Another related article, three Yale professors are leaving for Canada: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/yale-university-scholars-t...
Brain drain is happening in real time.
replies(4):
Brain drain is happening in real time.
And I've thought our wana-be-authorian politicians are greates idiots of all, but there seems to be running some kind of global world competion to find them and let them ruin their countries.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1490737/brussels-university-vu...
https://history.yale.edu/people/timothy-snyder
There is clearly an intentional narrative being pushed that defines anyone who disagrees with the current administration’s ideology as an enemy who should be punished. Even if the risk to any one person is currently relatively small, just the threat itself will have profound effects on individual’s decisions.
A massive brain drain seems inevitable but such a war on free speech will also radicalise people, even if it starts only in whispers. That will likely necessitate further oppressive measures to “stamp it out” and so forth, creating a vicious cycle. With each iteration the stakes increase, justifying increasingly violent measures & countermeasures on both sides, further increasing the consequences of — and the need avoid — actually being held accountable for those actions…
Matter of fact pretending to be an idiot and doing idiotic things might be worse cause you know better, an idiot’s excuse would be that that’s all they know to do.
But of course the survival of crazy policies hinges on people willing to elect politicians who will implement them. And that in turn hinges on how well you disinform them.
Fun fact, the leader of Alberta is hanging around Trump and others in his orbit a ton and having a generally great time. That isn't a coincidence:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/danielle-smith-has-g...
Does the UK have an issue with over-policing of twitter? Absolutely it does.
Are the tightening of protest laws concerning? Yes, very much so.
But it's nothing like the rhetoric and destruction of due process happening in the USA.
People are getting arrested and deported with no due process for expressing opinions? The UK government is rewriting history to remove women and gays?
No, you're just confusing the existence of hate crimes in UK law, and maybe the dumb migrant detention in Rwanda scheme (which has since been cancelled), both of which have due process, are public, and ridiculous to compare.
I don’t see how it could be believable that Vance is actually religious and isn’t just using it as a way to get votes.
Then we also have the Signal chat, and even biographies and books by some of the others that makes it clear done of these people are genuinely dumb as fuck.
I bet China, India and EU will soon overtake America in sciences. Made in America may yet become the new made in Bangladesh.
What is next?
- Maybe punish citizens for their views that do not align with the state sanctioned perspective, rather than just Green Card and immigrants. In this case, I expect some type of black list that deals economic damage to those on it. I can imagine some type of wide ranging social media bans for those on the list.
- Further erode the rule of law and empower the president as a unity power. Or alternatively marketed, deal with corrupt judges who want to upend the will of a democratically elected leader.
This play book has happened so many times recently, Putin in Russia, Netanyahu is doing it in Israel right now, Erdoğan in Turkey.
It seems this is where the US is headed and I do not see any off ramps in the need term.
In earlier biographies Trump bragged about his vengeful nature. How he would gladly bear a grudge for a decade if that would allow him to finally get even. To Trump winning is justice. He fantasizes about destroying any FBI agent that had the audacity to investigate him. And any judge that found him guilty. Or any politician that voted for his impeachment. Canada and Europe have mocked Trump for decades, but who's laughing now?
Vengeance seem so old-fashioned. Most of us don't seek vengeance or bear grudges. But to Trump getting even -- winning -- is everything.
Are you referring for instance to Claudine Gay? It seems to fit, IMHO.
Additionally, yeah there have been "social media offenses" in the recent years. Individuals have been arrested for comments made on social media platforms. Try it out. Communications Act 2003 come to mind.
Are people not entitled to lawyers in the US?
In any case, there is authority overreach in both countries (and more).
* https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-immigration-aut...
https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210327 ("Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (theatlantic.com)" (2015), 59 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41583725 ("Timothy Snyder on How the Collapse of the Soviet Union Took America by Surprise (lithub.com)" (2024), 87 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104723 ("How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end? (snyder.substack.com)" (2022), 88 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=timothy%20snyder
And a few more here (Algolia search censors things that were flagged),
Its just crazy. Are they seriously going to bully current allies and start wars with them?
