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Reposted by jbeth

Andrea Pitzer

@andreapitzer.bsky.social

I wrote about how concentration camp regimes evolve and why it's not too late to stop this, even though we are deep in it now.

Into the abyss

The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.

degenerateart.beehiiv.com

January 20, 2026 at 3:37 AM

Reposted by jbeth

Andrea Pitzer

@andreapitzer.bsky.social

I think there is some information in there that isn't familiar to a lot of people. Including that the US is currently holding three times as many people in immigration detention as were detained in the entire Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich.

January 20, 2026 at 3:43 AM

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Garrett M. Graff

@vermontgmg.bsky.social

We are watching one of the wildest things a nation-state has ever done: A superpower is committing suicide because the GOP Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King.

This is one of the wildest moments in all of geopolitics ever.

NOELREPORTS @noelreports.com · 1d

Footage shows Danish troops arriving in Greenland as part of a new military deployment. Among the personnel who landed on the island is Major General Peter H. Boysen, Chief of the Danish Army Command. #Greenland

January 19, 2026 at 10:59 PM

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat

@ruthbenghiat.bsky.social

Back then, wannabe dictators either declared dictatorship or staged a coup. Today wannabe dictators use “electoral autocracy” — they come to power via elections but then hollow out the electoral system through voter suppression, banning rivals from running for office, intimidation, & other tactics.

January 19, 2026 at 8:23 PM

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Kurt Andersen

@kurtandersen.bsky.social

Very good piece by @mashagessen.bsky.social, the author of Surviving Autocracy, who left Russia in 2013 as the authoritarian hammer really started coming down, and moved to the United States. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/o...

January 19, 2026 at 3:43 AM

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Joyce White Vance

@joycewhitevance.bsky.social

Good morning members of the GOP in Congress. Today would be a good day for you to wake up.

January 19, 2026 at 3:26 PM

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Lydia Polgreen

@polgreen.bsky.social

I went to Minneapolis last week. What I saw was horrifying and inspiring in equal measure. Gift link to my latest column: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/o...

Opinion | In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War

www.nytimes.com

January 19, 2026 at 12:56 PM

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Brendan Nyhan

@brendannyhan.bsky.social

There is nothing complicated or subtle or hard to understand about what is going on.

Trump may not succeed. But he will only fail if patriots stand up and defend our democracy and the Constitution. We must act, as @mashagessen.bsky.social writes, while we still can. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/o...

January 18, 2026 at 5:49 PM

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Asha Rangappa

@asharangappa.bsky.social

Thread

Silverman on Security @silvermansecurity.bsky.social · 3d

Brief operational term of art 🧵 to help better define what we're experiencing. What we're experiencing is state terror. I've seen a lot of terms thrown around for what the Trump admin is doing w/ICE, CBP, & other federal law enforcement (LE). The now largely out of use term is state terror. 1/

January 18, 2026 at 1:21 AM

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Frank Amari

@frankamari.bsky.social

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin, born #OTD 1706

January 17, 2026 at 1:04 PM

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Don Moynihan

@donmoyn.bsky.social

New at Can We Still Govern?
"I am writing as an ordinary citizen of Minneapolis/St Paul...to share with the outside world what is really going on ─ the terror being inflicted upon a U.S. city and state by our federal government."
Please read, share, help. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/dispatch-f...

Dispatch from the occupation

What life is like in Minneapolis now

donmoynihan.substack.com

January 17, 2026 at 1:49 PM

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Greg Sargent

@gregsargent.bsky.social

"Until Minneapolis, I would have told you that as bad as Trump is, he’s not capable of ordering ICE agents to shoot people...at random, and that as bad as ICE is, they’d refuse such orders. Now I no longer believe either of those things."

Read @mjtoma.bsky.social:
newrepublic.com/post/205379/...

We’re Nearing the Day When ICE Thugs Just Open Fire on Crowds

The United States is now closer to Assad’s Syria than to anything we recognize as fitting within the understood norms of American history.

newrepublic.com

January 16, 2026 at 11:36 PM

jbeth

@jbeth65.bsky.social

Donald Trump’s America

Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 4d

This is chilling and must be heard to believe. And the fact that this is where we are says everything.

January 16, 2026 at 8:49 PM

Reposted by jbeth

Jon Cooper

@joncooper-us.bsky.social

👇👇

January 16, 2026 at 12:19 AM

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Edwin Eisendrath

@eisendrath.net

I am done listening to pundits, consultants, and influencers tell us what Democrats must do, as if the attack on American democracy and freedom is a problem that the Democratic Party must solve. This is Americans vs MAGA. My latest:

open.substack.com/pub/edwineis...

person holding sign that reads shame in front of Ice agents

January 16, 2026 at 2:49 PM

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Sherrilyn Ifill

@sifill.bsky.social

So she had a pulse. That’s what the doctor on the scene wanted to check. She wasn’t breathing, but she had a pulse. He could have started CPR right away.

Instead ICE barred the doctor from attending her and waited 15 mins for EMT to get to her.

Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 4d

GIFT LINK

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Newly Released Records Detail Chaos During Fatal ICE Shooting in Minneapolis

www.nytimes.com

January 16, 2026 at 3:03 PM

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Mark Copelovitch

@mcopelov.bsky.social

I would like to live in a country where statements like "people are vermin" & "we should attack our NATO allies" & "we shouldn't have elections" immediately ended presidencies.

January 15, 2026 at 4:59 PM

Reposted by jbeth

Luke O'Neil

@lukeoneil47.bsky.social

A buddy in MN shared a drawing a classmate of his kid made. They've been making thank you notes for parents who have volunteered to carpool them to school so their own parents don't have to risk waiting out by the bus stop.

thank you for helping my friends come to school

January 15, 2026 at 4:43 PM

Reposted by jbeth

Frank Amari

@frankamari.bsky.social

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

-- Martin Luther King Jr., born #OTD 1929

January 15, 2026 at 1:24 PM

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Jon Collins

@jcollins.bsky.social

She says ICE agents mocked her: “The ICE agent who had pepper sprayed into the vents of my car said ‘you guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian b—— is dead,’ verbatim, speaking of Renee Good. Which filled me with absolute rage and shock..."
www.mprnews.org/episode/2026...

‘I was flooded with fear’: Minnesotans describe their encounters with ICE, being detained

From an Uber driver to a school drop off, MPR News spoke with Minnesotans who were stopped or detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

www.mprnews.org

January 14, 2026 at 3:42 PM

Reposted by jbeth

Osita Nwanevu

@ositanwanevu.com

I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives.

Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.

It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago.

It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”.

It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing.

The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States.

Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all.

As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.

January 14, 2026 at 3:26 PM

Reposted by jbeth

Mark Jacob

@markjacob.bsky.social

Please consider subscribing to my free Stop the Presses newsletter, which examines how right-wing extremism exploits the weaknesses in American journalism – and what we can do about it.