My personal thoughts/opinions, or commentary.
In high school, a prerequisite for being on the newspaper staff was talking the journalism class. A lesson that stuck with me was the concept of editorial discretion–being able to judge something as (news) worthy and including it in your coverage. Editors hold tremendous sway, even in a dying industry, to determine what enters the public sphere.
The Dallas Morning News didn’t even know about the protests. Like, how?
A New Hampshire town was taken over by bears because freedom means being able to feed bears so long as the bears aren’t “my problem.” It’s more complicated than that, because when you don’t believe government services have value, then problems that need government intervention don’t get addressed.
What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”
More evidence that libertarianism is anarchy for rich people.
The New York Times goes in depth as to how Elon Musk took over the government.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
And with a little education on a few bureaucratic agencies, that’s essentially what happened.
The SAVE Act Would Disenfranchise Millions of Citizens
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.
Two Redditors collaborated and put together a Project 2025 Tracker dashboard. Objectives are link to sources, marked for status, subject, and affected agency. As of 2/12/2025, fascism in America is over a quarter of the way done.