* https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/03/27/three-prominent-ya...
It sounds like this is viewed as revenge? The trend of using state power as revenge against groups one doesn't like is problematic and can be escalatory. As it escalates, eventually groups will fear the loss state power and that can lead to the end of democracy.
Yes. As someone else remarked online, there is a world of difference between an effectively zero chance of this terrible outcome, and a non-zero chance.
It's a change in kind not in degree, and people will react to that.
Here is a recent New York Times major article titled: "How Trump’s ‘51st State’ Canada Talk Came to Be Seen as Deadly Serious"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/world/canada/trump-trudea...
Here is NBC News headline:
"Trump's quest to conquer Canada is confusing everyone: President Donald Trump increasingly links a trade war to his push to annex America's northern neighbor."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-quest-co...
The underlying issue is that it makes sense from a long-term economic standpoint if you ignore everything else. Canada has tons of resources and even more land which will get more valuable as the world warms. Argicultural regions may shift northward if there is significant warming and that could hurt the US and benefit Canada. So strategically there is logic.
The main complicating factor is that Trump can be quite erratic in his views, so it may just shift off of his plate and he focuses on something else if we are lucky.
The hate is still there, but the "they" is now Trump/GOP and friends.
Lots of politically-right folks in the US have been a fan Hungary's Orban for a while now:
* https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-donald-tru...
* https://newrepublic.com/article/175368/why-republicans-love-...
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/10/hungary-vikt...
Here's an issue I have, it's that if you dig into the backstory of 90% of the people claiming this narrative, it's not what happened. They aren't "cancelled for their opinions" but instead they are making decisions that lead to their blackball.
Consider the case of Judy Mikovits. She likes to claim that she was fired for her wild ideas. But that's not why. She was fired because she was stealing a colleagues mail, got put on probation, and then had her understudy steal her laptop (which she never returned).
Her firing has nothing to do with bad thought.
I encourage you to point out other examples because they all tend to end like this. It's compelling to have a "I was cancelled" story.
But also, this just isn't the same. These "cancelled" people are pretty much all on the podcast/media train. Some of them making a decent chunk of change. That's completely different from having a van with masked strangers pull up, grab you off the street, and then ultimately imprison you who knows where with no access to a lawyer. Potentially ending with you being sent to an El Salvadoran death camp.
These are not the same thing.
Legitimately people are asking for a King. Right wing, supposed to be ultra-Americans are asking for a king.
As long as he promises to make their bank accounts grow, and make their perceived enemies suffer, they want a king.
I am absolutely astounded by what's going on around me right now
So-called "accelerationists" are excited about this. But empires take a long time to die and go out with a bang rather than just fading peacefully into history.
What we're witnessing with universities and the illegal black-bagging of legal visitors and permanent residents is an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. Only the McCarthy era probably comes close. We are very much in the era of thoughtcrime [1].
Fascism flames out because when loyalty is the only thing that matters, the administration turns into sycophantic morons. The courts won't save us. They've long since been subverted, a key pillar of the 50+ year Republican Project. There is no serious opposition to any of this.
There is no safe haven from this either. It's not Europe. Just look at the elections and political momentum in the UK, France, Germany and Hungary.
What's sad is the number of people who champion this as if it's going to make their lives any better. But cruelty, revenge and repression is the point. There are an awful lot of people who have legitimate grievances about the destruction of their standard of living, their material conditions. Yet nobody has done anything to address those concerns.
Things are going to get very, very bad.
This still is not how you do things.
For starters, if they are terrorists, then they should be locked up in our jails, not deported where they can continue to plan attacks.
But before we do that, shouldn't we have a trial? You know, the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing? How do we know, for example, that this isn't just a case of mistaken identity? Or a zealous ICE agent? Heck, how do we know that this isn't some agent getting back at his girlfriend?
That's why we have courts and trials.
