Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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The Bulwark @thebulwark.com · 2d

George was just trying to get to work.

ICE pepper-sprayed him, dragged him from his car, locked him in a detention center, and placed him on suicide watch. He even missed his young daughter’s birthday in the process.

This man is a veteran and American citizen. Don't look away.

The Bulwark @thebulwark.com · 2d

"They put me on suicide watch and they put me in the cell, I'm naked, in like a hospital dress and just a concrete bed with like a mattress, like a thin mattress and, they leave the light on 24/7."

@timmiller.bsky.social talked to a veteran who ICE wrongly detained and brutalized

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 1d

DANGER 😱

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M Meerkat @kackbro.bsky.social · 2d

Roberts Is Just As Responsible For Chump As Chump Is ! Both Have
Failed This Country.......

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 2d

Inhalers down 654%! We're going to be filthy rich being paid to carry home drugs soon! The orange really is more amazing than anyone has ever seen before!
/s
Christ wept. Openly, even.
Wept.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 2d

Maga patriotism is just narcissism, America to them is what they see in the mirror not what it actually is—they’re incapable of loving that country bsky.app/profile/atru...

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2d

Mike Johnson: "We're so angry about it. I mean, I'm a very patient guy, but I've had it with these people. The theory we have right now -- they have a hate America rally that's scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It's the pro-Hamas wing and antifa people ... "

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 2d

Great legal scholar and political commentator @theromanoreport.bsky.social almost has misunderstanding with bears! Stick around for the usual good stuff (he's OK).
youtu.be/db9KY2KQl_A?...

Holy CRAP!! - I can't believe that just happened!

YouTube video by The Romano Report

youtu.be

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Raven Le Maven JeSuisDeepstate @redrumofcrows.bsky.social · 4d

.
KASH PATEL's Customized Embroidered Jacket must be confiscated when he is arrested.
.

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John Collins @logicallyjc.bsky.social · 4d

Thank you so much to the 685 people who have joined my Substack! If you haven’t subscribed yet, you really should. I’m 99.2% sure you won’t regret it.
substack.com/@logicallyjc...

John Collins | Substack

Dad ☆ Husband ☆ Low-Key Nerd ☆ EdD / JD

substack.com

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 6d

tbh i'll treat the former a little better than the latter

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KittyKatGirl😻🙏💞🐞 @mary1kathy.bsky.social · 7d

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 7d

How curious that Democracy actually dies in broad daylight.

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Alt National Park Service @altnps.bsky.social · 11d

The Interior Department has told its staff to bring their government laptops and phones home so they can monitor updates about potential mass firings.

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Philosopher Jersey Flight @jerseyflight.bsky.social · 8d

A lawless paradigm shift for which the SCOTUS is to blame: we are swiftly moving away from the legitimacy of the mediation that rightly says, “this isn’t legal,” to the tyranny of a special pleading that *functions* as though the word of Trump is itself the law, higher than the Constitution.

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 8d

This is fascism.

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 8d

A decisive military offensive against a little boat (as in, needs an outboard motor to go) that's far from our shores sounds more like murder than an exec decision in the face of extreme emergency. It's a shame those in power don't bother with Truth and Justice.

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Jennifer C @thejenniwren.teamlh.social · 11d

🧵
Portland: ICE thugs assaulted disability rights activist Amanda Siebe as she filmed in a bike lane. Siebe, who uses a wheelchair, was body-checked to the ground.

Protesters begged agents to be gentle, shouting “She’s disabled!”

Instead, one agent sneered back: “She’ll be disabled now.”

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 11d

being a cat person is so crazy bc you live with someone who is undeniably annoying and you're always thinking "maybe i should get another cat"

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Inspirational Skeletor @skeletorinspires.bsky.social · 15d

Be the best you can be bothered to be. Says Skeletor wishing he was that cool vampire from Salem’s Lot.

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💙Keith B Martin DC 💙 🇺🇸 🇪🇺 🌎 @keith.is.democrat · 15d

100% against the law. But what else is new?

It appears he WANTS to incite violence so he CAN legally call up the military per the Insurrection Act.

In other words, he's ITCHING for a war . . . any war will do.

Rico Pulsa8 @pulsa8.bsky.social · 15d

To treat an American city & its citizens as hostile territory—invading with fed forces as though it were foreign soil—crosses a constitutional threshold. Under clear letter of the Posse Comitatus Act, fed military intervention in civilian law enforcement is forbidden www.rawstory.com/portland-267...

Trump 'authorizing Full Force, if necessary' as military deploys to another US city

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he would be directing Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth to “provide all necessary troops” to protect “war-ravaged Portland,” Oregon, and in a...

www.rawstory.com

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 17d

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Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 18d

People seem to be forgetting that DOJ doesn’t just “get” an indictment. They have to convince a grand jury to vote to return one, something this administration has struggled with recently.

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 19d

That is absolutely amazing. And in such a beautiful place; it's my favorite cathedral.

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 20d

This admin is fucking atrocious and so are those who support it. Deplorable, foul, insane.

Pam Nash @pamnashes.bsky.social · 20d

He’s nucking futs.
And all the cult members nod like bobbleheads.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 20d

Trump: "I think it has -- I think it's very bad. They're pumping, it looks like they're pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child, and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess. 80 different blends. And they pump it in. So ideally, a woman won't take Tylenol."

Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 23d

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpAH...

David Letterman on the Future of Free Speech | The Atlantic Festival 2025

YouTube video by The Atlantic

www.youtube.com

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Adrian XX @aedrian.bsky.social · 24d

The willingness I've seen from the general public to wink at moral decay is so alarming that I have left many people behind, lest the corrosion dressed as godly patriotism sap away what joys in life I still have.

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Rhuta Bhayga @rhutabhayga.bsky.social · 26d

All I can add is that if you're afraid to speak out now, you'll live in terror the rest of your life.

The door to speaking out - and POSSIBLY changing the direction we're headed in - is closing rapidly.

Apparently if you reject Charlie Kirk’s bigotry ; if you deplore his actual words; if you have a problem with his having devoted his life to advocating against the equality and humanity of pretty much every group except for cisgender heterosexual Christian white men; if you criticize his love of guns over people; if you have the temerity to state that he did conscious, active harm to others and helped unleash and normalize violence, YOU live in a “bubble” and YOU reject civil “discourse.” Just wow. The horrific murder of a rotten man by a radicalized white supremacist for not being rotten enough is causing a whole lot of people to draw some disturbing conclusions.
I wish there were an actual bubble to live in free of the cruelty and bigotry, free of the racism and misogyny, free of the hatred of LGTBQIA people and of immigrants and of Muslims and of Arabs and of Jews, which the defenders of Kirk’s character accuse me of living in and blame for my (and your) disgust of him. I would love to live in that bubble! As if we are not inundated day in and day out with the onslaught of all the biases, whether overt or unconscious or structural, that define and cleave our society.
I am profoundly disturbed and sickened by the number of people I have seen who are bending over backwards to defend the character of a man whose idea of “discourse” and “debate” was to dehumanize and deny the rights of whole swaths of people by challenging their very humanity and right to exist as equal members of society.

I have chosen to defriend people, people I have known for years, as the full depth of their unexamined biases and now-belligerent defense of Charlie Kirk’s character has revealed who they are. The mental gymnastics, the dodging and weaving, the straw men arguments, the gaslighting and projection, the denial of the lived experience of the targets of Kirk’s bigotry, the denial that he was in fact a white supremacist misogynist bigot at all, the contention that his nakedly hateful remarks were “taken out of context”, the conclusions they draw from Kirk having been shot for his views by a white supremacist more extreme and violent than himself (eg, that people on the left or “both sides” are to blame) and the concomitant censure of people for calling out Kirk’s bigotry for what it was as itself being a problem, are excruciatingating to witness and endure.
On this last point, let me say this:
1. Most mass shootings and acts of political violence are committed by white, male, rightwing extremists, hard stop. MAGAs /white surpemacists and and worse are the ones who killed Kirk, Melissa Hortman and her husband and dog; the ones who tried to kill Trump, who tried to kill Paul Pelosi and Josh Shapiro, who shot up Black churches and various synogogues. Trump himself incited a maga movement to storm the capitol and kill people, and the Proud Boys and worse answered the call and mobilized. Almost all stochastic violence is by racist misogynist radicalized white men who go down internet rabbit holes where people like Kirk and others thrive.

2. The Trump /MAGA movement is step by step dismantling the rights and denying the humanity of everyone who is not a white male cisgender heterosexual Christian male. They routinely deploy the use of dehumanizing language and bigotry (“civil discourse” of the type Kirk trafficked in and for which my former friends and people like Ezra Klein defend his “character”) and that language becomes the basis for “policy” views.
Examples:
✅the “view” that transgender people should not exist, so that they “will not” (poof! See all the laws banning the use of bathrooms or gender affirming care or pronouns);
✅the view” that immigrants should have no rights or due process (poof, now they are beijf rounded up en masse in dragnets by thugs in masks who throw them to the ground and treat them like criminals — who BTW are also supposed to have rights— and sent to concentration camps; or deported for criticizing Trump or Israel);
✅the view that women should be denied their right to vote (time to repeal the 19th amendment, or poof! Push for a bill preventing anyone who changed their names from voting unless their names match their birth certificates) or their rights over their own bodies (poof no more abortion in many states ) or that they should “submit” to men (which if this is followed means legalized rape of women and their erasure as anything but chattel);
✅ the “view” that the 14th amendment doesn’t apply to the children of immigrants (on the chopping block before the SCt);
✅ the “view” that Black women lack basic mental capacity (poof, Black women are fired in droves from their government jobs);
✅ the “view” that anyone not a white male is unqualified (poof everyone but a white man is a “diversity hire”;

And on and on.
3. When the non-extremist right has erupted in violence , it has typically been in response to years or decades of oppression and violence by state actors: cops murdering a Black man in live TV over $20; cops killing Philando Castile or Sandra Bland or Freddy Gray or Eric Garner. Over and over, the systemic violence, with no improvement or change. People protested in rage and horror over the brutality and violence. Yes there was some looting and violence but many of the protests were peaceful and yet cops responded with brutality. Trump wanted to shoot the protestors. Republican governors and legislators responded —notwithstanding the murder of Heather Hyer by a MAGA Nazi by running her over in a counter protest against the Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017 — by making it legal to run over protestors. Just like they have responded to efforts to make it easier for people forced to stand in long lines to vote (because the GOP cut the number of polling places in Dem cities so that people would not be able to vote) by making it illegal to bring them food or water while they wait. In any event, my point is this : the non-right responds to systemic oppression with mainly peaceful protests and organizing. Yet protests in support of basic humanity are demonized.
4. Since Trump has been back in power , the all-out assault on DEI has had its desired chilling effect on speech as well as retributive viewpoint discrimination. The regime has inverted language itself: if you observe that Charlie Kirk said racist things, you are the racist and the hater. It is people like you — who refuse to let that racism and hatred go unchallenged — who are destroying “civil discourse.”

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