Mathew Burns

UX director, @technocinema’s dad, journalism background, travel writing @mappingthepath. Supporting science and good reporting

[Mathew Burns @mathewburns]

It has all come to pass. It’s destroying our society. Feelings over facts. Intuition over evidence. The tearing down of good sources of journalism and science to bend reality to their will. And real authoritarians are taking advantage of it to finish the job.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

Carl Sagan’s prediction about America, made 31 years ago.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Turns out Trump’s market manipulation with a series of tariff announcements and pauses that tormented American businesses was done to enrich himself.

[Amy Siskind @Amy_Siskind]

WSJ: “Trump’s Brokerage Accounts Made Big Trades Around ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs”

This is literally securities fraud!

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Weird defense of the guy who made $2 billion off the presidency and demanded government shares of a bunch of companies.

[Isaiah Martin @isaiahrmartin]

This is what corruption looks like

[Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker ♟ @pelositracker]

You just can't make this up

The day before Trump announced a tariff pause that sent the S&P 500 up 9.5%

His accounts purchased 327 stocks worth up to $12.8 million

By law, those trades had to be disclosed within 45 days

Instead, they were disclosed over a year late, for a $200 penalty

[John Harwood @JohnJHarwood]

these people are fleecing the United States.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

The Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker has already been suspended.

The account collected Trump's stocks, etc. from open sources.

The most transparent administration in history!

[Laurence (Larry) Boorstein @LarryBoorstein]

DOGE showed they were morons with a series of gotcha moments:
- DOGE claimed to have discovered USAID was paying for condoms for Gaza which they joked was for "gay Hamas." It turned out the condoms were HIV/AIDS prevention for Gaza, Mozambique.
- DOGE claimed that USAID was paying for BBC. It turned out USAID was donating to BBC Media Action, a charity. BBC is funded by licenses in the UK.
- DOGE claimed there were 120+year old "vampires" as DOGE called them on Social Security. It turned out that a dummy date like 00/00/1900 was used in COBOL for records to be deleted and no benefits checks were going to the dummy names.

[Akayla Gardner @gardnerakayla]

NEW: Since President Trump won a second term, his two eldest sons — Eric and Don Trump Jr.— have become linked to investments in at least 10 companies in the defense sector that have received approx. $3.7 billion in federal funds in Trump 2.0, up nearly $1B compared to the end of Biden’s term. https://t.co/NbHH7pPaXI

[Whitney Tilson @WhitneyTilson]

The world's richest man has the blood of 100s of 1000s of the world's poorest people on his hands. And he took joy in doing so. It's obscene. Kudos to Nick Kristof for shining a bright light on this darkness!
https://t.co/RcIGAble8E

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

This is the headline: SCOTUS found that Trump violated the Constitution by trying to deport US-born Americans. And it's amazing how no news outlet says it exactly this way.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Elon Musk responded to a claim that not one child died from the USAID cuts with a single word: "Exactly." He has said publicly he was never able to get a suffering child on the phone to prove otherwise.

The Lancet's peer reviewed model found USAID prevented roughly 92 million deaths over two decades, 30 million of them children under five. The same researchers project the cuts could cause 14 million more deaths by 2030, 4.5 million of them children. Other researchers call the model conservative, not inflated, since it leaves out polio programs and the parallel cuts from other donor nations.

None of that requires a phone call to verify, but here is one anyway. In Zambia, three brothers named Joseph, Gift, and Alumbwe watched both their parents die over the course of a year after the antiretroviral supply that kept them alive ran out. Joseph dropped out of school to raise his younger brothers. They sleep on one shared mat under a roof that leaks, and eat once a day... Joseph wanted to be a doctor. The chainsaw never asked what any of them wanted to be.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

One thing that's interesting about Justice Roberts's birthright citizenship opinion is how his careful explanation of history shows how the immigration debate rarely changes. The argument that "these people are too different to join us" has just failed, socially, culturally, economically, and morally, time and time again.

[Pedro L. Gonzalez @emeriticus]

Vance is the only high-profile political figure who I can remember in my lifetime claiming to have had a dramatic religious conversion and the majority response is, "Yeah you don't believe in that, you don't believe in anything." And it's true. The guy decides to be a Catholic five minutes ago because of Peter Thiel and starts lecturing the Pope, saying that he hopes the Pope has "learned" something from him. Just a profoundly hollow man and fraud in every sense of the word.

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

Listening to Donald Trump on matters of constitutional law is like listening to him on what it takes to be a faithful husband.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

“The Trump administration is demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list that some officials fear will be misused or compromise operations, according to people familiar with the matter.” https://t.co/g1FC3sXvJd

[Adam Mockler @adammocklerr]

This you?

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

Don't fall for Elon Musk's gaslighting.

There is a massive, life-or-death difference between well-planned budget cuts and a sudden, reckless halt to promised medical aid.

Musk is actively lying about the fatal consequences of his USAID cuts. The US is not obligated to fund healthcare for the entire planet, but if a nation decides to pull back its global aid, it must be done responsibly. Ripping away funding mid-treatment means you are directly responsible for the preventable deaths that follow.

Instead of owning up to the fallout, Musk is flooding X with dishonest spin. He first challenged critics to name even one person whose death he caused. When people actually did, he immediately moved the goalposts, claiming that any spending cut inevitably causes deaths.

He is a dishonest charlatan trying to hide the fact that his chaotic decisions got thousands of vulnerable children and adults killed. That will be his lasting legacy

[Amy Siskind @Amy_Siskind]

Another dandy:
“Trump reported more than 21,000 trades across eight investment accounts in 2025, averaging about 80 trades per trading day. That is almost 24 times the number of transactions previously disclosed.”

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

i thought hunter biden’s corruption was unacceptable and said so at the time.

nothing remotely like what we see from trump today and republicans should not stand for it