Category: 2025

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Radley Balko: The police militarization debate is over

Quaint disputes about the proper role of police and military have been superseded by a more urgent threat: Donald Trump is creating his own, personal paramilitary force
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There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. …

In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.
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Christina Pagel: America’s retreat from science has far-reaching implications for global research and innovation

The immediate impact on US science and global health is devastating, but the implications for global science go further and we need to protect it.

Since January 2025 the US government has terminated or frozen hundreds of grants across the health, the climate, the environment, and NASA. Thousands of researchers have been dismissed and entire research programmes disrupted including climate change, vaccine development, social-media misinformation studies.

Universities are under sustained attack. Elite universities have had the most federal funding cut, are threatened with investigations over student Gaza protests, and are being asked to give up independence in hiring and curriculum decisions. Visa approvals for new international students and staff have slowed or been revoked outright.

International collaboration has been devastated. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been ordered to stop working with the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has halted grant funding involving foreign partners, and threatened the prestigious international Fulbright scholarship.

The attacks on US science have been devastating for those working in science or considering science careers in the US. But the rest of the world is poorer for it as well.
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Rebecca Solnit: Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning

The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn’t making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase–“what if they had a war and no one came?” What if we were in a war and no one noticed? Obviously all the people under direct attack have noticed, along with all the scientists and federal employees who’ve been fired, the foreign students afraid to come back, the medical professionals who understand what’s happening to public health, the economists who see the wrecking ball swinging, the university administrators whose institutions are under attack. I think most of us feel it and see it and know it. But too many of the powerful voices in this country are downplaying the crisis we’re in, and that tamps down the reactions that could save us.
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Two things under attack are the rule of law and the separation of powers, but the impact is largely downplayed. This year we’ve all heard a lot about the three co-equal branches of government. But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who, after the Big Brutal Bill (BBB) passed, literally handed his gavel to Trump in a horrifying gesture of surrender, is clearly and openly taking orders from him. Johnson is not interested in defending Congress’s powers, and so important powers Congress has, namely the power of the purse, the power to control the allocation and flow of federal funds, have been surrendered.
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John Pavlovitz: Call It What It Is: A Death Camp

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It is not a prison.

Prisons are for those who, through due process and the rigors of our legal system, are found to have committed crimes for which they face accountability.

This is a human kennel; a sweltering dumping ground for fathers, sons, husbands, and best friends, who have been stolen from their homes, workplaces, churches, and graduation ceremonies, for no other reason than to satisfy the irrational bloodlust of ignorant white people who spend their Sundays cosplaying followers of Jesus.
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Dispatch: ‘Just a Normal Life’

In Los Angeles, a prayer to the patron saint of lost causes.
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An according-to-Hoyle miracle? Maybe, maybe not. But her cancer is in remission, and Diego has a big-ass tattoo of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. For a while, he and his family seemed like they would enjoy the blessing of the one thing he kept bringing up over the course of our conversation on a beautiful afternoon in downtown Los Angeles: a normal life.

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“People are afraid,” Diego said. “Everybody is. They’re afraid to go out to a restaurant. They’re afraid to go to work.” He mentioned a colleague who now spends hundreds of dollars a week on rideshare apps rather than a few bucks on a transit pass because she is afraid she will be rounded up at a bus stop. (ICE raids have targeted mass transit in Los Angeles County, brandishing their firearms at literal little old ladies from Pasadena.) Immigrant-services groups have been printing up flyers with warnings and advice that would have sounded outlandish a few years ago: what to do if there is an ICE raid on your church, if ICE is targeting patients in a hospital, or if there is ICE activity at an elementary school.
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Bulwark: The ‘Parasites’ and the ‘Good Immigrants’

Meet more of the worst people in the world.

I’ve been listening to Robert Evans’ podcast series on Adolf Eichmann and one of the things Evans mentions is that throughout the Holocaust, many Nazis had in their lives a “Good Jew.” Some Jewish person who they liked and wished to save.
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One of the hallmarks of Trump’s mass deportation regime has been the emergence of Good Immigrants from certain MAGA communities. We saw these people in the small Missouri town which rallied to Carol, a beloved member of their community who was arrested by Trump’s secret police because her papers were not in order.

These MAGA diehards whined and complained until the administration relented and let Carol go. It seems to have occurred to precisely none of the townfolk that America is full of Carols.
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Dean Blundell: Trump Regime Sends Letter To Canadian Ambassador Demanding Canada Control the Weather In The US

It’s Epstein File Distraction Day! What better way to celebrate than to blame Canada’s forest fires and “arson” for ruining summer for Americans
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CLAIM #1: Canadian Fires Are Caused by Arson

Tiffany and Finstad: “We’ve seen things like arson as another way multiple large wildfires have ignited in Canada.”

Reality Check: According to the Canadian National Fire Database (CNFDB), lightning is responsible for ~50% of Canadian wildfires but causes over 85% of the total area burned. Arson, when it happens, accounts for less than 10%. In 2023, over 93% of the area burned was lightning-caused. That’s not arson. That’s climate-fueled nature punching back.
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CLAIM #2: Poor Forest Management Is to Blame

The letter: “A lack of active forest management” is a key driver.

Reality Check: Canada has one of the most sophisticated wildfire monitoring and response systems in the world, coordinated through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Most of Canada’s forests are in remote, boreal regions with little to no human access, let alone active mismanagement. Meanwhile, the U.S. sees 70,000 wildfires annually (Canada, 8,000), often in populated areas and on federal lands that Trump himself underfunded.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV: The Epstein client list story is not political. It’s not amusing. It is tragic.

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That Donald Trump’s Attorney General was questioned in his presence about her handling of a sex scandal involving one of his personal friends is an enormous outrage that in another time, involving another man, would have brought down a president. That in itself is a terrible commentary on how low we have fallen as the nation that put that man in that room in that previously august national treasure known as the White House.

But it is too easy to lose sight of the story behind the scandal, the very real damage that has been done again and again, over and over, to little children who were powerless to stop the powerful men who destroyed their innocence and scarred them for life, whether those men were presidents, businessmen, celebrities, or their own fathers, uncles, or neighbors.

The story of Jeffrey Epstein and the crimes he committed is not a political story. It is not something that should be bandied about by podcasters and television news hosts, or in posts on platforms like X and Facebook. Child abuse is a civilizational tragedy and a crime. All those who have abused children should be prosecuted and put behind bars, no matter who they are or what their station in life.

Period.
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Jay Kuo: It Really Is A Cover Up

A memo from the Justice Department reopens claims that it’s hiding the truth to protect powerful people.
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One thing has always piqued my curiosity, though. Donald Trump’s name appears multiple times on Epstein’s call and flight logs. He was friends with Epstein for a long time before distancing himself. Trump himself has a public history of sexual assault, and there are credible allegations of rape of a minor against Trump and Epstein together.

So how would the White House handle all the potential evidence once Trump was back in office?

It turns out, by issuing a quite unbelievable and outright denial, and seeking to close the case forever. Maybe they haven’t heard of the Streisand Effect, which says a cover-up only increases the visibility of the thing you don’t want people to talk about.
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We Hold Truths

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