Me chatting up strangers at an event: Look at me being so social and friendly and warm, what a joy I must seem! My face talking to strangers at an event:
Derek Johnson
@derekjesq.bsky.social
Chaos Muppet, Order Rising. CEO, ResearchCollaborative.org. Young(ish) Leader, Munich Security Conference + Friends of Europe. Former head of GlobalZero.org. Radicalized by basic decency. Made in #Iowa with parts from #Iran. he/him 🇦🇲
What would be worse: Dems losing the midterms or winning them and concluding their current approach is sufficient? My latest with @derekjesq.bsky.social anatosaurus.substack.com/p/turn-out-f...
Turn Out for What?
The Midterm Question We Need to Be Asking
anatosaurus.substack.com
The ballot box still matters. But the ballot box alone won’t save us. Happening now at #NN26: @anatosaurus.bsky.social, @tarabuss.bsky.social, Fenika Miller and Scot Nakagawa on elections under authoritarianism and what it takes to defend our freedoms as MAGA rewrites the rules to hold onto power.
Happening now in a packed room at @netrootsnation.bsky.social: “Wins Are Replicable: From Mamdani to Minnesota to Middle America” with @anatosaurus.bsky.social, @jlemonsk.bsky.social, @heyansa.bsky.social and Gabriella Zutrau
Black voter participation soared right after the VRA passed in 1965. But not until 1992, after Congress strengthened the VRA to require majority-minority districts, did we start getting closer to proportional Black representation in Congress. Because Black votes finally counted more in the South.
BREAKING: The Supreme Court’s MAGA Justices just green-lit discrimination against Black voters. By taking away key protections from the Voting Rights Act, the white supremacist faction is imposing Jim Crow 2.0 so they can control our elections and seize more power. apnews.com/live/voting-...
Live updates: Supreme Court weakens key tool of voting rights law in Louisiana case
The Supreme Court has weakened a key tool of the Voting Rights Act that has helped root out racial discrimination in voting since 1965. The case concerns a district in Louisiana.
apnews.com
We must understand that the Voting Rights Act was not merely about ensuring Black Americans rights, it was about democratizing America. This ruling is not just a decimation of Black rights and Black Americans’ ability to have representation, it is a fatal blow to multiracial democracy.
MAGA justices on the Supreme Court are doing everything in their power to help bring back Jim Crow. And many, many Americans understand that's exactly what the Callais does. www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/202...
The Roberts Court majority may be pretending they don't know the Voting Rights Act is what ended Jim Crow and their decision to gut it is license to take us back ("again") to stealing power from Black voters, but Americans do:
A vitally important discussion with @andreapitzer.bsky.social and @anatosaurus.bsky.social. There are many ways concentration camp systems can end — but they never end on their own. We have to ask ourselves what we will tell our grandchildren we did to stop this.
Call Trump's Concentration Camps What They Are
Andrea Pitzer on the history we cannot allow to repeat itself.
weekendreading.net
Now seems like a good time to remind everyone that the only way to destroy an entire civilization overnight is with nuclear weapons, and Donald Trump has the absolute power as President to follow through on that threat. It could take as little as 5 minutes. Here's how it would go down:
Accurate, and terrifying. The system presumes that an incompetent or incapacitated President would be removed from power through either impeachment or the 25th amendment, neither of which is fit for purpose in the current circumstance. Thanks for compiling and clarifying, @derekjesq.bsky.social
Derek Johnson@derekjesq.bsky.social · 4mo agoNow seems like a good time to remind everyone that the only way to destroy an entire civilization overnight is with nuclear weapons, and Donald Trump has the absolute power as President to follow through on that threat. It could take as little as 5 minutes. Here's how it would go down:
Now seems like a good time to remind everyone that the only way to destroy an entire civilization overnight is with nuclear weapons, and Donald Trump has the absolute power as President to follow through on that threat. It could take as little as 5 minutes. Here's how it would go down:
In other words: We're totally down with the war criminal but condemn those who get hung up by things like the law, ethics and morality.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5mo agoHegseth: "Israel has clear missions as well for which we are grateful. Capable partners are good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force ... no stupid rules of engagement."
The writing this season is getting a little too heavy-handed.
K.B. Spangler@kbspangler.com · 5mo agoTotal eclipse of the full blood moon is tonight, in case you haven’t checked in on the doom portents lately.
bibi is just descriptively correct and the next dem needs to just sever all ties with israel. defense, trade, all of it. even thinking on utterly cynical grounds: israeli political leadership and overall politics is overtly opposed to the american left-of-center project
John Hudson@johnphudson.bsky.social · 5mo agoNetanyahu says Trump fulfilled his dreams: In bombing Iran, Israel now has the "assistance of the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military. This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years"
It is simultaneously true that Trump had (in the two elections he won) positioned himself as opposed to the wars of his predecessors while advocating for warcrimes, and we're again seeing that play out: violence without aims or rules in service of generating spectacle that plays well on TV & posts.
Yeah, not a great sign that they're just going to be experimenting on trans inmates like this and it's not a big story.
Danielle Froom 🏳️🌈@danifroom.bsky.social · 5mo agoThis week it was uncovered that the Trump regime is trying to "cure" trans prisoners of being transgender, while doing everything they can - from labeling our mere existence as explicit to stripping us of our legal documents - to ensure we *all* end up imprisoned in their ever-growing camps.
"American innovation" now refers to making a kind of atrocity cronut by combining insider trading with war crimes.
Bloomberg News@bloomberg.com · 5mo agoAs US and Israeli bombs fell on Iran this weekend, bettors on Polymarket — where $529 million was traded on contracts tied to the timing of the strikes — were cashing in
Kenneth Roth: It is a perilous world when the fate of entire countries rests on the whims of the likes of Trump and Netanyahu. I would love to see the Islamic Republic end, but not at the expense of a world where our destiny is dictated by the men with the biggest guns.
Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is an illegal act of aggression | Kenneth Roth
Their actions are no different from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo
theguardian.com
The facts suggest two interpretive frameworks for Iran: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the U.S. Join my live conversation with @phillipspobrien.bsky.social, 12:00pm ET, snyder.substack.com
📣 LOUDER
G Elliott Morris@gelliottmorris.com · 5mo agoThe entire Democratic strategy debate — "moderate" or move left? fight or compromise? — is based on a misreading of data. Voters don't think Dems are too progressive; they think Dems are weak. The actual math on what to do about this isn't even close! New: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/new-poll-d...
Likely-historic photo by NBC News of all the Epstein victims asked to raise their hands if they've not yet been asked to meet with the DOJ as Bondi testifies in foreground
We are murdering people and it is basically just background noise at this point. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/u...
U.S. Boat Strike Kills 2 in Pacific, With One Survivor
nytimes.com
Another classic post-Homan day where around school dismissal time we get a flurry of ICE vehicles all across our neighborhoods. Today one vehicle led an observer to their own home and pointed at it. This is a sick game to them, but we won’t be intimidated and we won’t stop until DHS is abolished.