Canada can retaliate in a trade war, but if it is real annexation/invasion, Canada cannot effectively fight back. It would be a walk in the park for the US. We do not have the military resources, our popular is 1/10 the US, and our weapons are mostly supplied by the US, so they may not even work in a real war. And unlike with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, no one is coming to our aid.
Also the US would likely do it incrementally and start with a friendly province like Alberta, where a significant minority may even welcome it.
People are really, really good at believing things that benefit themselves.
Certainly Iraq pre-invasion made them look like a pushover!
That's not to say that invading would be painless, but let's not pretend that Canada would have a chance.
When you are welcomed at someone's house, you don't start going around by lecturing them on how to run their house.
They are free to support Hamas, just not in the US as students.
Yes the cynicism is there, but the "praying" is the means by which the subject performing the acts is able to feel authentic while performing them.
Also they're all performing for each other, too.
We cannot just wish the current administration away. It is the result of the fact that the US system is seen as broken by many outside of coastal elites. And that they do not like being trodden on in the names of covid, climate or equity.
The sooner the opponents of the current administration start working on issues that matter to people they lost (instead of going further left and screaming louder), the less damage Trump can inflict. My 2c.
Non-citizens have 1st Amendment rights in the United States. They also have Due Process rights. People, even non-citizens, are absolutely allowed to have and share legitimately abhorrent views on any topic they want.
So long as he hurts the right people, they love him.
It's because they blame their current status on "the other". Why can't they get a job? Because a foreigner "stole" it. Why is government aid failing to keep up? Because the bad people that don't deserve it are draining their deserved benefit.
But further, their religious texts say times will get tough before their Messiah comes back, so if Trump makes them personally suffer "well, hopefully Jesus will be back soon".
They absolutely are free to support Hamas (with words and assembly, not with financing). The 1st Amendment has no exemption for "except if it's pro-bad-guy" nor for "except if you're a student" nor for "except if you're not a US citizen."
> When you are welcomed at someone's house, you don't start going around by lecturing them on how to run their house.
We're not talking about a guest in a house. We're talking about a person in the US's jurisdiction. Our Constitution explicitly protects their right to do this.
The 1st Amendment's Free Speech protection is not limited to citizens, nor is the 5th Amendment's Due Process protection. The 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause makes that totally unambiguous: if you are within US jurisdiction, you have Constitutional rights.
Eventually there could be an entire political capture of these social media companies, universities, journalists, NGOS etc where 90%+ of its employees subscribe to one political party .
But it gets even worse. If this continues we could see activist judges try to throw political rivals in jail. They would even change the law in order to try to get them to go to prison, combining misdemeanors into felonies.
And this says nothing about the rhetoric. By casting political opponents as villains, this invites assassination attempts and general lawlessness to intimidate people perceived as not falling in line. By this point the media will be complicit so there will be no investigation into these activities. Even a failed assassination attempt would be at most a few day story with no reporting on motive or coordination.
I too am very concerned about all of this.
Growing up at the end of the Cold War with basically every major political figure decrying the USSR’s political apparatchiks monitoring everything, I never expected that to happen here but having watched the right’s embrace of Orban it wasn’t a surprise by the time it happened. The guys who brought us “freedom fries” crowded everyone else out of the party.
Now the administration is staffed entirely with maga loyalists and Trump has appointed a substantial portion of the entire federal judiciary, up to creating a supermajority in the supreme court. The barriers are gone.
So now we get the white house deliberately messaging the suffering of others. Kristi Noem in front of prisoners in El Salvador. Tweets of people in shackles or AI images of people weeping while being arrested, presented to the glee of adoring fans. "We love hurting these people" is the message.
I would say it's well past 'floating'.
He's already signed the EO to end it, and now it's up to SCOTUS. This is like saying someone is floating the idea of getting a pizza, when they're in the store, pie in hand, waiting for the payment to clear.
But ok, then let's say they said or wrote wrong words. How do we know that actually happened? Trust ICE? How do we know they were on Visas? How do we know ICE didn't abduct the wrong people?
You haven't gotten around the problem of no due process.
