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johnalight.bsky.social
John Light
@johnalight.bsky.social
35K followers 1.5K following 280 posts
I’m an editor at TPM.


signal: johnalight.99
email: [email protected]
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Reposted by John Light
rickperlstein.bsky.social
This is a really good explanation of the prima facia lawlessness of the attacks on protesters: they don't bring charges any more, because judges laugh them out of court every time they show the supposed "evidence."

talkingpointsmemo.com/the-weekende...
Thirty-One False Starts
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️ One minor mystery...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 24, 2026 at 7:00 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
One of the weird things about this second Trump term is, during moments of crisis, it's unclear if the president is getting real information and spinning that real information, or if he is getting the same disinformation from his advisors that they are giving to the public.
Trump Truth Social post: "This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go – What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers? The Mayor and the Governor called them off? It is stated that many of these Police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do! Why does Ilhan Omar have $34 Million Dollars in her account? And where are the Tens of Billions of Dollars that have been stolen from the once Great State of Minnesota? We are there because of massive Monetary Fraud, with Billions of Dollars missing, and Illegal Criminals that were allowed to infiltrate the State through the Democrats’ Open Border Policy. We want the money back, and we want it back, NOW. Those Fraudsters who stole the money are going to jail, where they belong! This is no different than a really big Bank Robbery. Much of what you’re witnessing is a COVER UP for this Theft and Fraud. The Mayor and the Governor are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric! Instead, these sanctimonious political fools should be looking for the Billions of Dollars that has been stolen from the people of Minnesota, and the United States of America. LET OUR ICE PATRIOTS DO THEIR JOB! 12,000 Illegal Alien Criminals, many of them violent, have been arrested and taken out of Minnesota. If they were still there, you would see something far worse than you are witnessing today!"
January 24, 2026 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by John Light
rgoodlaw.bsky.social
FBI leadership coverup of Renee Good killing.

A supervisor in FBI’s Minneapolis field office resigned "after bureau leadership in Washington pressured her to discontinue a civil rights inquiry into" ICE agent Jonathan Ross. "Such inquiries are a common investigative step in similar shootings."
F.B.I. Agent Who Tried to Investigate ICE Officer in Shooting Resigns
www.nytimes.com
January 23, 2026 at 11:30 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
There are all these moments from the first term — like "shithole countries" — that are burned into our mind. Trump's rhetoric is often even worse now, but no longer treated as news.
January 21, 2026 at 2:52 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
Not sure I've ever seen anything quite like this.
talkingpointsmemo.com TPM @talkingpointsmemo.com · 5d
In a bizarre court filing, DOJ conceded that in March 2025, two members of DOGE who were working at the Social Security Administration were in touch with an advocacy group that hoped to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States."
DOGE Worker at SSA Signed Agreement With Group Seeking to ‘Overturn Election Results,’ DOJ Says
In a bizarre court filing last week, the Justice Department conceded that...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 20, 2026 at 9:33 PM
Reposted by John Light
frankfigliuzzi.bsky.social
They say they witnessed guards kill an ICE detainee. DHS wants them gone: www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
DHS seeking to deport two men who said fellow ICE detainee was killed
The two men’s eyewitness accounts of the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos at a Texas detention camp differ from the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the incident.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 17, 2026 at 10:38 PM
Reposted by John Light
laylaayanna.bsky.social
A Trump takeover of the Federal Reserve could give the president power to slash interest rates at will, punish blue state banks, influence lending to his corporate allies, and more talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-f...
There’s More at Stake Than Just Interest Rates. Here’s What Trump Could Do With the Whole Federal Reserve Toolkit
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on whether President...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 16, 2026 at 10:59 PM
Reposted by John Light
sarahposner.bsky.social
This didn't get coverage in regular media, but this week Christian Zionists held an invite-only gathering at Mar-a-Lago, and Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah of Iran, spoke to them

