Al Camus

Absurd revolt is a tribute one pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.

[Al Camus @realgmill]

What's the meaning of all this?

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Elon Musk’s cuts to U.S.A.I.D. led to some 700,000 deaths, according to Atul Gawande, a former leading administrator at the agency. Gawande, backed by recent academic studies, believes that the death toll will likely reach seven figures. The policy is not only immeasurably cruel, he argues; it is also stupid, badly undermining what remains of American soft power and prestige. Gawande explains the human cost of DOGE’s war on U.S.A.I.D.: https://t.co/pcqDGOFqdJ

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

the one conspiracy i believe is that this place is full of bots programmed to say insane, incendiary things and they're funded by foreign organizations who want to divide americans and destabilize US society

[Michael S. Schmidt @nytmike]

NYT top newsroom lawyer David McCraw: “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.” https://t.co/mmQ2mvSR7V

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

“When socialism finally came to America it wasn’t the lefty, Scandinavian version with universal health care and free college. Oh no. Instead, we got a command economy à la Chinese communism and it was ushered in by the right.” https://t.co/dpMaT5DP7N

[Бианка @BiankaB12]

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea).

We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World.

The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated.

The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise.

A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention.

That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care.

Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it.

The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

again, big picture, donald trump won an election about affordability and then he

- passed tariffs (which raise consumer prices)
- expanded the deficit w a ginormous corporate tax cut (raises interest rates)
- waged a stupid war (raises gas prices)
- and now refuses to sign a bipartisan bill to reduce housing costs bc he's protesting senate republicans for failing to pass voting restrictions

... while making $2 billion from crypto rug pulls that transferred income from his supporters to his bank account

americans hate the president for very good reasons

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

He's a parasite.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Trump is the most socialist president in American history, and combined with his nationalist, autocratic tendencies and policies, it makes him a National Socialist in a way that isn’t manipulative or ironic at all, as it was used in the 30's.

[Arnold Schwarzenegger @Schwarzenegger]

Nope! I always say there is no such thing as self-made. It’s a myth.

It took millions of people - from my parents to mentors to friends to competitors to fans and voters - to write my success story. I did not write it alone.

That’s the American Dream - not a lie about going it alone - but the truth that none of us do, and there is always someone with their hand out to lift us up.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The world's richest oligarch is the biggest Welfare recipient in history, by orders of magnitude.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

As I said when Musk bought Twitter, it’s always "free speech = my speech", and if you think otherwise you’re a sucker.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Literally socialism

[Samantha Power @SamanthaJPower]

Starting in early 2025, Elon Musk and the Trump administration began terminating USAID's programs and firing its staff — with Musk himself boasting about "feeding it into the woodchipper." One year ago today, USAID was officially dissolved, its remaining programs haphazardly folded into the State Department. Amid all the lies and misinformation that have followed, some facts about what has actually been lost:

• USAID saved more than 3 million lives a year at a cost of less than $10/month per American. That is what was destroyed. On purpose.
• According to Boston University's Global Impact Counter — which tracked deaths attributable to the cuts until it stopped operations in February 2026 — an estimated 781,000 people died preventable deaths in the first year, including 518,000 children.
• Global child mortality (the number of children who die before their fifth birthday) rose in 2025 for the first time in 35+ years — by 200,000 additional deaths.
• USAID's 50-country disease surveillance network — the system that cut outbreak response times from 2 weeks to 48 hours — is gone. We are now watching an unprecedented Ebola outbreak unfold in real time — with the highest first-month caseload and death rate in modern history.
• Programs reaching 93 million women and children were cut 92%. TB programs cut 56%. Water and sanitation cut 86%. Over 2,000 health facilities permanently closed.
• 25 million fewer people received humanitarian assistance in 2025. The overall humanitarian budget was slashed 74% — from $14.1 billion to $3.7 billion.
• 363 million people face acute hunger in 2026. The famine early-warning system that would have seen it coming went dark for five months.
• $1.7 billion in democracy and governance funding (election monitoring, anti-corruption work, support for independent media and civil society) was terminated.
• 360+ independent media outlets lost funding. Hundreds of legal clinics closed.
• Far from saving money, the Trump administration itself has already said the dismantlement will cost taxpayers at least $19.2 billion in cancellation fees, severance, and penalties. That's more than half of USAID's annual budget — spent on destruction and closeout, not support for vulnerable people.
• American farmers, universities, and businesses are among the casualties too. USAID partnered with more than 3,500 U.S. companies and maintained 17 university-based research labs. Its work with U.S.-based contractors and the private sector generated hundreds of thousands of American jobs and multiplied the return on every dollar spent. Those markets and partnerships are gone.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