They have given up on the "make their bank accounts grow" thing. The tariff tax and stock market sliding down doesn't appear to bother them. Neither does the fact that he promised to make their groceries cheaper in one day. And the opposite is happening.
Making the perceived enemies suffer is the big thing. "I may not have enough to feed my family, but if you make marginalized people I don't like suffer, you have my support."
Not every politician is motivated solely by winning one more election.
If US annexation of Canada started to look like a fait accompli, and Trump was threatening terrible retributions for anyone who resisted him—which politicians would resist, and which would become Carrie Lams, or Pétains?
You may be right about the other aspects, but "annexation", which Trump has proposed, isn't a negotiated thing, it is something that is forced.
I think the left may see that being conciliatory and moving to the center isn't the way to win. Trump didn't do that and it worked. I think people see that Bernie and AOC are the only politicians on the left that people are actually excited about. They can do the Trump playbook but from the left. Run as something new and untried.
Otherwise the left just becomes Trump-lite, undifferentiated and not as good as the original.
I think when people view the system as broken, they want to try new things. So be something new.
Yes, but it is shifting. The recent special elections are good data points, though special elections draw very motivated voters.
To your point, I think media bans will be next (Trump has floated many times). If they can ban all media except Fox and X, MAGAs will be able to lie with impunity continuing to control the narrative.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/27/demo...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/gop-anxiety-persi...
Again, you are free to speak your mind. Just, that, if I invited you to dinner at my home and you start criticizing everything I'll gently ask you to leave and go have dinner elsewhere.
I get you are being cute, but let's be real. Nothing "the left" did compares to this.
The current issue isn't the US deporting or revoking visas. The issue is there's a process to both do that, which involves a trial, and a process to deport, which also involves a trial.
Neither of those are happening. Instead, the admin is unilaterally decreeing a visa or citizenship is invalid and then they are rushing individuals across the country with promises of a direct flight to El Salvador.
One of the many reasons we have trials is to ensure that the agency actually caught the right person.
Although I think AOC and Bernie fire up their own base, the people who do not need firing up and will vote for the left anyway. I think going harder left will likely alienate people whom the democrats recently lost and a more centrist agenda can attract more people repelled by Trump’s antics.
I am not a politician, but if left goes farther left I personally will be sitting out the next election regardless of how crazy Donald gets.
1) ZERO citizenships are being "decreed invalid". I don't know where you get any ideas to the opposite.
2) revoking a visa does not involve a trial. ANY border control officer can do that, for any reason, including for no reason. This has always happened, including under Biden or Obama, only the reasons have changed (a bit)
3) only removing a green card requires "a trial". It's specified between scare quotes because it is called a trial but is NOT subject to the normal rules of justice (to give one extreme example: you do not have the right to a jury trial, you don't even have the right to be present at trial). The judges are employees of the executive (hired and fired, NOT appointed) and thus under the control of the executive (ie. Trump).
It's definitely a step up from the visa "process" but ...
It's like "youth court". It's called a trial. It happens in a courtroom. In youth court, the judges are actual judges. BUT IT'S NOT A TRIAL. You don't have the right to defense. You don't have the right to a jury trial (or the same as immigration, you don't even have the right to be present).
4) You can leave ICE detention by "self-removing". This involves proving you've booked a flight, and they will bring you to the airport to catch your flight. So you're not detained.
5) this is just utterly ridiculous: "One of the many reasons we have trials is to ensure that the agency actually caught the right person"
Yes. But these are NOT trials (even the green card removal isn't). To get US citizenship you must prove yourself for, at minimum, 10 years, often more, the the executive of the US government.
6) I would ALSO like to point out that what Trump is doing is the norm in the whole world. Including in Europe. In the Netherlands, protesting while on a VISA is stupid, and if you get arrested, you will be removed. Maybe not the first time, but it will happen. I hear France is the same.
Miles beyond most other right wing parties. https://on.ft.com/4iqh3qA
The idea of the US going to war with Canada is seriously stupid. Canada has fought beside the US military. There are deep ties between the countries that go much deeper than trade, many close friendships, and family connections across the border.
