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This piece in The Atlantic takes a look at the election results with a fresh eye: Five days after last month’s election, Senator Chris Murphy rendered a damning verdict on his party’s performance. “That was a cataclysm,” the Connecticut Democrat wrote on X. “Electoral map wipeout.” Donald Trump had won both the popular vote and the biggest Electoral College victory—312 to 226—for any Republican since 1988; Democrats had lost their Senate majority and appeared unlikely to retake the House. The Democratic Party had lost touch with far too many American voters, Murphy concluded: “We are beyond small fixes.” Other prominent Democrats saw a similarly sweeping repudiation of the party’s brand. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a statement issued less than 24 hours after the polls closed. At the time of those reactions, millions of votes had yet to be counted, and several of the nation’s closest House races remained uncalled.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Our new book, Religion Is Not Done With You, came out on Election Day—and what...

If you’re like me, this whole crypto craze is somewhat mystifying. And I really don’t understand the necessity for it. Paul Krugman at his Substack has the answer: crime. The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends. He goes on to point out that this is actually the opposite of what the whole Bitcoin revolution was supposed to do which was eliminate the need for banks: What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.

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As Tom mentioned this morning in this excellent piece, it sure feels as if whatever resistance there was to Trump during the past 8 years is evaporating. Most of those who haven’t decided to jump on the MAGA bandwagon just don’t want to hear about it. CNN reported yesterday that its latest poll shows that 72% of those polled say they’re paying little to no attention to Trump-related news. I wrote about one early bright spot in all this a while back: the Blue State Governors. At the moment they seem to be the only ones showing a willingness to fight. Rolling Stone took a deep dive into their plans: Among governors, [Illinois Governor] Pritzker has been out in front — positioning himself as the blue-state anti-Trump. The Hyatt hotel heir is a billionaire himself, worth nearly $4 billion, which counts as fuck-you money in an age when opposing Trump can carry significant costs, from increased security to the risk of retaliatory litigation, or “lawfare.” In November, Pritzker launched a new organization, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, that seeks to unify state-based opposition to Trump’s agenda. Unveiled with co-chair Gov.

A visit with evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant.

The post Back to the Galapagos appeared first on Nautilus.

The Opposition’s shadow minister for home and foreign affairs, Barnaby Joyce, has pledged to make it illegal in Australia to sell gingerbread people without baked on genitals, in an effort to combat wokeness. ”I’ve had a bloody gutful, what is... Read More ›

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s supported this site this year. It’s a validation of the work we put into it and I appreciate it so much. It appears that indy media, however small, is going to be more important than ever in these next few years. Thanks to you, we’ll be here doing our best to make sense of it all. I don’t honestly know what most people care about anymore but I do know that some of us still find Trump’s attempted coup one of the most shocking events we’ve ever witnessed. A president inciting a mob to storm the Capitol during a joint session of Congress to overturn the presidential election is the most destabilizing event in recent memory. That we’ve put that president back in the White House is a very disturbing sign that this country has lost its moorings. Trump discussed his plans to pardon the insurrectionists in his recent TIME Magazine interview: Well, we’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail.

Sanctions, privatization, and reconstruction: Washington’s approach to post-Assad Syria offers a glimpse into the true nature of America’s foreign policy agenda.

The post Privatizing Syria: US Plans to Sell Off a Nation’s Wealth After Assad appeared first on MintPress News.

MAYADA, a young Yazidi woman living within her community in Coffs Harbour, has won a place in the 2025 ABC Heywire competition after entering her story of escaping her ISIS captors in Syria. Heywire is a true story competition from the ABC which calls young people in regional, rural and remote Australia to tell accounts...

The post Coffs-based Yazidi woman wins Heywire true story competition appeared first on News Of The Area.

It looks like Kash Patel isn’t the only one implementing the vengeance agenda and Russ Vought won’t be the only ones demanding total loyalty in the executive branch. Others are helping with the dirty work: Staffers working for the DOGE duo, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have contacted some of Trump’s first-term cabinet secretaries and asked them to prepare two lists of people they served with: one for political appointees and the other for career officials. The listmakers are then to write an “A” by the names of those they believe Trump should bring back or keep, and a “B” by the names of those they think should be blacklisted or fired. Of course, civil servants (the career officials) are typically protected from political raids at agencies, but Trump has vowed to use Schedule F, an executive order that would make them fireable—and these plans for mass layoffs will almost certainly wind up before the courts. I would have thought those two would be huddled over spreadsheets and policy papers deciding the BIG QUESTION of how to slash a third of the government in the first year.