curated news excerpts & citations
Jess Piper: Silencing Mockingbirds
Reading is resistance
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I was in my classroom, and it must have been second or third hour because I remember I was hungry — we hadn’t had lunch yet, and I was running too late that morning to grab breakfast. I was reading a short chapter from To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to my 8th graders.
Most liked it so far.
My Principal walked in for an observation and noticed we were reading a novel, and then proceeded to walk right back out…he stood at the door for a second and told me to visit his office after school.
If you think being summoned to the Principal’s office as a child is terrifying, you should be summoned as a teacher.
A shiver went down my spine.
(Jess Piper more…)
Thom Hartmann: “One Battle After Another” Is What Happens When Art Refuses to Kneel
404 Media: Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – October 8, 2025
… This morning, the Defense Department announced the federal activation of about 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard and about 300 from the Illinois National Guard, saying they would be protecting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and other federal agents “who are performing federal functions, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”
The statement said the National Guard soldiers “are under federal command and control in a Title 10 status.” The section of the legal code to which the announcement pointed was the one permitting the president to call into federal service members of the National Guard whenever the U.S. is invaded or in danger of invasion by a foreign nation, there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the U.S. government, or the president cannot execute the laws of the United States with the power of regular law enforcement.
It is this power under Title 10 that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller yesterday claimed was “plenary,” or absolute. The idea that exceptions to the rule of law reveal who is really in charge of the government was central to the political philosophy of German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazis and whose work is increasingly popular among the radical right in the U.S. these days. Since taking office in January, Trump has declared at least eight national emergencies that the administration has used to justify the use of emergency powers.
As J.V. Last of The Bulwark laid out clearly last night, there is no crisis in Chicago that makes it necessary for the administration to send in National Guard troops. Last points out that any instability in Chicago has been caused by the administration’s surge of federal agents into the city, …
…To push the administration’s narrative, Trump held an “Antifa Roundtable” at the White House this afternoon. There, far-right influencers tried to make the case that “antifa” is real and has harassed them, although as The Guardian noted, many of those influencers feed their media channels by confronting protesters and filming the responses they’ve provoked. …
Antifa is a term used by the far right to define anyone who does not support MAGA: it means “antifascist.” During the meeting, influencer Jack Posobiec—a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory—warned that “Antifa” went back all the way to Germany’s Weimar Republic. As Holly Baxter of The Independent pointed out, “it is absolutely true that there were anti-fascist protesters in the Weimar Republic. If you’ll remember, those were the people taking issue with the early versions of the Nazis.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Clara Jeffery: It’s Time for Soft Secession
California, and the country, cannot await the outcome of the midterms to repel Trump’s siege on democracy. More drastic action is required.
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Short of actual secession, what could California do? It could learn from the Jimmy Kimmel showdown and lead a financial “countervalue” rebellion, using “the full weight of blue states’ market power, cultural influence and legal authority to raise the stakes of Republican red-state aggression,” Democratic strategists Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight wrote in the Washington Post, by imposing “regulatory and economic costs that bite hard enough to make the constituents of even the most insulated legislator feel the pain.”
(Clara Jeffery more…)Steward Beckham: Clara Jeffrey’s Hard Truth of the Union
I have been thinking about Clara Jeffrey’s Mother Jones piece and the quiet thunder inside her thesis, the idea that blue-leaning states are not merely wealthier or more urbanized, but are, in effect, financing the republic’s decay. California, New York, and Massachusetts are no longer just states, but patrons underwriting the continued dysfunction of their ideological opposites. It’s not secession Jeffrey is describing so much as a slow withdrawal of faith, the recognition that one half of America carries the weight of the other, both fiscally and spiritually.
TNR: The Case for the Forever Shutdown
Senate Democrats actually allowing the GOP to stop funding the government is only the first step. Now they have to make the case that Trump’s government is illegitimate.
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Closer to the Edge: For Chicago (and every city that follows)
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
They say it’s “just training.” They said that once before, too — in every chapter of history that began with soldiers standing where civilians should.
Members of the Texas National Guard have arrived in Illinois. Tomorrow it could be Ohio, New York, Minnesota, California. One by one, state lines blur and the word “domestic” starts sounding like “deployment.”You don’t have to take part in the theater. You don’t have to clap for it, feed it, or fuel it. The Constitution — the real one, not the bumper-sticker version — gives you every right to say no.
“No Soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner.”
— Third Amendment, United States ConstitutionThat single line is a barricade made of words. It means that no government — not Washington, not Austin, not Springfield — can plant armed troops on your property, in your business, or under your roof without your consent.
(Closer to the Edge more…)
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John Pavlovitz: The Trump Administration Has Targeted Straight White Men. ICE Shows It Has Succeeded.
At first glance, it’s easy to focus on the Trump Administration’s attacks on historically marginalized minority communities: the incessant and increasingly violent war it is now raging on immigrants, on people with brown skin, on the queer community, on women, on Muslims, on people with disabilities.Understandably, our collective attention is drawn to those who are clearly vulnerable right now, those whose freedoms and safety are evaporating, those facing the bruises and the bullets.
What is less obvious but equally alarming is the way that this regime is targeting straight white men.
(John Pavlovitz more…)Jennifer Rubin: Stephen Miller is the Poster Boy for the Rabid MAGA Movement
Bulwark: The ICE Propaganda Campaign Goes Into Overdrive
MAGA commentators are stepping up as soldiers in Trump’s culture war to provoke confrontations against “Antifa” with the backing of DHS.
Dispatch: DHS Says Videotaping ICE Agents Is Illegal. Federal Courts Disagree.
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Root: Why This White Christian Pastor Says Young Black Men Should Be Executed, and How Black Folks are Responding
… “If you take that and then you took a law like Deuteronomy 21, which is a just law that got enacted through Moses; the law was that if you had a rebellious son, you have a child who’s coming up into their manhood and they’re rebellious, they don’t listen — he lists some characteristics — and even though they’re disciplined, they will not turn, he says the father is to bring them out into the town square, this is a rebellious son, and then they stone him to death. They kill him.”
(Root more…)
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James Eagle: America’s vanishing stock market
Electronic Arts just agreed to vanish from the stock market. The largest leveraged buyout in history at $55 billion, and another blue-chip American company disappears behind private doors. Every month, another household name gets bought out, taken private, removed from your reach. The companies your children grow up with won’t be companies they can ever invest in.
If this chart is right, we’re back near levels last seen in the 1970s. Public markets matter because they offer broad, regulated access to ownership. …
(James Eagle more…)
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TNR: Photographer Captures Pam Bondi’s Notes—and They’re a Doozy
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Joyce Vance: The Slow Death Facing The Comey Prosecution
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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