The US will not start a war with Canada, despite what Trump may make you think.
If you want to deconstruct the status quo, make sure that your outcomes will be actually be better for you. Even Stalin ended up as a victim of his regime at the end of days, his physician ending up arrested and being interrogated while his health declined.
How do you know they aren't?
There was no trial to determine that these people even have visas, it's just the accusations of the administration.
The admin is additionally working hard to try and shield who they are deporting.
Disregarding legal directives of judiciary is another aspect of these events that is highly concerning.
Freedom of speech, rule of law, not having an (unofficial) aristocracy, and undivided loyalty for our nation (alone) are (were?) the essence of American values.
> I think it's entirely reasonable to rethink our relationship with the people that are obviously exploiting the process.
That is irony for you folks. I'll let you do the thinking on the unspoken matter here.
2) Fair point.
3) You still have a right to appeal unfavorable determinations.
4) This assumes the ICE agents are following the laws. I don't believe they are.
5) Even as someone caught by ICE you still have the rights to an attorney and you have legal rights to claim this was a false arrest. ICE may have extra enforcement capabilities over non-citizens, it cannot hold citizens.
6) One of the most recent deportees, Rumeysa Ozturk, didn't protest. She wrote an op ed [2]. Further, ICE violated judicial orders not to deport. [3]
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/01/27/trum...
[2] https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/29/us/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts-unive...
Republican state governors and legislators have drank the Trump Kool aid, Democrats need trump to run against to stay in office.
The people are fat and lazy and either comfortable or uncomfortable enough not to have spare time.
It's a fucking train wreck. Nothing means anything and everything is bullshit.
How about we treat humans like humans before we suddenly start legal nitpicking? It's not like these people are listening to actual legal authorities to begin with.
Doesn't sound very free. Nor legal.
If the judicial branch chooses not to check that power for partisan reasons, they will continue not to check that power as they exercise it more.
Which is exactly what your example Rumeysa Oztruk is doing, and ICE seems to be respecting the order. Which undercuts your point number 4 a bit. If she asked to leave detention by leaving the US, would ICE stop her, and forcibly keep her in detention? I'm going to assume "no" ... why would ICE violate one inconvenient law, but respect another?
ICE could make the argument she is only in detention because she explicitly asked for it, that she is only detained because she delayed her deportation.
But more than that, I think Rumeysa Ozturk is yet another example of someone who just won't get support from people. She's a rich kid being given an easy path in life, yelling loudly how bad the people helping her are, and ... good luck defending that one in an economy where people are losing jobs.
Probably she's here on the dime of her parents, with a scholarship (a PhD IS a scholarship, a subsidy, so there's really just a question of how much it covers), with the goal of letting her immigrate into the US and get a better job, better life, here than she could ever hope to get in Turkey ... the world is extremely UNfair, and she is the benefactor of enormous unfairness.
Given what has happened to the economy in the past few years, and how many people have experienced setbacks 10x worse than losing a free and easy path in life.
To some extent people don't seem to realize "you want the right for an easy path in life for people in X (Turkey, China, Gaza, ...). Fine, Great even, but the US government FIRST must create such path for everyone in Appalachia. You want it done for Turks? Great. I even agree that that should be done. But not by the US government, by the Turkish government"
And yes this is a "if I can't have it, you can't have it either" argument, and it is mean, jealous and vindictive ... but Rumeysa's defense is essentially "let them eat cake". She has support from the US government for her education, which many locals don't have (and many MAGA are going to say a student in education sciences isn't helping the US, she's just taking jobs and subsidies away from US people. This isn't entirely untrue. She is not an exceptional talent that will elevate the US, economically or politically, or even in sport, or otherwise. In other words, she's "wasting" the US government support she's receiving, bluntly why shouldn't US citizens have first dibs on wasting US government support?)
In that situation she goes out writing op-ed, complaining, doing what the executive (even under Biden) would consider sabotaging US government policy? sigh. Really?
