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

The standard assumption of this administration that anyone who is not a White male in a position of authority is inherently deviant and suspicious

submitted 19 hours ago • 21 comments

I used to watch every Sean Spicer press briefing, a useful exercise which taught me a great deal about what Trumpism was all about and how it worked. I just watched my first Karoline Leavitt press briefing today, and it shit-scared me in a way Spicer's never did--because... 1/

submitted 1 day ago • 84 comments

Backing the truck holding all Americans' private info up to the dock for pillaging...

submitted 61 days ago • 5 comments

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

submitted 10 days ago • 1115 comments

Those of you who aren't San Diego Politics freaks probably don't know that Trump crony and tariff mastermind Peter Navarro is a former Democrat and arch-NIMBY. Before tariffs, his big idea was a "housing development moratorium" in San Diego. A huge dumbass across two parties

submitted 2 days ago • 18 comments

i'm watching a group of conservative law professors insist that there is a grand debate over birthright citizenship that somehow escaped generations of scholarship and only popped into existence after a right-wing president announced an effort to nullify the 14th amendment.

submitted 2 days ago • 230 comments

"It's a world record." Line 14 of the #Paris Métro, a 27-kilometer automated route, is now running trains every 85 seconds, or 42 an hour. Each train can carry 1,200 passengers. It's expected to serve 1 million riders a day later this year. www.leparisien.fr/info-paris-i...

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

JUS TIN: Susman Godfrey becomes the latest firm to sue over Trump's retaliatory executive orders. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

submitted 5 days ago • 56 comments

This is a 12 alarm fire for the economy. If being friends with the president and giving him kickbacks makes you exempt from large import taxes Vs your competitors, it will stratify the whole economy and push corruption and loyalty and political controls deep into the private sector

submitted 7 days ago • 98 comments

The MAGA leaders who claim to love America do not understand or believe in anything that makes this country great. They are opposed to freedom of speech and competitive elections. They don’t love Americans or our ideals. They want to be kings in a country founded on revolution.

submitted 8 days ago • 27 comments

The American Library Association and a union representing more than 42,000 cultural workers in the U.S. have filed a lawsuit contesting the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal agency that supports the nation’s libraries, arguing that the cuts are already causing “irreparable harm.”

submitted 8 days ago • 19 comments

👍

submitted 10 days ago • 14 comments

An underrated factor in how we got ourselves into this mess is that Americans are increasingly relying on computers and the internet instead of their own critical thinking faculties (AI is making this even worse), and as a result are uninformed and easy to manipulate.

submitted 10 days ago • 347 comments

Someone should make a film about a mad king, say in the late 18th century, whose arbitrary rule and foolish decision-making inspired people in one of his colonies to create a political system in which power would be distributed more widely so as to avoid the harms of such mercurial policy making.

submitted 10 days ago • 51 comments

A successful sequel plays on the same themes as the original while not being a copy. In this case, Trump 2 has a new cabinet, no repeat casting. Like the original, they’re all crooked and/or incompetent terrible people.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Murphy: "It's not designed as economic policy. It's designed as political policy. Because Trump gets really excited when people have to come to him, petition the king for relief. That's what he's doing with law firms, doing with universities. That may be what he's doing with businesses."

submitted 12 days ago • 125 comments

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. 1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

submitted 14 days ago • 963 comments

Murphy: "Newsflash: These guys are incompetent. They don't know what they're doing. We hired a weekend Fox News host with no diplomatic or management experience with a checkered personal history of abuse and alcoholism to be our chief national security official. And it's going very badly."

submitted 15 days ago • 606 comments

Liberals easily hold their Wisconsin Supreme Court majority, & Elon Musk fails spectacularly despite illegally bribing voters. Republicans underperform Trump by 16-22 points in Florida's special elections. Sen. Cory Booker's record-breaking 24+ hour filibuster energizes Dems. A bad day for GOP.

submitted 15 days ago • 18 comments

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Let's talk about why Trump is already publicly floating this idea of running again in 2028. At this point, he's being public about running again because this helps him deal with a number of problems that lame duck presidents suffer from. 1/x www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

submitted 16 days ago • 5 comments

1/ I wonder if there's a complement to Mettler's _Submerged State_ thesis: the successful state thesis. In brief: American government has in many ways been so successful for so long that Americans have forgotten why they need it, making anti-government rhetoric more appealing.

