Steve McClellan
brownianemotion.bsky.social
Steve McClellan
@brownianemotion.bsky.social
Oakland dad and video essay enthusiast
Reposted by Steve McClellan
this could be the floor
Who will be the first member of Congress to introduce legislation named after Renee Good that abolishes DHS?
January 7, 2026 at 11:11 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
extremely fucked that it’s equally plausible that:

1) he’s just lying

or

2) someone showed him an AI video and he believes it
January 7, 2026 at 10:30 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
Venezuela, MN, Greenland, etc, are not "distractions" from Epstein or anything else. They are all connected in that they are the fruits of unqualified and unstable people given absolute power and wielding it in ways that profit them and hurt others. It's not a conspiracy, it's an ethos.
January 7, 2026 at 11:34 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
There's significant evidence from state legislative term limits that they do, in fact, empower both lobbyists and state executive branches.

"Disagreeing" without offering any counter-evidence is just vibes.
I disagree with the suggestion that term limits would further empower lobbyists and therefore we shouldn't consider them as a viable path forward. The current system of federal elected officials who are financially incentivized to become insider traders until they choose to retire isn't working.
January 4, 2026 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
Like the Koch brothers and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes.

Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule.

(Published Oct. 2024)
A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.
Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks are poised to take their Christian nationalist agenda nationwide.
www.propublica.org
January 4, 2026 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
This brainrot is more responsible for the rise of authoritarianism in the US than any of the wokeness it will not shut up about
January 2, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
If an Old Navy Fourth of July shirt could read the news.
Incredible. CBS Evening News announces five new “simple values” — instead of their “38-page handbook” — as they roll out Tony Dokoupil is lead anchor.

One of those values is simply: “We love America and make no apologies for saying so.”
January 2, 2026 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
Bill Watterson could do Sin City but Frank Miller could not do Calvin and Hobbes
January 2, 2026 at 10:01 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
i was just thinking about this. when a fascist squeaks by, it’s a mandate. when a progressive wins by a landslide, he needs to be deferential. it’s such bullshit.
as a texan i'll spare people zohran takes but one thing i think we're going to see even more of now that he's mayor is mainstream media shift the goal posts of what having a mandate is. trump had a mandate when he narrowly won but zohran has to reach out to all these factions no matter what
January 2, 2026 at 12:19 AM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
This is a surgical dismantling of yet another dumb Matt Yglesias argument by a former clean energy exec and current Representative. This is the sort of thing that should make people stop listening to people like Yglesias.

Read the whole thing.
This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...
Opinion | Obama Supported It. The Left in Canada and Norway Does. Why Don’t Democrats?
www.nytimes.com
December 20, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
billionaire: i have 3 brains. in my skull
interviewer: incredible
December 20, 2025 at 4:33 AM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
Vought is one of the top three or four enemies of the Constitution & American democracy. His removal from power is one of the highest priorities for any project of checking the dictatorship's lawless wielding of the vast powers of the state
Russ Vought set out to ensure a second Trump term would not be hampered by checks and balances:

“I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”

(Published October w/ @newyorker.com)
Russell Vought, Trump’s Shadow President
From the wholesale gutting of federal agencies to the ongoing government shutdown, Russell Vought has drawn the road map for Trump’s second term. Vought has consolidated power to an extent that inside...
www.propublica.org
December 19, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality.

And trans lives are grounded in reality.

We see y'all. No matter what.

www.popsci.com/science/tran...
First-of-a-kind study shows encouraging data for trans kids who socially transition
Ninety-four percent of participants in a new study stood firm in their trans identity after five years, and "detransitioning" is rare.
www.popsci.com
December 18, 2025 at 5:16 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
People love this one because they love American exceptionalism. The Euros can't possibly come up with their own unique evils, it all has to be about us
If you’ve heard the “the Nazis got their ideas from the US segregationists” I beg you to please stop. This is both false and it minimizes historical European antisemitism in a misguided attempt to emphasize the nature of US anti-Black racism.

It’s horrific without comparison to Nazism.
May I politely encourage you to reconsider this framing. It is inaccurately stated and suggests consistent and strong linkages that do not exist.

The Nazis did not “get their ideas” from confederate laws. Antisemitism and anti-Jewish laws existed in Europe long before the Confederacy…
December 12, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
Conservatives have their own "gender ideology" they are pushing constantly, and it's one that's built on coercion and treating women like property.
December 10, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
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December 8, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.
The relative contribution of close-proximity contacts, shared classroom exposure and indoor air quality to respiratory virus transmission in schools - Nature Communications
The relative importance of close-proximity interactions, shared space and air quality to the transmission of respiratory viruses is not well understood. Here, the authors investigate this question by ...
www.nature.com
December 8, 2025 at 4:23 AM
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Which lines of poetry live rent-free in your head?
December 7, 2025 at 5:30 AM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
The thing everybody knows about mob bosses is that once you pay fealty, you're set for life and the demands never increase
The White House’s new anti-media website includes denunciations of:

-ABC, which bribed the president
-CBS, which bribed the president and moved away from fact-based journalism trying to appeal to him and his fans
-WaPo, which spiked a Harris endorsement and tilts coverage in Trump’s favor

Fools.
November 30, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
Ordering no quarter, as Hegseth effectively did, isn't a newfangled modern war crime. It was understood as a crime as far back as the Revolutionary War. Washington threatened to do reprisals over it. The bad guy in 'The Patriot' is (very loosely) based off a British officer who was notorious for it.
November 28, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
trump will pardon or assist any head of state who has been convicted for crimes. acting out of self preservation, basically
WHOA. Trump says he will pardon Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once said that he wanted to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” He had people killed as part of his narco-trafficking ring, which he at times operated directly out of his presidential office.
November 29, 2025 at 12:12 AM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
To put a finer point on this whole thing: "Two people with direct knowledge of the operation" — presumably uniformed military leaders — are accusing the U.S. Secretary of Defense of personally ordering specific war crimes. That's a historic accusation.
Textbook war crime/extrajudicial killing

"Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack ... ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions."

Report by @alexhorton.bsky.social @ellenwapo.bsky.social o.bsky.social
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order to kill all crew members in the Sept. 2 strike on a suspected drug boat. Navy SEALs fired a second missile.
www.washingtonpost.com
November 28, 2025 at 11:48 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
The legal, media, and academic institutions capitulating to an authoritarian ordering payments for favorable treatment are damning themselves to irrelevance. They are destroying their institutions. They will be — and should be — shunned for failing in their most basic purposes for existing.
BREAKING: Northwestern University has agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury $75 million, over the course of three years as part of an agreement with the federal government to restore funding and end investigations into the university

Full statement from NU below:
November 29, 2025 at 1:37 AM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
It remains insane to me that DOGE was treated at the time as an impressive shock and awe accomplishment - “you can’t deny he’s getting stuff done!” - and then instantly memory holed by the press once if became clear it was a total failure by every possible standard including Musk’s own
Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was. Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.*

The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths.
Bye bye, “DOGE”.

It no longer exists as a “centralized entity”, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

@reuters.com
www.reuters.com/world/us/dog...
November 23, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Steve McClellan
Public land grant universities with a mission to serve the residents of their respective states are the great economic equalizers. So of course Republicans and billionaires want to destroy them. 😖
November 23, 2025 at 6:04 PM