The faster that mainstream Democrats realize that the far-left hates them as much as MAGA hates them, the better off we'll all be.

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

.@elonmusk says that no one can name a person who died from his aid cuts. In fact, I've met the kids who are dying, and I've talked to the families who lost children. In my columns, I've cited many, many names of people who have died because of Musk's aid cuts. A few examples:
*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because Musk cut funding for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. She couldn't get to a hospital and died as people were carrying her there. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
*Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of his cuts to malaria medication in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
*Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after he interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
*Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when Musk cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to the healthcare workers.
I could go on and on. In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts. I challenge Musk: Come with me on a reporting trip, and we'll talk to these moms and dads, and you'll see the dying children themselves. I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you'll change your mind.

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

Will this be part of Texas's Bible study?

Leviticus 19:33–34: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.”

https://t.co/0W4e3OjhPT

[Michael Steele @MichaelSteele]

This is what it sounds like when idiots gather, pound their religious breasts and sow stupidity. The words “separation of church and state” do not appear in the Constitution, but the words are a metaphor (you know what that is, right?) from an 1802 letter written by Thomas Jefferson (since relied on as precedent by our Supreme Court) in which he stated that the First Amendment built a "wall of separation between Church & State."
Jefferson should know what those words meant; so if it’s good enough for him…perhaps the idiocracy should sit down and pick up a book they haven’t burned or banned. #BringBackCivics

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

A note to my friends who still back Trump:

I am not here to dunk on you. I am writing because you have a working brain, and this story insults it.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a $14 million paint job. Shortly thereafter the water turned green and the new “American flag blue” coating started peeling off the bottom in sheets. Trump says vandals did it. He claims, without evidence, that someone took a knife and cut a 300-foot slit, a number that grew to 350 feet while he was still talking.

Back on May 4, Trump bragged about that same coating and said, if you had a knife, you could not even cut it, so strong, like powerful rubber. He cannot have it both ways.

And the green water?

A George Mason scientist tested it and found ordinary, non-toxic algae, the kind that blooms in any shallow sunny pool. To fight it, crews dumped hydrogen peroxide into the water.

Hydrogen peroxide is also a paint stripper.

That, not sabotage or vandalism, is the obvious reason the paint came off. They wrecked their own paint job, then blamed phantom vandals for it.

The lone "vandal" they paraded is a 67-year-old Olympian who touched a flap of paint already peeling on its own.

Here is the thing. If they will look you in the eye and lie about something this small, something you can see with your own eyes, ask yourself what else they are lying to you about.

Again, you have a working brain. People like Karoline Leavitt are counting on you to stay loyal instead of exercising independent thought.

Prove them wrong.

[Konstantin Sonin @k_sonin]

That's how information bubbles actually work. Leaders create them themselves. @elonmusk would be the most informed person on Earth - intellectually, financially, etc. - yet he consistently chooses to ignore new information. Here, he looks at the graph showing that incarceration rate policy has nothing to do with the crime rate and, instead of absorbing this information, ignores it entirely. Instead, Elon reinforces his baked-in worldview, directly contradicting the data that he looks at. I am not saying that his point is wrong - he might be very well right; my point is that he reads information that contradicts his view as if it were confirming it. Information bubbles around big people are entirely self-made.

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

This only becomes more evident with each passing day