cbn.com/news/israel/...
Trump Says Help 'On the Way' to Iran Protesters as Death Toll Climbs by Multiple Thousands
After President Trump's pledge on Tuesday to send help to Iran, the world is watching to see how the White House will re
cbn.com
January 14, 2026 at 9:47 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
The Trump DOJ's wild directive to investigate Renee Good's widow — which reportedly prompted several prosecutors to resign today — builds on a claim that has been slopping around right-wing media for days, pushed by Jack Posobiec, Tim Pool, Andy Ngo, others.
How a Grainy Video of Renee Good’s Anguished Wife Convinced Right-Wing Media to Blame the Widow
In the days before the Trump Justice Department asked Minnesota federal prosecutors...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 13, 2026 at 11:25 PM
Reposted by John Light
qjurecic.bsky.social
seems like a bit of an own goal for the administration to push out the person who was running the (legitimate) fraud investigation used (illegitimately) as justification for the mn crackdown
3 Prosecutors Quit After Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow
www.nytimes.com
January 13, 2026 at 5:54 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
Many of the still-outstanding questions about this year's midterms will be decided by the Supreme Court
How Redistricting and the Fate of the Voting Rights Act Might (Not) Impact the Midterms
The midterm elections are often treated by voters as a referendum on...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 13, 2026 at 5:23 PM
Reposted by John Light
emptywheel.bsky.social
WaPo. catalogs who left govt and via what means.

These will be useful to show that Trump effected a SHIFT--from spending on things that help people (like VA care) TO snatching grannies.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
VA faced the most attrition in 2025 Hundreds of thousands of employees left agencies across the federal government, most quitting or retiring, including 50,000 at Veterans Affairs. QuitRetirementOther separationRIF 0 10K 20K 30K 40K VA 50K 26K 16K 9K Treasury 29K 19K 8K Army 28K 13K 9K 6K Agriculture 25K 12K 8K 5K DHS 24K 10K 9K 5K Navy 23K 11K 9K 3K Air Force 23K 12K 7K 5K Defense 22K 10K 8K 4K HHS 19K 5K 6K 4K 4K Interior 15K 6K 6K Totals for separated employees represent separations between January and November 2025. New hires are not represented. Source: Office of Personnel Management Clara ence morse / THE WASHINGTON POST
January 10, 2026 at 11:58 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
"What was clear from DHS’s creation was that that power could all be directed and concentrated toward some corrupt or illegitimate purpose. And that, among many other things, is what we’ve seen over the last year."
Abolish ICE? DHS Too. It’s Time
If you’ve been watching reportage and viral videos of immigration raids over...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 9, 2026 at 9:41 PM
Reposted by John Light
ryanlcooper.com
ICE orphaned a 6 year old boy www.startribune.com/she-was-an-a...
‘She was an amazing human being’: Mother identifies woman shot, killed by ICE agent
Renee Nicole Good, 37, lived in the Twin Cities with her partner.
www.startribune.com
January 8, 2026 at 1:00 AM
Reposted by John Light
hunterw.bsky.social
Along with the more standard, now-familiar January 6 denialism, the White House website included a suggestion that assassination attempts against Trump have been orchestrated by rogue forces inside the government. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-whi...
The White House’s J6 Revisionism Includes a Wild New Conspiracy Theory
The White House marked the fifth anniversary of the Capitol attack by...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 6, 2026 at 11:55 PM
Reposted by John Light
kateriga.bsky.social
In major decision, the Wyoming Supreme Court knocked down 2 abortion bans today -- citing an anti-Obamacare amendment! The amendment was initially passed to protect people from ACA "threats" like "death panels." It's now an inadvertent shield for abortion rights talkingpointsmemo.com/news/anti-ob...
An Anti-Obamacare Amendment Just Saved Abortion In Wyoming
The Wyoming Supreme Court knocked down two abortion restrictions Tuesday — one...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 6, 2026 at 8:26 PM
Reposted by John Light
davidkurtz.bsky.social
"I found that sending out the first reports was a struggle...I had to overcome the sheer disbelief. Was I really seeing people climbing the walls? Were Nick Fuentes Groyper flags really hanging from the windows of the Capitol? What had happened to the police?"
talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-mom...
The Moment We Lost The Plot
It has never been easy for me to write about January 6. ...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 6, 2026 at 5:28 PM
Reposted by John Light
davidkurtz.bsky.social
I'm not one for anniversaries, but it feels fitting to mark the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, if only to preserve clarity amongst ourselves about what that day represents: the starkest fork in the road that this country had faced since its civil war.

talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
NEVER FORGET: Jan. 6 Five Years Later
Programming note: Our first Morning Memo Live event is coming up on...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 6, 2026 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by John Light
allegrak.bsky.social
The first week of January is like a great cosmic punishment
January 6, 2026 at 8:31 PM
Reposted by John Light
jwherrman.bsky.social
Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...
The reality of the AI industry is far larger than a subculture on X with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into physical infrastructure, reshaping jobs, and deploying into products used by billions of people. But that makes X's capture of the AI conversation all the more notable. Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world's understanding of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now - the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress - is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk. It has been merged into xAI, where the in-house chatbot occasionally confuses itself with Hitler. When the history of this period in tech is eventually written, it will be composed of, among other things, a whole lot of threads and replies from blue checks on X. Then, of course, there's the Musk factor. The fact of his ownership creates obvious risks for all of his competitors, who rely on his platform to supply the vibes they need to help keep their companies, and the AI boom in general, going. It's worth remembering that, back before he decided to purchase it and let it drive him nuts, Twitter was, to Musk, a platform with clear functional utility, a social network that helped make him wildly famous and use that fame to convince thousands of retail traders to buy into Tesla, the company that made him the richest man in the world. Even if we assume, against all reason, that Musk won't leverage this unusual sort of power over all the competitors gathered on his platform, X's influence over them and how they're seen by the rest of the world is undeniable. Along with "AI Twitter," some of the other communities thriving on Musk era X include MAGA guys and crypto guys, meaning that the background vibe of the primary gathering place for the industry that's trying to remake the world is quite a bit more conservative and mercenary than it otherwise might have been, and while the primary factor in the public's deep skepticism of where Al is going is clearly fear about labor, association with polarizing Muskian politics probably doesn't help assuage ambient fears about job loss and surveillance. (One important consequence of having the AI elite gathered on X is that their media diets are now substantially made up of one another's posts, effusive and dismissive responses to their oren posts, and standard "For You" page Musk-era algo-slop. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly their information diets are influenced by their timelines, and you can get a pretty good idea of what those look like by jacking into AI Twitter yourself.)
January 5, 2026 at 2:56 PM
Reposted by John Light
joshchafetz.bsky.social
Congestion pricing is an unqualified success in NYC. It would be great to see it expanded to every city with decent public transit options. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Congestion pricing after one year: How life has changed.
How life has changed in the New York area, according to data on traffic, transit and the responses of 600 readers.
www.nytimes.com
January 5, 2026 at 11:23 AM
Reposted by John Light
cooperlund.online
For the past year I've had the feeling that the Trump administration's primary goal is the creation of content, and I expanded upon it here in the wake of our excursion in Venezuela
The Trump-Flavored Content Administration
Understanding the administration as a content mill
cooperlund.medium.com
January 4, 2026 at 5:52 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
The Wall Street Journal editorial board: "Mr. Trump is pursuing the Bush freedom agenda, at least in the Western Hemisphere. Are we all neocons now?"
Opinion | Trump’s Regime Change in Venezuela
Toppling Maduro sends a salutary message to America’s adversaries. Now Trump has to make the occupation a success.
www.wsj.com
January 3, 2026 at 10:53 PM
Reposted by John Light
talkingpointsmemo.com
Whether or not they played a role in what happened overnight, 2020 election conspiracy theories continue to loom large in Trump's thinking about Venezuela.

Venezuela’s 2024 election “wasn’t a hell of a lot worse than what they did to us in 2020," Trump said today.
Moments From Day 1 of the US Supposedly Running Venezuela
This post has been updated.
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 3, 2026 at 10:25 PM
johnalight.bsky.social
"Whatever the power of LLM-based AI (a basic and unsettled question) a central part of this conversation is about who controls it and on what terms. Whatever this thing is, we can have it transform society on civic democratic terms or on authoritarian and oligarchic ones."
Who Controls AI Exactly?
I’ve been getting lots of your emails about Artificial Intelligence and its...
talkingpointsmemo.com
January 3, 2026 at 9:19 PM