"I do not deride any of this in the least" : U.S. POLITICS OCTOBER 2025

I woke up early so I could finish reading yesterday's district court ruling in the American Association of University Professors' suit, from which the title is drawn:

Triumphalism is the very essence of the Trump brand. Often
this is naught but hollow bragging: “my perfect administration,”
wearing a red baseball cap in the presidential oval office
emblazoned “Trump Was Right About Everything,” or most recently
depicting himself as an officer in the First Cavalry Division.49 Unfortunately, this tends to obscure the very real and sweeping
changes President Trump has wrought in his first year in office. If change is a mark of success, President Trump is the most
successful president in history.

49 I do not deride any of this in the least. Evidently, this
is markedly effective with a broad swath of our people.

Good morning!

I'm not gonna go back through a few days of Rupar vids, but recently he shared a clip of Louisiana's governor basically inviting Trump to send the army into New Orleans & Baton Rouge. Is this the first time in this administration that a Red State gov. has asked Trump to go to town on their Blue Cities? I do know there's also been talk from up top about Memphis, but how on-board is Bill Lee with that?

Oh, super on board. Lee and both Tennessee senators went to the Oval Office for the announcement of the Memphis deployment.

fwiw I talked about this the other week here: https://theprogressivesouth.org/headlights-ep-22-rising-appalachia/

The gist of it is that I think we're likely to see more red-state deployments because our governors and state Republican officials have already been conducting their own wars on the blue cities, so having actual federal troops on their side is just a plus as far as they're concerned.

the odd thing is that, if I'm not mistaken, they have their own state National Guards that they can deploy themselves without having to ask Trump about it

iirc—if they called them up themselves they'd have to pay the bill, if federalized the feds pay

wait, socializing the costs sounds suspiciously left

Also different states have their own laws on when the Guard can be deployed. e.g. Tennessee’s broadly allows it for civil unrest, but it’s unclear whether day-to-day crime fighting would fall under that.

And it can be unpopular obviously, because you are taking guard members away from their normal jobs and lives. Like say a guard member in Knoxville who works for a construction company or something is not going to be thrilled to be sent all the way across the state to hump their gear around Memphis.

Oh, super on board. Lee and both Tennessee senators went to the Oval Office for the announcement of the Memphis deployment.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71IuWndOqHL._AC_SY300_SX300_QL70_FMwebp_.jpg

got to wonder how citizens of Louisiana and Tennessee feel about their governors calling in the National Guard on themselves

Well again, the people in the cities are not thrilled, but white Republicans in the burbs and rural counties are like hell yeah, go get ‘em!

This guy's been doing funny videos about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbO5ElUq1MM

finally found something that gets jeffries riled up https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m22z4gferq2s

most people oppose the national guard being in cities

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/27/nx-s1-5553536/npr-ipsos-law-enforcement-poll-national-guard

The best news I've heard all week is that the government shutdown would cancel SF's Fleet Week and extremely annoying Blue Angels air show that accompanies it.

Speaking of state laws on deploying the Guard, it appears that our shameless hack of an attorney general is rewriting the legal guidance on the fly to accommodate Trump. Color me shocked.

https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/tennessee-lawmaker-says-ag-omitted-altered-guard-deployment-opinions

but of course they did

Federal employees told Democrats to blame for shutdown in ‘highly inappropriate’ email

Federal employees at multiple agencies received emails Tuesday blaming congressional Democrats for a potential government shutdown “forced” by the party, an unusual use of government communications that typically steer clear of political comments....
The emails go on to say that each agency has a plan in place in the event of “any lapse in appropriations by Congressional Democrats.”

Pretty desperate

!

Awful (not my experience, though)

I have all kinds of feelings about this shutdown that I’ll keep to myself, but you can imagine

Pretty desperate

It doesn't read as desperation to me. This is just sticking to the playbook of never deviating a hair's breadth from the message. What is different this time around compared to most of our lifetimes is that the message is simply and always about defining enemies, not opponents. You can sometimes find ways to come to an agreement with opponents, but not with enemies. They must be crushed.

Telling abused federal employees that garbage is dumb, they’re not fooled.

Fooling them isn't the point. Never admitting a ray of daylight from any other reality to intrude on the message is the point.

they may also remember the history of government shutdowns, pioneered by gleeful republicans.

but also, the mask is off. trump and republicans believe that the federal government, even career positions, is infiltrated with leftist union supporting radicals, and yesterday Trump explicitly said he wants to lay off a bunch of workers, and he wants those that support democrats to leave. previous republican presidents and shutdown pioneers would still go through the show of pretending that they thought career federal workers were honest people who would do their job as best as they could, regardless of political party.

picking up cues from fascists, modern republicans begin to believe their own paranoid projections of what the government is like (full of evil saboteurs driven by politics), and now they're "fighting" that delusion by creating the very thing they were (supposedly) criticizing -- a career federal employee pool that's dominated by their own political party and beholden to the corrupt officials, rather than the law.

