Jeff Mattas

@criticalwitllc - Narrative Design, Writing, Creative Direction. VO. Narcosis, Batman: Arkham Shadow, Decarnation, and more.
AI Confidential demo now on Steam!

[Acyn @Acyn]

MacFarlane: Some national park service workers are so alarmed, they leaked internal spreadsheets that show where the money is going. 

We added the numbers together and found for the white house grounds for the vanity projects, the beautification and the needed upgrades: They've set aside $323 million for this year…

$323 million compared to $7 million for the white house in 2024. That's a 5,000% increase. 

National mall has a ten fold increase from 2024 for projects that are the president's priority. 

Doesn't mean the money is directly being starved out of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mount Zion, Grand Canyon. But we checked those parks all have significantly less funding allotted for them this year than they did two years ago, and there's a $30 billion backlog of deferred maintenance

They are going to have to shortchange important projects throughout America to marshal donated money or taxpayer money on things like a reflecting pool, a helipad, a ballroom, and other vanity projects.

[Not Your Average Liberal @NotAvgLiberal]

For all the MAGA “Alpha Males” kissing Trump’s ass….

Feel free to respond.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

.@JamesTalarico: The young people here might not remember this, but those of you who are a little older might. Not so long ago, you could afford to live a good life here in America.

You could buy a home in your 20s. You could go to college for cheap or free. You could support a whole family on one paycheck. You could afford to get married, have kids, and retire comfortably. You could fulfill your God-given potential.

We called it the American Dream.

In the middle of the 20th century, we invested in healthcare and education. We built homes and highways. We protected workers' rights and paychecks. We blocked consolidation and encouraged competition. We built the largest, strongest middle class in the history of the world.

But today that middle class has disappeared. For too many of our neighbors, the American Dream has become an American Nightmare.

We can't afford a home, but Jeff Bezos has at least a dozen. We can't afford to fill up our tank, but Mark Zuckerberg is launching helicopters from his mega-yacht. One in five Texas children live in poverty — but one of our residents became the world's first trillionaire.

The top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

.@JamesTalarico: 50 years ago, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell circulated a memo around DC — a blueprint for how corporations could amass political power, reverse the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, and rig the system for themselves.

The Powell memo outlined a strategy. Unite corporate special interests, privilege corporate perspectives in the media, appoint sympathetic judges to the court, and buy politicians in both political parties.

And it worked. Republicans and some Democrats sold the false gospel of trickle-down economics. Trickle-down economics is not a theory, it is theft.

Since the late 1970s, mega donors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties. And then those politicians turned around and rigged the economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense.

We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

🔥 Here's Sen. Whitehouse's entire remarkable speech opposing Todd Blanche: "What's left of this committee when we don't demand straight answers? How many times has this DOJ been asked what became of the $50,000 that the FBI reported it handed to Homan in a bribery sting? ... our Republican colleagues see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil"

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

This is treason. Actual blackletter treason—aiding and abetting the enemy in a war.

In order to protect his handler Putin, Donald Trump is deliberately dismissing a threat to our troops during a war he started. We have hung people for less.

REPORTER: Zelenskyy says that Russia is giving Iran satellite imagery of US bases in the Gulf to help them target What can you do about that?

Trump: Well, we'll find out about it. I’ll ask Putin about it. We'll find out. Hasn’t had that much impact because we knocked the hell out of ‘em. If that's the case, look, you know, they gave Venezuela a lot of equipment. Venezuela had all Russian equipment How did that work out? Not too good. So they may be giving, but if they are it hasn’t worked out because they have no army, they have no air force. They have no navy, they have no nothing. So it hasn't worked out. Well, I don't think they've been doing it certainly not at a high level. And if they have it has been very unimpactful.

[(((Bvweir))) #He.Must.Be.Stopped. @Bvweir]

This about sums it up

[Acyn @Acyn]

Reporter: Isn’t there concern that this slippery slope to socialism inevitably ends up as full-blown communism?

AOC: I mean, no. I think that’s very silly. We can’t even raise the minimum wage. Do they really think communism is going to happen? No. They’re trying to scare people because they don’t want us talking about the fact that we all have a right to health care.

