VIDEO OF THE DAY: Top Democrat drops nightmare news for Trump, Republicans
Brian Tyler Cohen sits down with Democratic Rep. Josh Harder and discuss the GOP's determination to shoot themselves in the foot by kicking millions of people off their healthcare in order to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans.
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Let’s start talking about jail time for Trump and his MAGA enablers
Jason Linkins, The New Republic: "Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power. Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he’s rocketed into a new level of infamy. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI’s investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren’t dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—“has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.” This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I’m not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate. It’s an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration’s unlawful torture network to Wall Street’s ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The 'look forward, not backward' ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration. Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults’. This is where the avatars of 'Let the bad guys off the hook and move on' obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they’ll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical. We hear so much about the “rule of law” these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the “rule of law” is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It’s time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place."
Take Action: Demand Congress pass gun control laws to save lives!
Time is running out to stop Trump’s huge attack on Endangered Species Act
Earthjustice: For 50 years, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been used to save vulnerable species from extinction. Now, the Trump administration wants to severely undermine that common-sense principle and rewrite the rules to open the door to logging, mining, drilling, and development in vital habitats. The public comment period ends on May 19th — in just THREE DAYS — and we have to make our voices heard. Click here to tell the Trump administration that you support habitat protections for endangered species!
Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican
Anna Silman, The Guardian: "On the most recent episode of her YouTube show, the rightwing commentator Brett Cooper joined the rest of the world in jeering Katy Perry, Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez’s brief flight to space. 'These women were completely dependent on men who built this spacecraft,” she said with a cheeky smirk. “Frankly, we all are, because men built civilization. They built the homes that we live in, they built the studio that I am recording in … the spaceships that all of these rich celebrities are flying around in.” The difference between Cooper and feminists, she says, “is I choose to acknowledge that and celebrate it and be grateful.' There is a sizable audience for Cooper’s brand of disarming anti-feminist content. She had the second-fastest growing political YouTube channel in the first quarter of 2025 with over 900,000 new subscribers. Analyses of the 2024 election widely heralded the “manosphere” – the coalition of bro podcasters and YouTubers popular with male audiences – as key to delivering Donald Trump’s victory. Now, there are the beginnings of an organized effort to create a similar alternative rightwing media ecosystem targeting young female US audiences – one of the few demographics that has, until now, leaned substantially Democratic. This new “womanosphere” includes Cooper’s channel as well as lifestyle magazines like the Conservateur and Evie, Candace Owens’s Club Candace, Alex Clark’s Maha ('Make America Healthy Again') talkshow Culture Apothecary, conservative Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey’s Relatable, and swimmer turned anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines’s podcast Gaines For Girls. Draw the circle a bit wider and you get the 'tradwives' posting homemaking content on Instagram, the edgelord It Girls of Red Scare, and 'femcel' influencers positioning themselves as the female answer to Tate. While the women behind these outlets all have different styles and tactics, they are mostly aligned in their desire to return to a gender-essentialist worldview: women as submissive homemakers, men as strong providers. Like the manosphere influencers, these outlets are animated by a grievance against “wokeness” and the belief that conservatives are the real oppressed minority. They claim that the liberal media and Hollywood are promoting feminist propaganda, and so they must fight back. While quitting one’s corporate job to bake pies, milk cows and raise beautiful babies while wearing flowing nap-dresses may look like an appealing form of escapism, [women's magazine writer Maggie] Bullock said this lifestyle propaganda was serving a much more sweeping and nefarious conservative agenda. As she put it: 'If you’re going to tell a generation of young women that it’s bad to be a feminist, the Trump administration is pro-woman, that they should be having babies immediately and more of them and the pill is bad for them, that is a huge setback you’re proposing for American women.'"
Take Action: Demand Congress save our Head Start programs!
Pro-Israel neo-McCarthyism is rising in Indiana
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: "Earlier this year, Ben Robinson was due to speak at a law school class at the University of Chicago about Indiana’s recently passed SEA 202, a law that critics like the Indiana Conference of the American Association of University Professors had called 'dangerous legislation' that constituted “a threat to free speech and teaching reality.” Weeks earlier, Robinson, a professor of Germanic studies at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington and an outspoken critic of US support for the war in Gaza, heard a case was being investigated under the law, which allows university faculty to potentially be fired through anonymous accusations of squelching 'intellectual diversity.' “In the back of my mind is, ‘Who is this SEA 202 complaint about?’” recalls Robinson. A week later, he found out: it was him. Robinson, who is Jewish, is one of the first to be formally investigated under SEA 202, which was signed into law by Republican governor Mike Braun in March last year under blistering criticism from statewide faculty organizations and civil liberties groups. One critic charged it would create a “snitch system” that would lead professors to watch what they say lest they trigger a complaint that jeopardizes their livelihoods. Robinson’s case suggests those critics were right all along. But it’s also part of a growing nationwide effort targeting university professors over perceived left-wing bias, an effort that has gone hand in hand with escalating attacks on free speech driven by the desire to silence critics of Israeli policy. One of SEA 202’s key provisions is a five-year tenure review process that could see a tenured faculty member get demoted, face a pay cut, or even lose their job if they are found to have foisted their unrelated political views on students or failed to promote “intellectual diversity.” To that end, it also mandated that schools create a process to let students and employees submit complaints about faculty — a process that IU chose to effectively turn into a system for anonymous accusations. The investigation of Robinson comes amid extraordinary government pressure on colleges to crack down on antiwar speech. This past March, the Trump administration singled out IU and fifty-nine other schools for investigation under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, on the basis that they were failing to stop antisemitic harassment and discrimination. University professors were one of the chief targets singled out in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” a blueprint for a government-fueled crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism released shortly before the 2024 election result that explicitly modeled itself on the mid-century initiatives that later evolved into the McCarthyist Red Scare. That document has already anticipated a number of the Trump administration’s most aggressive pieces of overreach, justified today on the basis of protecting Jews — even though, as Robinson’s case shows, many of those being targeted in this campaign are Jewish themselves. That these two rising trends — punishment of pro-Palestinian speech at universities and efforts to weaken tenure — are advancing in tandem begs the question: Are we seeing the groundwork being laid for a revival of 1950s-style McCarthyism, one combining state power with private accusations that lead to professional consequences and a climate of fear? 'It’s not paranoid. This is obviously happening,' says [professor of political science at IU Bloomington Jeff] Isaac. 'It’s all the Left being targeted.'
Take Action: Denounce Trump's attacks on immigrants!
Rear Admiral Eileen Laubacher aims to sink Lauren Boebert's career
Eileen for Colorado: MAGA extremist Lauren Boebert represents everything that’s wrong with the modern GOP. A Trump sycophant who rubber-stamps the worst of his excesses — when she’s not making a fool of herself in House hearings or getting thrown out of children’s theater productions — Lauren Boebert barely survived her last election, winning by only 594 votes. Her conduct in Congress has inspired former National Security Council member Rear Admiral Eileen Laubacher to run for Congress, flip her VERY winnable seat blue, and restore our congressional majority! Will you make a donation and help jump-start her campaign?
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