I just heard some retired brigadier general on the radio and he pretty much ripped Hegseth a new one... just a point-by-point refutation of all of his bullshit peptalk

He also said that the majority of those leaders would be flying coach from Korea, Japan, Djibouti, wherever they're stationed... they don't have their own private planes

xp And then as more and more things cease working properly, they'll blame sabotage by disgruntled departing employees or something. It was Snowball!

the majority of those leaders would be flying coach from Korea, Japan, Djibouti, wherever they're stationed... they don't have their own private planes

Sullenly resenting, but complying with, ridiculous orders issued from one's superior officer is a normal fact of life for most of the armed forces hierarchy, but I'm sure this particular instance hit all those generals and admirals hard who believed they had risen too high to be dragged back into those feelings again. This was Trump's military parade all over again, but with the top brass.

I was happy they picked Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl, both because I like him and it’s already pissed off the right people in my life, but this shit is so gross:

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski appeared on Benny Johnson’s web interview series “The Benny Show” and warned that ICE agents will be present at the 2026 Super Bowl, where Bad Bunny is set to perform the Halftime Show.

Notably, the Halftime Show, presented by Apple Music, is Bad Bunny’s only U.S. concert appearance that’s set for 2026 at this time, as his highly-anticipated Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour, which is scheduled to run from December through July 2026, is not stopping in the states. Bad Bunny told I-D magazine last month that his fear of ICE raids was part of the reason why he skipped touring in the U.S.

When Johnson asked Lewandowski if “ICE will have enforcement at the Super Bowl” where Bad Bunny is performing, the Trump advisor responded: “There is nowhere you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally. Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else. We will find you and apprehend you and put you in a detention facility and deport you. Know that is a very real situation under this administration, which is contrary to how it used to be.”

“It’s so shameful they’ve decided to pick somebody who seems to hate America so much to represent them at the Halftime Show,” Lewandowski said about Bad Bunny. “We should be trying to be inclusive, not exclusive. There are plenty of great bands and entertainment people who could be playing at that show that would be bringing people together and not separating them.”

He concluded, “If there are illegal aliens, I don’t care if it’s a concert for Johnny Smith or Bad Bunny or anybody else. … We’re going to do enforcement everywhere. We are going to make Americans safe. That is a directive from the president. If you’re in this country illegally, go home.”

I'm just disappointed that no TV station used the opening lines of Black Sabbath's War Pigs as the soundtrack for the military meeting.

super bowl is in san jose, no? expect a lot of protestors if ICE is there

I think healthcare was a good thing to hang the shutdown on as it allows democrats to beat the drum on how the subsidies expiring will impact nearly everyone’s premiums. Obviously it is just one issue of a zillion disturbing things, but maybe they can keep the focus here and prevent trump from “flooding the zone with shit.” They need to really drill this point home though and they are bad at messaging.

I don’t care if it’s a concert for Johnny Smith or

you could say a lot of things about Lewandowski, but you must admit he has excellent taste in jazz guitarists

Six Democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee (Durbin, Schiff, Whitehouse, Klobuchar, Coons, and Welch) voted yes on two Trump district court nominees this morning, and my question remains, why do senior members of this party keep voluntarily ceding political capital to Donald Trump

https://ballsandstrikes.substack.com/p/why-is-this-democratic-senator-voting

https://abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chicago-federal-agents-surround-south-shore-apartment-building-dhs-requests-military-deployment-illinois/17908911/

^^^ horrific stuff

NYTimes Trump job approval by age/race/gender

18-29: -36
30-44: -20
45-65: -23
65+: -4

White: +6
Black: -73
Hispanic: -43

Men: +3
Women: -23

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/02/polls/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html

I feel like this is a situation that calls for the fabled “double-minus”

white men are such a fucking problem

imagine your approval of trump going UP

Does it not simply mean that 3% more men approve of Trump than disapprove, rather than his approval rating has increased? [I AM NOT A MATHEMATICIAN]

Its still positive, which is crazy.

oh i see

but yes still

anecdotally there were a bunch of trump signs near me that stayed up all through biden and the next election and theyre all gone now

cuts funding to 16 states that didn't vote for him

https://newrepublic.com/post/201223/trump-cuts-energy-funding-16-blue-states-democrats-shutdown

The compact would require colleges to freeze tuition for five years, cap the enrollment of international students and commit to strict definitions of gender. Among other steps, universities would also be required to change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

Colleges that sign the agreement would receive “multiple positive benefits,"

Queer Satanic queersatanic.bsky.social‬

> Context: this piece of filth barged into Psych 210 (The Diversity of Human Sexuality) at UW throwing up nazi salutes, yelling Heil Hitler, and calling everyone “[r-slur] degenerates”.
>
> Class didn’t appreciate it.
https://bsky.app/profile/queersatanic.bsky.social/post/3m26l5ykrjs2j

feel like this is where the countrys head is at, meanwhile our political and media elites are cashing checks in a completely different reality

cap the enrollment of international students

this kind of thinking is absolutely killing the UK's once-thriving higher education sector btw

yeah foreign students are basically free money, president deals doing his thing

attn, nazi punks: fuck off

sorry all i see there is a woke mob repressing conservative viewpoints, perhaps illegally

he's starting to rock a real The Hills Have Eyes vibe

some Sloth in there too

To that point, a take here on the rise of Bovino: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/this-man-is-the-face-of-the-future-border-patrol-greg-bovino🕸

They're trying to turn him into an action hero, to make the whole thing more marketable. Make him seem like a bad-ass. They'll probably start selling merch. I think the problem is that he's clearly loathsome and dangerous. But I thought that about Trump too, so.

He falls on the wrong side of the jock/creep fascist divide to become a hero to anyone other than future school shooters.

I hope somebody's preserving all the footage these camera crews are gathering.

so the filibuster thing, I thought this was a good take

‪The Tennessee Holler‬
✧@thetnhol✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 58m
The filibuster is a racist relic. If it goes away the door will be open to real change down the road. (Medicare For All, etc)

Not great that this would be why it finally falls — but sometimes the right thing can happen for the wrong reasons.

Yeah it's always seemed most likely that the Republicans would be the ones to nuke it.

I'm convinced the Democrats will never do it if given the opportunity.

Joe Neguse showing how to answer dumb press questions about how Democrats should deal with the shutdown

https://bsky.app/profile/khrisnin.bsky.social/post/3m4i24fc3ec2c

Michelle Goldberg:

But people in Maine kept telling me that on the ground, the Platner campaign still looked very much alive. Sure, some people had decided he’s unacceptable or unelectable. But many in the grass roots resented what they saw as an attempt by Democratic leadership to take down Platner and thus boost Janet Mills, the state’s 77-year-old governor, who announced her Senate campaign two weeks ago.

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”

These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”

Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council. The more money national Democrats poured in on Mills’s behalf, she said, the more ardent that support would get: “I think it’s a sort of defiance.”

I met Platner Monday afternoon at a coffee shop in Ellsworth, not far from where he lives. He was wearing a Dropkick Murphys hoodie, a reminder of the antifascist punk scene he grew up in, which still shapes his worldview.

During the 1970s, some punks had deployed Nazi imagery for shock value, but in the 1980s white supremacists started infiltrating the subculture in earnest. The bands Platner loved — Dropkick Murphys, the Dead Kennedys — positioned themselves squarely in opposition to these fascist interlopers. He recalled going to hardcore shows in Bangor in the late 1990s and early 2000s at a time when there were still regular fights between antiracist punks and neo-Nazis. Ever since then, he told me, antifascism has been at the core of his politics.

Many of Platner’s most controversial Reddit posts stem from this antifascist ethos. In 2018, for example, he responded to a poster worried about how a roommate would respond to the purchase of an AR-15. “Tell them that if they expect to fight fascism without a good semiautomatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” he wrote. In another post he wrote, citing the socialist Eugene Debs, “An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/opinion/graham-platner-democrats.html

was it a hipster coffee shop

that's all Maine has

Republicans have also landed on a winning message

Brooke Rollins: "My message to America is your government is failing you right now ... we have failed you."

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m4iomvjww52d

The filibuster is a racist relic

the us govt is a racist relic, maybe we can just nuke that

Racist relic? Is that like a piece of the true (burning) cross?

"We have failed you" for November thread title.

From the Goldberg NYT article:

American politics makes room for violent ideations on the right; Republican politicians regularly pose with semiautomatic weapons and promise to use them to safeguard their notion of freedom. There is much less evidence that voters will tolerate such rhetoric from the left.

Speaking as someone who lives in Texas, in my experience voters are absolutely fine with violent ideations. The media on the other hand will give the right a pass and will crucify any leftist who tries it. Especially the New York Times!

yup

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article312722642.html

U.S. poised to strike military targets in Venezuela in escalation against Maduro regime

fuck

'No food on the shelf? insurance premiums soaring? pay no mind, we're at WAR now, everyone must sacrifice..'