So they want to call everything they don’t like communist because if people actually wake up to the fact that their elected officials are screwing them over when they get here, they’re going to realize they deserve better and that health care as a right isn’t crazy. They want to call this stuff communist because they don’t want us to realize that the rest of the developed world has guaranteed health care. They want to call it communist because they don’t want you to know that Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada—everybody else—has it better than us, and we spend the most money for the worst care in the developed world.

[Acyn @Acyn]

PabloReports: What do you make of the FBI saying it will no longer investigate killings by ICE agents?

Jackson: This echoes something very long and dark in American history, where those doing the lynchings were never brought to justice…

[Vaibhav Sisinty @VaibhavSisinty]

A college student just killed the biggest advantage politicians have ever had. The gap between the lie and the fact-check.

He built a Chrome extension called InTruth. It listens to any live speech, debate, or interview.

Transcribes every word. And checks every claim against real sources in real time. Before the speaker even finishes the sentence.

It works on debates. Press conferences. Town halls. Interviews. Anything with someone talking on video. The fact-check shows up on your screen while they're still talking.

Until now, fact-checking happened hours or days later. By then the clip has been shared, the headline has been written, and the damage is done. Nobody reads the correction.

InTruth closes that gap to seconds. The claim and the fact-check exist in the same moment.

A college student, a Chrome extension, and an AI model just did what entire newsrooms couldn't figure out for decades.

[Snowden Bishop🌻💚🤍❤️✌️🇺🇦🆘🔄🌍 @SnowdenBishop]

Walter Cronkite: After liberating execution camps… Germans (who cried) they didn’t know…were as as guilty as Nazis…because they applauded when Hitler shut down (media) and said, ‘We don’t need to know. We trust our government...’

It’s our duty to know.

[Dittie @DittiePE]

Border Patrol pulls over a 20-year-old in Slidell, LA for “white lights on the back of your vehicle… your reverse lights are on the whole time.”

Then, before writing a single ticket, the agent asks: “What’s your citizenship?”

The driver, Alan Laureano, was born in Slidell. His passenger — his 13-year-old stepbrother — was born in Pearl River, Louisiana. Both are U.S. citizens.

Didn’t matter. Twice, on camera, the agent tells Laureano he’s going to “check” the kid and “if he’s illegal, I will take him.”

He tries to open the 13-year-old’s car door himself. Laureano locks it and rolls the window down instead.

The agent then interrogates the child directly — full name, spelling, date of birth, birthplace — while Laureano stands his ground and refuses to hand over his own ID, telling the agent he doesn’t have the right to stop him over a taillight.

Immigration attorney Michael Gahagan reviewed the video and called it what it is: “an illegal detention.” Border Patrol isn’t authorized to detain someone over a traffic violation — they need independent reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation, and that has to come first, not get invented after the stop.

DHS’s after-the-fact statement claims the stop was based on “reasonable suspicion or probable cause of federal law violations” — but doesn’t say what that violation was. WWL Louisiana asked twice. No answer either time.

This is the pattern: pretext stop, pivot to citizenship, threaten a kid with removal before confirming anything. It only looks “routine” until you’re the one being asked to prove you belong in the country you were born in.

[Jon Favreau @jonfavs]

The government is giving guns and badges to violent, psychotic individuals and setting them loose on our streets

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The Portland Press Herald has released footage from the deadly ICE shooting in Biddeford, Maine.

Bystanders described the shooting as an execution.

[Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09]

One of the most brutal scenes in human history has been leaked.

The moment the tents of displaced people were bombed in the southern Gaza Strip, in the Mawasi area of ​​Khan Yunis, killing more than 500 civilians.

A video that the world must never forget.

[Game Informer @gameinformer]

Opinion: The PS5 and Xbox Series X generation has been a race to the bottom https://t.co/Ax8nUBj7xd

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

MS NOW put together a supercut of Lutnick, Bessent, and Hassett continually moving the goalposts and always saying that some future quarter will have spectacular economic growth

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Ossoff: "You've got the American government controlled by Donald Trump backing a Trump family tungsten mine in Kazakhstan with a billion plus dollars of federal commitments at the very same time that they are cutting healthcare, defunding hospitals, and nursing homes, and doubling health insurance premiums."

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Texas is officially the first state in the nation to mandate Bible study. I don't know who needs to hear this, but red states are closer to Sharia law than Zohran Mamdani's New York City.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

JD Vance: "I think Nixon's historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12 hours news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy."