Peter Birkenhead

@pbirk.bsky.social

Bylines in The Daily Beast, The Week, McSweeney’s, The NY Daily News, Salon, LA Review of Books, US News, the Washington Post, The Awl, The Morning News, Marie Claire, MORE, Chicago Tribune, others. substack.com/@peterbirkenhead

here is what i think: we're not consumers or spectators, we are participants with agency. you should not hope that democrats will do anything. you must work to force them to do the right thing. the odds are long, but we are far from the first americans to face long odds. we will win.

jamelle@jamellebouie.net · last mo.

you know, when someone says something like "these are the things that need to be done to avert disaster" and your response is "you think democrats will do that?!?" all you're telling me is that you think politics is a spectator sport

NYT is always "progressives should abandon their principles! Sell out! Sell out! SELL OUT!" This is something you will constantly find at the NYT, a piece dressed up as a news article that is editorializing frantically for a political position, not neutrally presenting the facts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/climate/democrats-climate-change-oil-gas.html

oh my GOD I've been a Democrat my whole damn life and my whole damn life I've been told that if we demonstrated greater ~nuance~ around my right to MY OWN DAMN BODY, we'd regain/hold on to power. MY BODY IS NOT YOUR FUCKING BARGAINING CHIP.

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When I look at the last five years of abortion rights, I think it is Democrats who must show nuance and compromise. I analyze American politics for a living. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/o...

The Missing Middle in the Abortion Debate

i really do think they believe that because they're "good" on policy that they don't owe people anything on a human level, and if you're a woman who believes in the same policies but also understands the capacity even "good" men have to be cruel then you're weak

The thing about the left needing a positive vision for masculinity to counter the right is … they don’t have one either. Their whole thing is “don’t be a woman” as arbitrarily defined by whatever they consider feminine. Apparently some people find this admirable and wish to imitate it

When her emails provided a look behind the curtain at Hillary, we saw an integrity completely at odds with her public image of corruption. When Epstein’s emails provided a look behind the curtain at powerful men, we glimpsed corruption completely at odds with their public image of integrity.  h

Serious Men and the Water They Swim In

I’ll never forget the feeling I got about an hour into reading Hillary Clinton’s emails after they were released in 2016.

open.substack.com

No more pretense or excuses. Trump and his team have made the white supremacist foundations of this project explicit and clear. If you enable this you need to face who and what you are. But you can always choose another way. Choose humanity. Decency. Equality. Democracy.

Sherrilyn Ifill@sifill.bsky.social · 8mo ago

To make common cause with this Administration is to support an affirmatively white supremacist vision of this country. Period. Every corporation. Every Republican. Every influencer. Every Governor. Every evangelical leader. Every voter. Yes. Every voter.

This is a demand, that if raised loudly by the base, the congressional Democrats will have an incredibly hard time avoiding or ignoring. What are they going to say? That this is a distraction? That it’s too complicated? That they can get this deal without leverage? That Latino voters can drop dead?

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Democrats can demand a rollback of the Supreme Court ICE racial profiling case. It’s a trivial legislative fix. It poses virtually no political risk for them. It protects 68 million people from open government persecution. It protects basic constitutional values. No government funding without this.

“We should all remember Washington, D.C.’s most violent day was sparked by Trump himself. What’s more, D.C.’s safety won’t come from militarization, but rather through decreasing unemployment, ending ICE’s kidnapping of neighbors, and restoring funding to Medicaid, SNAP and public schools.”

Free DC models effective resistance to Trump’s takeover

DC residents’ rapid response to Trump's National Guard deployment is a masterclass in how to prepare for crises and fight authoritarianism.

wagingnonviolence.org

News --> Top Dems are demanding that the Pentagon disclose any/all internal memos and policy guidance involving DHS's push for more militarization of domestic enforcement. It's a response to our reporting on DHS talks w/Pentagon on this. Details in my new piece: newrepublic.com/article/1990...

“Alarming”: Trump’s Threat of Troops in Cities Just Got Much Scarier

Top Democrats are demanding that the Pentagon release documentation of internal conversations about future militarization of domestic law enforcement.

newrepublic.com

STFU, RFK Jr, you ridiculous idiot. You don't care about the wellbeing of patients. You care about politics. You are actively undermining doctors' ability to protect their patients from measles and COVID. Your party forces women who have miscarried to bleed out in parking lots over your politics.

Bild

We have appended an Editor’s Note to our story about President Kennedy, who was declared dead from bullet wounds in Dallas, Texas. After publication, the Times learned that he also had a preexisting back condition.

Bild

Who among us hasn’t given a birthday card to the world’s most notorious pedophile in which we draw a picture of a naked woman and write “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. May every day be another wonderful secret.”?