curated news excerpts & citations
Jennifer Rubin: A Nobel Prize for Trolling?
The distinguished awards further illustrated that Trump is wrong on just about everything
The Nobel Prize Committee announced its annual awards over the last week or so. Aside from the number of winners based at U.S. universities (which have been until now the crown jewel of our education and scientific communities), something else caught my attention: Are the Nobel Prize judges…trolling Donald Trump?
I have no doubt the awards—the culmination of a long and rigorous process—are apolitical and entirely well deserved. However, what the committee said about the prizes and how the winners’ work were described certainly highlight Trump’s ignorance and malevolence. If you are going to shine a light on brilliance and excellence, Trump is going to be left in the dark—and others will notice.
Nobel Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes was explicitly asked about Trump’s clamoring for the Peace Prize. “In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think this committee has seen many types of campaign, media attention,” Frydnes said. In other words, they are used to getting nagged. He continued: “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So, we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.” Hmm. Sounds like Trump fared poorly in comparison to all those men and women esteemed for courage and integrity.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
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Bulwark: Racist Young Republican Chat Leaves GOP Stumbling to Respond
Split over whether to discipline the offenders or just ignore the whole affair.
IS THERE A PLACE in the Republican operative class for people who “love Hitler”? How about those who like making jokes about black people eating watermelon?That’s the debate consuming the MAGA movement this week, after Politico published selections from a group chat featuring a faction of the Young Republicans organization using what we will charitably call vile language.
(Bulwark more…)Adam Kinzinger: The GOP’s Young ‘Leaders’ Aren’t Kids — They’re Adults Praising Hitler
There’s a world of difference between gallows humor and glorifying genocide — one saves your sanity, the other kills your soul.
Independent: In the wake of Young Republicans texting scandal, ‘white supremacist’ Nick Fuentes claims: ‘There’s groypers in every department’
Fuentes’s comments came after it was revealed that members of the Young Republicans were praising Hitler and threatening to torture opponents
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ProPublica: We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.
- Americans Detained: The government doesn’t track how many citizens are held by immigration agents. We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests.
- Held Incommunicado: More than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them.
- Cases Wilted: Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.
TNR: ICE Detains Citizen After Saying She Doesn’t “Look Like” Her Last Name
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Greeley, who was born in Illinois, is Latina and adopted. She had her U.S. passport on her when she was detained.NY Times: Nory Doesn’t Go to School Here Anymore
ICE deported 17-year-old Nory Sontay Ramos and her mother. Devastation met them in Guatemala.
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Rebecca Solnit: No Kings, No Violence: On the Ongoing Misrepresentation of the Left
Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s hard to portray someone dancing in an inflatable frog or chicken costume as a terrorist.This, of course, hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from officially designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem even claimed to have arrested in Portland “one of the girlfriends of one of the founders of Antifa,” which has never been a real organization, just a nickname for antifascists. Girlfriend of founder of imaginary group is, well, a very Kristi Noem category. But the right has been claiming the left is violent even longer than it’s been hallucinating about antifa. And because these claims are often used to justify crackdowns and suppression of First Amendment rights, they’re worth unpacking, especially as we head into the huge #NoKings demonstrations on Saturday.
An authoritarian is nothing without an enemy to justify his brutality, and imaginary or grossly exaggerated ones are often resorted to, or an already-marginalized minority is portrayed as a malevolent threat; under Trump both immigrants and the left and anyone standing up against ICE have been portrayed that way. Authoritarians routinely hype the peril we’re in if the enemy is not quashed, and of course that quashing customarily and conveniently requires a suspension of laws, a violation of rights, a seizure of power, or all of the above. Right now it’s being used to justify turning ICE into an ultra-violent, unaccountable army invading American cities.
Some pundits and scholars are getting on board with the idea that there’s a surge in left-wing violence, which of course raises the question of what the left is, what counts as violence, whether whole political affiliations are responsible for the acts of individuals, and why the massive surge of right-wing violence over the past decade has been so normalized. …
(Rebecca Solnit more…)Cammy Pedroja: Donald Trump’s Dangerous ‘Antifa’ Strategy
What’s really behind Trump’s move to declare antifa a ‘terrorist organization’
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Intercept: He Tweeted Charlie Kirk “Won’t Be Remembered as a Hero.” The State Dept. Revoked His Visa.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – October 16, 2025
Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would pay furloughed troops by using funds Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE) for fiscal year 2026. Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had “found a creative solution to keep the troops paid. And rather than congratulate the president for doing that, this unprecedented action to get our troops paid, the Democrats want to sue him for it. They’re saying that it’s illegal.”
Democrats are saying it’s illegal because it is illegal. …
…There is more at stake here than a broken law.
…Today Annie Grayer and Adam Cancryn of CNN reported that not just Democratic representatives but also Republicans are out of the loop of presidential funding cuts, finding out about cuts to their districts through press releases. Even Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said “we are really not consulted.”
Speaker Johnson told CNN that he hasn’t received details about the administration’s offer of $20 billion in public money and another $20 billion in private-sector financing to Argentina to prop up the government of Trump’s right-wing ally Javier Milei before upcoming elections there.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Chris Geidner: “Not Guilty”
A not-at-all-subtle reminder to Trump that he’s just the president — and that means his power is limited. And: The Seventh Circuit keeps troop deployment blocked in Illinois.
(Chris Geidner more…)
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Joyce Vance: John Bolton
John Bolton has been charged by a grand jury in the District of Maryland with 18 counts of mishandling classified information in violation of the Espionage Act, 18 USC 793. …
The indictment is entirely different from the two we’ve seen against Jim Comey and Letitia James out of the Eastern District of Virginia. For one thing, as we discussed earlier this week, the U.S. Attorney in Maryland is a career prosecutor. But she didn’t go into the grand jury to obtain the indictment. It’s signed off on by two senior prosecutors in her office as well as lawyers from DOJ’s National Security Division. Instead of the factually deficient indictments we’ve seen in the other cases, this is the sort of detailed indictment we are used to seeing in a serious matter. The factual predicate for the charges against Bolton is 20 pages, laid out in detail by professional prosecutors. Each count appears in a graph, as the first eight do here, with details about the documents involved.
(Joyce Vance more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: Undaunted
MIT, with several courageous universities to follow, shows it is made of sterner stuff
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Borowitz: Mike Johnson Accuses No Kings Protesters of Blatantly Exercising First Amendment Rights
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404 Media: Why the Portland frogs work
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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