curated news excerpts & citations
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – February 15, 2026
The Trump administration’s white nationalist project was on full display this weekend at the 62nd Munich Security Conference that took place from February 13 to 15, 2026. …
… officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.
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[Rubio’s] description of that shared heritage reflected the Trump administration’s fantasy past. It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly “American” identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.
Rubio’s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S., and even though he called out the Rolling Stones, who built their body of work on that of Black American blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as part of “western civilization.” Rubio even ignored his own family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.
Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. …
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Bulwark: This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like
A shocking move by RFK Jr.’s team has the industry spooked—for good reason.
THE VACCINE MAKER MODERNA decided this past week to tell the world about bad news it had received from the federal government.
A potentially groundbreaking vaccine for seasonal flu that the Massachusetts-based company had developed would not be getting approval from regulators. In fact, it wasn’t even getting formal consideration, Moderna announced in a Tuesday press release, because officials were refusing to accept the application.
…This was not a decision to reject the Moderna vaccine. It was a refusal even to think about approving it. The FDA rarely takes such a step, and when it does it’s usually because an application is missing a whole component or includes suspect data. Nobody is suggesting Moderna’s application has those kinds of issues.
On the contrary, the available evidence suggests this is a case of the FDA disqualifying a vaccine on questionable grounds, while changing its standards for review late in the process because it was trying to find a way to reject the vaccine.
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Mary Geddry: Dow 50,000 and the Schmoo Tree Economy
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So when you look at the same time period, Trump’s second term, through that standardized lens, the U.S. stock market is up about 16%. But the rest of the developed world? Up nearly 38%.That’s not a rounding error, that’s the rest of the world more than doubling America’s pace using the benchmark global investors rely on to allocate trillions.
The Dow hitting 50,000 makes for a beautiful patriotic headline. But once you step back and use the actual global measuring tape, the story shifts from “America is winning” to something more awkward:
In other words the Dow should be sitting at 60,000. …
(Mary Geddry more…)
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NY Times: U.S. Deports Nine Migrants in Secret, Ignoring Legal Protections
Most had court orders protecting them from removal to their home countries, so they were sent to detention in Cameroon.
…Most of those migrants and their lawyers say they have been detained since then at a state-owned compound in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. They say they’ve been told by local authorities that they cannot leave the facility unless they agree to return to their home countries, from which they fled to escape war or persecution.
As far as is known, the deportations are the first such expulsions to Cameroon. They highlight the extraordinary secrecy that surrounds President Trump’s global deportation effort. …
(NY Times more…)
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Chris Geidner: The Trump admin argument that masks “are for officer safety reasons” is actually an admission
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And yet, when O’Keefe tried to interrupt Homan’s filibuster to make a point, Homan summed up his arguments — and the Trump administration — with a bang:[T]he masks right now are for officer safety reasons.
This was stated as an explanation, as a justification, as an argument for masks.
In reality, it is a deep admission of the fundamental moral failing at the base of the Trump administration’s lawless actions.
If you knew what the administration is doing, it would not be sustainable.
If a government’s actions in a democracy require masks — if the people being governed in that democracy cannot know who is acting — that is a problem with what the government is doing, not with the governed.
In fact, outside of the second Trump administration, I can really only think of two other instances where the government so fastidiously protects anonymity: The death chamber and the shadow docket.
The exceptions really do prove the rule.
(Chris Geidner more…)
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Robert Reich: My father and the bullies
Hitler, Joseph McCarthy, and Trump
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Ed Reich was a good man. He was a loving husband and father. He was loyal and kind to his friends. He worked hard, six days a week. He contributed to his community.Ed Reich would have loathed Donald Trump.
That’s not because my father was a liberal Democrat. In fact, for most of his life he was a Republican. He began voting Republican in 1936. The first time he cast a vote for someone who became president was in 1952 when he voted for Dwight Eisenhower. He didn’t give up on the Republican Party until it nominated Richard Nixon in 1968.
But my father hated bullies. He fought in World War II against Hitler.
…My father admired people who stood up to bullies, such as Maine’s Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, whose Declaration of Conscience speech on June 1, 1950, condemned McCarthy’s tactics and defended the right to criticize, protest, and hold unpopular views and beliefs.
(Robert Reich more…)
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Daily Beast: Trump’s Valentine’s Post Overrun With Brutal Epstein Taunts
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NY Times: Mexican Cartels Overwhelm Police With Ammunition Made for the U.S. Military
Drug syndicates have used .50-caliber ammunition, produced at a plant owned by the U.S. Army and then smuggled across the border, in attacks on Mexican civilians and police.
(NY Times more…)
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Intercept: Marine Detained in Minneapolis Says Feds Copied His Phone Without a Warrant
He was observing after Alex Pretti’s killing. He says feds detained him at gunpoint, sampled his DNA, scanned his face, and cloned his phone.
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Rook T. Winchester: BIG TURN, BIG RESISTANCE
Why Minnesota’s winter music festival matters more than ever in an age of fear, isolation, and federal crackdowns
There is a lie we are told every winter in Minnesota, and it sounds harmless until you recognize it for what it is. The lie says this is the season to retreat. To hibernate. To shrink your life down to the warmest, smallest version of itself. Stay home. Stay quiet. Stay online. Stay isolated.
Authoritarianism loves that lie.
(Rook T. Winchester more…)
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Above the Law: Jeanine Pirro Brought In Dance Photographer To Prosecute Lawmakers And It Went Exactly As You’d Expect
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NBC reports that the administration not only flubbed its attempt to indict the six Democratic lawmakers who starred in a video reminding military personnel that the law requires them to reject unlawful orders, but it could not find a single grand juror willing to bite. …… And it’s possible that even Vandervelden knew this was a lost cause because according to Bloomberg Law News, Vandervelden continued to run his dance photography studio while pitching in to help his old boss pursue political prosecutions.
(Above the Law more…)
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Ruth Ann Crystal MD: COVID, Flu, and Health News, 2/15/26
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Thom Hartmann: Chapter 12: The Nightmare Scenario
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: “The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink”
(Thom Hartmann more…)
ICE deaths 2026 – They deserve remembrance and justice.- January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
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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