Not sure they've sufficiently built up Maduro as a modern day Hitler yet. Possibly because it would reflect poorly on all the modern day Hitlers in the White House.

Our town is fucking swarmed with ICE today. My son just texted us that they are camped out across from his school and I hopped on to see that they are outside the high school and almost every middle school. The entire district is on lockdown. My son sent us a list of friends that need to be driven home, so I'm leaving to go help with that.

Fucking Halloween and these monsters are terrifying school kids (not that any other day would be okay).

Yeah I wonder if Pritzker should have made that request to chill out for halloween... probably gave them the idea to introduce some actual horror into these poor kids' lives

So two federal judges have told the Trump administration to use its emergency reserves to keep SNAP funded in November. No responses yet, but in any case it seems pretty clear none of that money will be there by tomorrow.

My son sent us a list of friends that need to be driven home, so I'm leaving to go help with that.

Thank you for doing that. My wife is planning to help walk home kids from the elementary school in our neighborhood.

https://bsky.app/profile/rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social/post/3m4iwruyehk2x

to keep SNAP funded in November

I guess the Dept of Agriculture has pulled the bit on their website where they say that have money for emergency shutdowns, they have a plan

it's like they actively want people to go without food so they can blame it on the Dems

it's like

they also want to performatively demonstrate to their hardcore base that all those poor people out there are just living on government handouts from the Democrats and that's why your taxes (and the deficit) are so high. but the Republicans will take care of all that.

Basically the plan is to attack the usual enemies harder than ever:

Deport all undocumented people
Turn the war on drugs into an actual war
Put the homeless into concentration camps
fire all government employees
let the poor starve

a winning formula

beautiful poem too

studies confirm that it's not ordinary poor people starving or losing healthcare, it's 29 year old unemployed men who sit in their parents' rec rooms playing video games all day

this must've led to an awkward discussion

Vice President Vance on Friday defended comments he made two days prior about his wife Usha Vance and their relationship dynamic as it relates to religion during a Turning Point USA stop at the University of Mississippi.

The vice president told college students Wednesday that deep down, he hopes the second lady is “somehow moved by the church” and will convert to Christianity “because I believe in the Christian gospel.”

One user on the social platform X later commented, “It’s weird to throw your wife’s religion under the bus, in public, for a moment’s acceptance by groypers.”

studies confirm that it's not ordinary poor people starving or losing healthcare

the republicans in congress unshakably believe their 'common sense' is correct, no matter what evidence contradicts it. it confounds them when others don't see it all as clearly as they do.

this is why they are trying to ship Vance and Erika Kirk xp

One user on the social platform X

this guy just never shuts up

would cooler if she converted Vance to hinduism, maybe full-on krishna

So, there was a documented incident of ICE intentionally ramming a car then attacking the people inside, you’ll probably see the videos circulating on social media. It was insane, 6-8 armed ICE goons, all masked, naturally, also threatened to shoot the community task force filming them.

A silver lining, the community here absolutely showed the fuck up. Within 30 minutes there was probably 80-100 community members at the school I was to to help, protest, organize.

I know this was just one of hundreds of incidents, but it does tend to hit harder when it is your community, your neighborhood, your people. I’m proud to see how fast people mobilized, they actually had to turn people away who were volunteering to get kids home safely.

absolutely Jon.. that's really freaky and scary

the whole fact that the Bay Area was spared because a couple tech bro's have Trump on speed dial is nauseating.. but I don't think they're all gone, I saw a super suss looking SUV yesterday.. I think they just postponed 'the surge'

Ugh sorry Jon. Good for you and your neighbors for doing what you can.

For anyone not familiar with Chicago and its many neighborhoods and surrounding inner burbs, it should be stressed that a lot of these places being targeted are safe, leafy, family-friendly destinations, not stretches of urban blight or whatever. That the weather has largely been sunny and clear for a lot of these raids just adds to the discord of the images coming out. There have been people snatched where I live, too (and a couple of protesters thrown into the back of vans). Fingers crossed that these assholes don't run over any kids tonight.

Amping up things on Halloween fits with the spectacle/kitsch-loving side of leadership.

The “everyone is 12-years old” hypothesis being proven.

Amping up things on Halloween fits with the spectacle/kitsch-loving side of leadership.

They thought they elected Batman, but really they stuck us with President Joker.

the Joker would like a word (test image)

https://www.dropbox.com/preview/joker.jpg

stories like yours, Jon, and all the clips on social media of ICE fucking shit up, I honestly don't know how anyone in these areas could ever vote Republican again. And probably that doesn't matter, but the hate for these fucks can no longer be simmering.

New thread

“The pathway to human thriving” - U.S. POLITICS NOVEMBER 2025