Wes Termin
historyell.bsky.social
Wes Termin
@historyell.bsky.social
Former History and Government teacher
Current WENA expert commentator from abroad.
He/him/his
Pinned
Couldn't happen to worse people. Wish them all the worst
Why yes, I am thinking about Andrew Jackson and his Vp's John C. Calhoun's argument during his first year in office that led to their estrangement, Jackson firing his whole cabinet, and picking a new VP for his 2nd term.

Why do you ask?
Reposted by Wes Termin
"Never spread the lie in the headline" should be a hard rule of 21st century journalism.

Research shows that repeating lies helps to spread them, and people read headlines more than they read stories.
News media has to do better with headlines that present false and unverified public health claims.
November 30, 2025 at 1:10 AM
Reposted by Wes Termin
In case you didn’t realize SNAP is corporate welfare.
The Boston Globe identified the companies in Massachusetts that employ the most SNAP recipients. A key stat: "In Massachusetts, 74% of working-age recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are employed, half of them full-time."

Full article: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/28/m...
November 29, 2025 at 8:46 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
This is a long but well worthwhile piece. Clinically scathing of Roberts and his legacy.
November 20, 2025 at 9:11 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Fitting that Chief Justice Roberts wrote the Dred Scott of our generation: Trump vs United States.
November 29, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
The destruction of the federal government disproportionately affects black women. The federal civil service has long been a good career option because of the strong equal opportunity enforced in the civil service that has historically blunted the double discrimination that black women face.
Since February, according to my latest analysis, almost 600,000 Black women have been economically sidelined. The November 20, 2025, Jobs Report makes clear this isn’t a blip. It’s a structural crisis. That is not a recovery. It is a redistribution of opportunity.
The exit economy is here. Black Women are paying the highest price | Fortune
This isn’t a blip. It’s a structural crisis. And it's not a recovery, it's a redistribution of opportunity.
fortune.com
November 24, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Kabas connects the various threads of journalism's crises and nails the rotting core of it all: too much of big name media has the stink of the billionaire elite attached to it these days.
November 19, 2025 at 2:28 AM
Reposted by Wes Termin
New — I wrote about the myriad ways journalism’s moral rot manifests, and how our crumbling institutions have created the conditions for it to fester:
Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field
The Nuzzi/RFK Jr. mess and the revelation of Esptein's journo pals lay bare a profound moral absence at the heart of our free press.
www.thehandbasket.co
November 18, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
I've fallen down the rabbit hole of small town life in the USA in the 1880s-1930s [as research for the book currently called "The Money of the Poor"]. And even though I *knew* it, there's still something awful about the census form that lists a woman's age as 24, who's had 7 children, 5 living
November 18, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Oh wow @reuters.com got the photo here:
November 14, 2025 at 9:25 PM
When the 🧵 hits so well, and then the alttext hits harder 😘👌
It's Tuesday. It's November. And it's been awhile. So lets tell the story about the eel, the scheming wife who ate it, and the talking magpie that ratted her out!

That's right! It's time for the eel tale from the 1370s blockbuster hit, "The Book of the Knight of the Tower." 1/5
🗃️🧪
November 11, 2025 at 10:38 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Hi.

I’ve been editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue for the last 4.5 years — a dream job, one I never thought a Brown girl from small town Louisiana might hold.

I am so incredibly proud of the work we’ve done and what we accomplished. Our journalism has won major awards. (cont’d)
November 11, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Once upon a desert sandy
As through winds the trav'ling man he
Spied the face of Ozymandy
Lying, simply lying there
Suddenly there was some writing
Pon the plinth that he was sighting
That the sand and time were blighting
Quoth the statue, "Now despair"
There was an old man you could gaze
At his works in despair in a daze
If you looked upon them
And were mere mortal men
'Ozymandias mighty', it says
My name is Pagliacci, Clown of Clowns. Look on my works, ye doctors; I despair.
October 30, 2025 at 12:41 AM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Again, not the most important here, but I'm begging for a journalist to figure out how/why NPS put up a Confederate statue DURING A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN. How is this "essential" when food stamps are not?
Feels symbolic that a Confederate statue first installed in 1901, at the peak of the consolidation of the Jim Crow system—when the states of the former Confederacy were in the midst of revising their constitutions to disfranchise Black citizens—has been reinstalled.
www.npr.org/2025/10/27/n...
A Confederate statue toppled in Washington, D.C., in 2020 has been reinstalled
A statue of Confederate general Albert Pike, which had been pulled down during the Black Lives Matter movement, has been put back up in Washington, D.C.'s Judiciary Square.
www.npr.org
October 28, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
I don’t know how many times I have to say this but if you didn’t know any geek girls in high school or you don’t know any now it’s because they didn’t trust you and you’re *NOT A SAFE PERSON* for women to be themselves around.
okay grandpa, let's get you to bed
October 25, 2025 at 5:18 AM
Paris: Boys will be boys. You can't blame him for thinking Helen was beautiful and she was asking to be stolen away
Describe a character in Greek mythology the way someone trying to defend a politician would. I’ll start.

Oedipus: Like you’ve never had sex with someone and regretted it later
October 24, 2025 at 11:50 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Describe a character in Greek mythology the way someone trying to defend a politician would. I’ll start.

Oedipus: Like you’ve never had sex with someone and regretted it later
October 24, 2025 at 11:40 AM
Reposted by Wes Termin
ACLU-DC’s Michael Perloff: “[G]overnment officials can't punish you for making them the punchline. That's really the whole point of the First Amendment.”
October 23, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Ad: This clip, then cutting to people waiting in food lines, then to Johnson saying he isn't familiar with X, Y, or Z, then cutting to U.S. citizens being arrested by masked goons, then a quote from Roberts and the immunity decision.
Leavitt: "At this moment in time, of course, the ballroom is really the president's main priority."
October 23, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.
October 18, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
The idea that political dissent can only be the product of “paid protesters” or “outside agitators” has a long history. Here is the Mississippi columnist Tom Ethridge in June 1963 concerned that attendees at the upcoming March on Washington might be “whipped into a frenzy by skilled agitators.”
October 13, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
The spirit of Dollree Mapp has joined the battle
Border Patrol “attempted to arrest a plumber working inside a Logan Heights home but left empty-handed after the homeowner refused them entry.

The homeowner told agents she would not allow them inside because the warrant they presented did not include her address and lacked a judge's signature.”
Federal immigration operations target San Diego neighborhoods, sparking community resistance
Federal immigration agents conducted operations in Logan Heights and Southeast San Diego on Friday, with community members capturing footage of the enforcement actions.
www.10news.com
October 13, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Reposted by Wes Termin
it’s such a privilege to be able to teach from the heart
October 12, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Making the Democrats sound 100%, 400%, 600%, 1,000% in some cases cooler than they are.
Thune: "If the Democrats had won the majority, they probably would've tried to nuke the filibuster. And then you'd have four new senators from Puerto Rico and DC, you'd have a packed Supreme Court, you'd have abortion on demand ... "
October 10, 2025 at 10:07 PM
Reposted by Wes Termin
Pope Leo is spitting.

www.npr.org/2025/10/09/n...
October 9, 2025 at 1:25 PM