submitted 16 days ago • 112 comments

Not surprising but absolutely wild to go on stage and blame bad things on a nefarious billionaire who is pulling on the puppet strings of politics while you are the richest man in the world who is on stage because he's spending millions trying to influence an election!

submitted 17 days ago • 96 comments

Elon Musk has been a walking SEC violation for a decade and no one cared. The entire Trump era could have been avoided if the US took white collar crime anywhere near as seriously as it does low level drug crime.

submitted 18 days ago • 245 comments

This guy is in one of the worst prisons in the world with no way out and may spend the rest of his life there because, it appears, he has an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his little brother. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

submitted 21 days ago • 2092 comments

Hooooo boy: "The Executive Branch hereby notifies the Court that no further information will be provided in response to the Court’s March 18, 2025 Minute Order based on the state secrets privilege." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

submitted 23 days ago • 83 comments

So look at that. DOGE has cost the US Treasury fucking half a trillion dollars. HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS. This is your cost savings.

submitted 25 days ago • 192 comments

A friend drove two hours today for her breast cancer chemotherapy only to learn it was canceled due to NIH cuts. Clinical trial ended midstream. No treatment, no restart, no plan, no information. Her bro-in-law's chemo was also canceled.

submitted 27 days ago • 1667 comments

Putin plans to hold talks with Elon Musk about teaming up with SpaceX to strengthen and develop Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, and state nuclear corporation Rosatom.

submitted 29 days ago • 61 comments

“This is the logic of a suicide bomber.” In the @nytimes.com, I break down what’s at stake as Silicon Valley extremists try a hostile takeover of the U.S. government. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/o...

submitted 29 days ago • 47 comments

This is, quite literally, how democracies die www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/u...

submitted 29 days ago • 95 comments

The discourse on “Abundance” has been good, as is the Klein & Thompson book. I personally find the history more interesting than the prescriptions though YMMV. Anyway there’s another angle here which is that without building housing, Democrats are going to be severely electorally disadvantaged

submitted 30 days ago • 1 comment

Scientists have just cured pancreatic cancer in some patients with personalized mRNA vaccines. Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away. They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.

submitted 31 days ago • 630 comments

The New York Times is the first to put out comprehensive estimates on the cost of a year without U.S.A.I.D. and they’re higher than I thought: - 1.65 million deaths from AIDS - 500,000 from lack of vaccines - 550,000 from lack of food aid - 290,000 from malaria - 310,000 from TB

submitted 33 days ago • 245 comments

Killing children is by design, I'm afraid. "Pro-natalists" like Musk claim they aren't racist, but their pressure to have children is solely focused on white women, while they back policies that literally kill of non-white children. He's a eugenicist. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

submitted 33 days ago • 46 comments

Trump and Musk are basically trying to deskill America: 1) kill all white-collar jobs and replace them with AI 2) kill universities 3) use tariffs to turn the U.S. into an economic island manufacturing, oil and ag hub 4) empty the cities 5) push men into manual labor & women back into the kitchen

submitted 32 days ago • 200 comments

I’m voting HELL NO on the Republican CR. It hands Musk and Trump a blank check, turning your tax dollars into a wanna-be dictator’s slush fund. No accountability. Just corruption on autopilot.

submitted 34 days ago • 489 comments

Don't take this as gospel. It's not official. It's a very knowledgable source's best understanding of the situation. This persons likely Yeses on cloture are. Schumer, Hassan, Peters, Durbin, Schatz, King, Shaheen, Fetterman, Cortez Masto and Gillibrand.

submitted 34 days ago • 571 comments

This trend has a ceiling imposed by two important and powerful groups in the GOP - oil/gas (EVs consume very little) and franchise 3rd party car dealerships (Tesla is direct to consumer)

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

The government has never been this efficient www.politico.com/news/2025/03...

submitted 35 days ago • 28 comments

A lot of people who got the measles as children died or suffered lifelong disabilities as a result. The measles vaccine was a godsend to worldwide public health, and it’s an absolute scandal that this lethally ignorant dolt has any power over public health.

submitted 36 days ago • 386 comments