my kink is democracy

Pessimism is irresponsible. Nihilism is immoral. Someone very smart said that.

[my kink is democracy @HoshJowley]

New Pin.📌

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

Remember the "Bubble Boy"? That kid in the 80s who had an ultra-rare genetic condition that caused him to have no immune system at all, and he had to spend every minute of his life inside a special sterilized room? That's how not immune to propaganda you are.

[Danny Deraney @DannyDeraney]

Every year, I share this video of French caretakers who take sand from Omaha Beach in Normandy, and scrub them into the letters to give them the gold coloring.

They do this for all 9,386 US soldiers who died.

France also gave us this land as American soil. #MemorialDayWeekend

[Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien]

We are witnessing US decline in real
time

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Resurfacing this from 2017.

[Meanwhile in Ukraine @MeanwhileInUA]

Putin didn't invade Ukraine because of NATO. He invaded because Ukrainians were proving democracy works.

Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum puts it plainly: Putin looked at Ukraine's democratic movement and thought, "If they can do it in Ukraine, then people could do it in Russia. So I need to crush this."

That's the real threat Ukraine posed. Not missiles. Not borders. A working democracy next door.

Applebaum frames the war as a fault line between the democratic and autocratic worlds. Russia isn't just trying to take territory. It's trying to erase Ukraine as a nation, reduce it to a colony, and send a message to every country that the post-1945 rules of Europe no longer apply.

Those rules were simple: no invasions, no wars, borders don't change by force. Russia understood exactly what it was breaking when it crossed into Ukraine.

[Christo Grozev @christogrozev]

A Russian disinformation operative once confided "Tulsi was my best asset. Whether or not she realized it".

[Jason Kint @jason_kint]

NYT out with a jaw dropping investigative report on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 60 Minutes reported last Sunday on some of this, too. The NYT report is a must-read, the 60 Minutes report should then be watched. 1/3

[GLOBSEC @GLOBSEC]

Democracy doesn't maintain itself @anneapplebaum at #GLOBSEC2026

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Read the whole thread.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Trump is now reportedly responsible for roughly 27.7% of the entire U.S. national debt accumulated under all presidents combined.

That is an astonishing figure historically.

The national debt just crossed $39 trillion.

President Trump has added roughly $12–13 trillion to the debt across his two terms in office.

That’s approximately 30% of ALL U.S. national debt accumulated since 1789.

In 2016, Trump said he would pay down the national debt “over a period of eight years.”

Instead:

- First term: +$7.8 trillion
- Second term: roughly +$4–5 trillion already

And yes, COVID affected first-term spending.

It does not explain adding another trillion dollars every five months without a pandemic.

A political movement built on:
“fiscal conservatism”
“small government”
“balanced budgets”

has now overseen the largest debt expansion tied to any single presidency in American history.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

There’s always a tweet

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

TRUMP: We have a ballroom that's under budget. It's going up right here. I've doubled the size of it because we obviously need that.

REPORTER: The price doubled

TRUMP: I doubled the size of it, you dumb person. You are not a smart person.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

Project 2025 called for gutting the EPA's scientific research office. In under a year, the Trump Administration has done exactly that, taking a division of more than 1,500 scientists down to 124, reassigning doctors and epidemiologists to finance offices and hazardous waste permitting desks that have nothing to do with their expertise.   

For more than 50 years, that office produced the independent science behind every major clean air and clean water protection this country has. It existed specifically to be free from political interference.   

The scientists who remain answer to Trump appointees, and their work must now conform to the Administration's agenda.   

No other institution in the United States can replace what's being lost. Once that expertise is dismantled, it doesn’t come back in a year or a decade. It’s a generation of progress erased, deliberately, methodically, and exactly according to plan.  
https://t.co/IbDEHQiRG6

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

A Republican Sheriff in Florida, Grady Judd, announced the arrest of 266 defendants in a sex trafficking scheme & minced no words. He identified influencer Craig Long, who he said moved in high circles, including with the president, holding up a picture of Long with Trump. https://t.co/NKHXTRFZZC

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

1. Ukraine promptly answers a U.S. call to help with drone interceptors and sends its top experts to the Middle East.
2. Russia helps the Iranian regime with intel to kill Americans.

As a result:

1. Russia and Putin gets praised and cherished by Trump who's relieving Russian oil sanctions and in fact helping save Russian war economy in war against Ukraine.
2. Ukraine gets a spadeful of shit into its face from Trump once again.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Trump: ​"So now we have low-cost interceptors effectively combating Iranian drones."

I wonder which country with "no cards" gave them to you 🤔

[Emily A. The Spirit of Jezebel @emzorbit]

@RadioFreeTom Warrior Ethos:

1. Only take photos from the Secretary’s good side

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

This list is very important as it shows the many ways in which Trump has helped Putin

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

And I’d like to remind everyone that not so long ago, by helping Ukraine with weapons, America was:

- securing valuable contracts for its own defense industry and spending a large part of U.S.-Congress-allocated funds in America
- gaining massive global advertising for American weapons, which in Ukrainian hands performed superbly in a war against a vastly superior enemy (just look at the impact systems like the Bradley, HIMARS, and Patriot had)
- gaining an extremely loyal ally in Ukraine, ready to share its cutting-edge experience from a new era of warfare, especially in drones and highly intensive missile defense
- reinforcing its image as the arsenal of democracy and the powerful leader of the free world, sending a clear signal to dictatorships worldwide: don’t even think about wars of conquest, we will support our democratic allies
- sending Ukraine, to a significant extent, older weapons from its stockpiles that would have had to be written off anyway in the future, while simultaneously modernizing its own arsenals
- achieving the radical military weakening of an aggressive militaristic Russia, a dictatorship fundamentally built on revenge for the Cold War, hatred of America and the West, and a desire to dismantle the American-led world order

And all of this -- without a single American servicemember having to get deployed and fire a single shot.

Ukraine pleaded, humbly asking for nothing more than a simple win-win partnership: with your weapons we save ourselves from extermination -- you get a defeated fascist Russia.

I genuinely cannot understand how anyone could trade all of that for absurd lies about “$350 billion,” then smear and humiliate Ukraine, insult America’s key NATO allies, side with that KGB cyborg in the Kremlin -- and then to squander billions of dollars, cost American lives, and derail the global economy in a poorly thought-out war in the Middle East.

And then eventually end up asking Ukraine to help defend American bases in Jordan from Iranian-Russian drones.

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

Ukraine offers to help defend the West from Iranian drones.

Russia helps Iran track American forces.

And the White House eases sanctions on Russian oil.

Explain that to the families of U.S. troops. My latest (in reply)

[Yaroslav Trofimov @yarotrof]

I doubt anyone in the Kremlin imagined four years ago that in 2026 Ukraine could strike with Ukrainian-made weapons the heart of the Russian oil industry, such as this Sunday attack on the pipeline node in Tatarstan some 1,000 miles away, and it wouldn’t even make news.