To add insult to injury, to put it VERY mildly, what is happening in Turkey, is still a lot worse than what is happening to her. The US doesn't seem to be able to count on Turkey's help to rectify those problems. She wants to fix the world, yell at a government? Then go join the yelling at Turkey's government, they have destroyed their universities, replacing all teachers with Erdogan loyalists, imprisoning tens of thousands just for holding a university job (and I guarantee every last teacher, assistant and student on a visa was deported from Turkey, regardless of their political stance). Turks, who supported that (she seems to care about religion, which in Turks is a near-guarantee that they support Erdogan). And then she loudly criticizes the US for using money and visa policy to influence university positions? (as opposed to what HER government does: arresting, imprisoning for decades, even torturing the entire faculty staff)
So I also predict you will not see any real uprising against this until people can't make the argument "she could easily have avoided this in 10 different ways and effectively chose this path".
It sucks, but you just won't.
Having the state police arrest people without an explanation is in and of itself evil. Citizen or no.
So yeah, I'm going to make the worst assumption about why they are doing this because they should have to explain themselves. We still, presumably, live in a democracy where the state is accountable to the people. Letting the state police remove civil rights for opaque reasons should always be treated as them doing it for the worst possible reasons.
Only after defying the order to keep her in Mass. and illegally transporting her to a detention facility in Louisiana.
ICE and the Trump admin are operating under "Ask for forgiveness" with their actions. If they think a Judge will stop them, they try to act before the order is disseminated to claim "woopiedoodle".
As for everything about how she's not a perfect victim. I just don't care. Even if she's a serial killer, she shouldn't be treated like this. We have laws and procedures for how we treat people. At a bare minimum even the worst person on earth deserves not to be disappeared.
I also don't really care that "well turkey is worse". Why does that matter? North Korea is worse, does that mean an asylum seeker from there has no rights to express any opinion against the US government?
A foundational part of the US government is that political speech is and should be protected.
I also don't think you actually read the op ed. It did not criticize the US government.
The entire op ed can be summed up as "The student senate voted that you should divest from Israel. You should follow what the students have told you to do". That's it. It gave reasons for divestment and historical comparisons to the divestment of south africa. It did not actually mention US policy of funding israel in any way.
Can foreign spouses of US activists be deported for being associated with them?
But yes, the current US administration is drifting into the same category as China or Russia.
Ergo, all peoples within the United States are entitled to their due process.
This administration is welcome to push for a constitutional amendment to strip due process rights from non-citizens, if they'd like to change the law.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8... [1] https://www.finduslaw.com/us-constitution-5th-14th-amendment...
> I just don't like people taking advantage of the permissive immigration system in the US that me and so many others have benefited from.
That every American without native American heritage has.
Otherwise, it's it's a group of people collecting un-named people, deporting them, and them saying "trust us, we got it right".
But let's say for the sake of argument that no explanation was provided, even privately to her and her attorney. I would agree that's bad, even if it's legal in the case of visa holders.
But why should that cause us to make assumptions about the reason? And if we're going to make assumptions, why this particular one? Why not assume she was detained because an officer didn't like the color of her shoes?
In that case, especially, she should be treated like this.
> We have laws and procedures for how we treat people
And this is what those laws say. On a visa, the executive can chose to remove you immediately from the country, for any reason. That means Trump, since the election. If you don't leave yourself (that means an immediate one-way flight out), you can get deported. This is not illegal.
> I also don't really care that "well turkey is worse". Why does that matter?
Because 1) she's Turkish 2) she's religious
This very likely means she's an Erdogan supporter and will defend destroying Turkish academia by arresting, disappearing and deporting students and staff. To put it simple: on top of everything else she's Turkish version of a MAGA nutcase. She supports removing university staff and students on a large scale ... and now it happened to her.
Protests need to be taking place. This isn't a bi partisan issue but a constitutional crisis that will destroy our country if we do not overturn these illegal EOs.
April 5th come support the national protest.
Maybe as India gets richer and the UK economy flatlines they'll stop doing that.
