests: They proved the Democratic approach is unnecessary. We have always outnumbered them. There's no reason to seek bipartisanship. Generate enthusiasm instead.

submitted 20 hours ago • 11 comments

Via ABC News's Rachel Scott, let's never forget for a minute what a classless scumbag the President is. x.com/rachelvscott...

submitted 21 hours ago • 463 comments

not the first time I’ve said this and more qualified people have surely said it to, but I still think this is the long tail of the professionalization of journalism. we were better served by working class, unionized news reporters who understood class in a way the J Schoolers just don’t.

submitted 21 hours ago • 7 comments

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?

submitted 1 day ago • 290 comments

According to the latest WaPo/Schar School poll, Trump’s handling of deportations has 37% approval, 52% disapproval. And Quinnipiac has it at 40% approval, 56% disapproval. But @facethenation.bsky.social insists “public approval is so high on deportation.”

submitted 23 hours ago • 183 comments

These people are the enemy.

submitted 1 day ago • 720 comments

All in the last five weeks

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

My favorite so far is "If not Gestapo, why Gestapo shaped?" Honorable mention for the most veteran "oligargle dez nuts."

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

This is Austin, where protesters are being kettled and gassed. Guess who the Austin city manager is: T.C. Broadnax. In Dallas, during the 2020 George Floyd protests, protesters were kettled, gassed and shot with rubber bullets. Guess who the Dallas city manager was: T.C. Broadnax.

submitted 1 day ago • 9 comments

Estimated protesters today: 5 million WaPo: "thousands of Americans" Estimated parade crowd: 100,000 WaPo: "cheering crowds" A reader who missed both might reasonably conclude they involved roughly the same number of people.

submitted 1 day ago • 16 comments

The video, the replies and the quotes are giving me an extra dose of joy

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

These are failed state optics.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

I have so many thoughts about this and no idea why the soldiers marched like this, but I'm choosing to believe it was because Army leaders explicitly refused to sacrifice actual training time to practice for a Kremlin-style propaganda parade

submitted 1 day ago • 10 comments

Seeing a Black Woman Second Lieutenant command a Bradley in the Army birthday parade is the only thing that made me tear up and smile. No kings but this queen. #Army250

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

Yesssssss… I love this 🙌🏼

submitted 1 day ago • 366 comments

The US Army spends ~ a billion / year in marketing (1.1bn in 2025) to make service look like an exciting purposive path that young people want to take How much of that is flushed down the toilet by this shit show? Does this look enticing to high achieving drug free 17 and 18 year olds?

submitted 1 day ago • 7 comments

I watched one short video and boy, I dunno. Not sure it would be an overreaction.

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

I see we're filing and uploading stories on Friday, scheduling them to run over the weekend

submitted 1 day ago • 31 comments