Fucking horseshit.
Some were tired of the media ignoring stories like the Biden laptop story.
Others wanted more details on Hunters $500k no show Ukrainian job. Or disliked that Trump was tried on novel charges.
Personally, I think the way Hollywood has been weaponized is worth overthrowing. That’s a giant propaganda machine.
Institutions like NPR, which had 87 directors that are Democrats and no Republicans. Doesn’t seem right, does it?
So not everybody is alarmed. It’s only dark if you’re on one side of the political spectrum.
What they want is mostly fair representation in media, entertainment, and politics. Look no further than Saturday Night Live to understand how conservatives are misrepresented and liberals are given a free pass. Fix that and people will generally be more satisfied.
When did this happen? If you're referring to the "Twitter files", then you're take on this is very misinformed and the government did not coerce Twitter to suppress the laptop story. It was even found that Republicans submitted so many similar requests that Twitter had to keep a special database to track those requests.
The right wing has a weird persecution complex while they have the biggest cable news network in the US (Fox News), just got control of all three branches of government, and had a billionaire buy Twitter for them to help their guy win.
Will you only be satisfied if everyone agrees with you and drinks the Trump kool-aid? Also note that the "other" political party you're referring to didn't deny the election results and try to overthrow the government.
The endless litigation in the laptop case against Hunter Biden wasn't enough? Every media company must also cover it if MAGA says so?
> Others wanted more details on Hunters $500k no show Ukrainian job
Hunter Biden does not and has not held any position in public office, but regardless a House Republican investigation into the Biden family found no wrongdoing[0].
I'm sorry that you feel persecuted when your side just got control of all three branches of government, had the richest man in the world buy Twitter to help you win, and also controls the largest cable news network in the country.
But even if that is true, it is also true that Chavez took many actions to centralize power, erode democratic safeguards in the Constitution, control the media and destroy the opposition parties. Every step was justified by pointing to the horrible rightist conspiracy against Chavez. But the end result was a dictatorship and the absolute ruin of the Venezuelan state.
This is normal for dictators. Many cast themselves as victims. Stalin was pressed on all sides by Capitalists, Kulaks, and Trotskyists. Hitler, of course, by Jews and Communists. Whether the accusations are pure fantasy or rooted in some level of real persecution of the movement, it is very important not to allow them to be used to justify the establishment of tyranny.
The story was suppressed at the FBI's insistence until after the election. They were spreading that it was Russian disinformation to ensure it wouldn't harm the Democrats, including getting social media sites to remove posts about it.
> "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not, and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case," the letter said.[0]
> called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.[1]
> That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company. The newly empowered Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now devoting significant resources and time to investigating this supposed “collusion” between liberal politicians and Twitter.[1]
[0]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115286/documents/...
Taxpayer funded Politico also went live with headlines "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say".
The reveal was shut down fast by the Biden white-house.
https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docu...
"Furthermore, officials within the CIA recognized at the time that the Hunter Biden statement was political and would hurt the Agency. The signatories’ decision to leverage their former intelligence community titles to promote a narrative about foreign election interference improperly embroiled the Agency in domestic politics. This report underscores the potential dangers of a politicized intelligence community."
You'll never see me defending our intelligence apparatus and I agree that it's bad they involved themselves. But, government agents can submit strongly worded letters all they want. It doesn't mean anything.
Same thing applies to slavery, then, since every race has been enslaved before. Would you say slavery is OK, too, considering it has been common practice by then by race or nationality X?
The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-admi...
Chat logs, published just this Tuesday by the House Judiciary Committee on X, show that the gag order extended to an FBI analyst who attempted to alert social media companies that the laptop was authentic—before these companies moved to censor the story’s spread.
Plese read the thread at: https://x.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1907098412652052870
Nutshell: So, the FBI under Biden stated that the laptop story had all the signs of a Russian misinformation op. When an agent wanted to correct the record and mention that the laptop was genuine, he was made to shut up. If this isn't explicit partisan interference during an election period, the there is no standard of evidence that will convince you.