iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Heartwarming: entire crowd at the Spanish world cup final watch party here in DC boo when they show Trump on screen

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

That's definitely true. It's just a crazy accidental alignment

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Is there someplace I can file a complaint for having to live in the timeline where the president of Iran *and* one of the worst evangelical pastors in the US are broadly on the side of the pope in a feud with the US president, who posted AI slop of himself as Jesus www.newsweek.com/pastor-says-...

newsweek.com

Pro-Trump pastor's post saying president is "demon possessed" goes viral

"I genuinely believe Trump is currently demon possessed," Joel Webbon wrote on X.

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Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Hungary's brave choice last night is great for Europe, good for Ukraine, bad for Russia, bad for Trumpism, and bad for the far-right over the entire globe—all of which, to me, is a victory for the forces of good and democracy in the world: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/the-joy-of...

doomsdayscenario.co

The Joy of Choosing Democracy

The inspiring electoral upset in Hungary yesterday is great for Europe, good for Ukraine, bad for Russia, bad for Trump, and bad for the far-right over the entire globe.

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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Ok so who's the most cursed Antipope option? Is it: 1. J.D. Vance 2. Sohrab (is he still Catholic?) 3. Matt Walsh 4. Candace Owens 5. Adrian Vermeule

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Excited to see what looks to be a great new entry to the pro-liberalism space!

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

My grandmother was Canadian so it shouldn't be too hard

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Gonna be extra obnoxious about rooting for team Canada to beat the US in hockey now

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Wait hell yeah I'm Canadian for real (and not just a joke at hostels because I don't want to claim being American)

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Reading this while I work on a paper involving Judith Shklar's treatment of cruelty and the politics of suspicion is...a bit too pointed

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Deeply horrifying and not the sort of thing that legitimate governments are supposed to permit, let alone participate in.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

This is what I get for asking the monkey's paw for voters with consistent beliefs smh

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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

As the lawlessness of the regime accelerates, the logic of impunity ratchets up the stakes of removal

This is how the logic of accountability can work against democracy itself. Under normal conditions, the expectation of accountability keeps politicians from abusing power they don’t want to be held accountable for—or deploying power they don’t want opponents to wield. But at some point, the incentives flip: if you’ve gone too far, you simply can’t afford to hand power back. The perverse logic becomes: “I can’t face accountability for what I’ve already done, so I must go even further to ensure I never can be held accountable.”

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

R̶e̶l̶i̶g̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶d̶o̶m̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶R̶e̶l̶i̶g̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶d̶o̶m̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶i̶a̶n̶s̶ ̶ Religious freedom for the right kind of Christians

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

(I am going to bed that is enough today for today)

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

"hee hoo I am the president, I sue myself and award myself ten billion dollars of taxpayer money" I'm sorry but what are we even supposed to say at this point???? How is reality this stupid? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Trump sues IRS, Treasury Department for $10 billion over tax return leak | Reuters share.google/rcM4qMLIdiR5...

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

When you edit your piece to include the administration's stated response and then your changes become outdated three hours after publication. (At least I was right?) www.theunpopulist.net/p/has-the-tr...

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

State-level accountability creating perverse incentives for the Trump administration is a big part of my analysis here. www.theunpopulist.net/p/has-the-tr...

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Instead of chasing the ball of Trump's mercurial pronouncements on running for a third term or suspending elections, focus on the incentive structure. Unfortunately, the incentive structure shows that the risk of another, far more sustained effort to hold onto power is very great indeed.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

The killing of Alex Pretti reveals that we are perilously close to the point when the desired incentives flip into the perverse ones, for both legal accountability and the survival of the MAGA state capture program.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

From me: normally, regular transfers of power create incentives to not abuse power or seize power you don't want the other party to wield next. But if you abuse power too much, or accumulate too much power, it creates a perverse incentive to go even further: you can no longer afford to hand it over.

theunpopulist.net

Has the Trump Administration Crossed the Rubicon When Lawlessness Makes Lawful Transition Impossible?

It may have reached a point when its only option for avoiding accountability would be keeping Democrats out of power

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

It's unlikely that we can break that pattern without Congressional action, which is why we need to press on now. We have achieved something in Minneapolis, but more work is needed to prevent this from happening again in the next city.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

This demonstrates a way to get Trump to leave particular cities alone, yes. But it does not mean that they won't go to another place and start acting similarly. There's a much deeper set of cultural, policy, etc., problems with Trump and Miller's deportation machine.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Another factor seems to be pushback from courts. When the administration encounters judicial opposition, as they did in Chicago, they move on. This is a way to avoid accountability: lawful actors seek to build records and pursue cases; the government leaves town when this nears success.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

This was making Trump look bad, so he stepped in to shuffle personnel. But they're still acting awfully in other places, like Maine right now. And let's not forget that they engaged in a similar pattern of violence in Chicago, including multiple shootings, before pulling back to go to other places.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

That's partly a function of PR. My operating theory right now is that the president doesn't appear to be doing a lot of presidenting right now, and a lot of stuff is getting left to people like Stephen Miller until it creates bad optics for the President.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

It's good news that the administration is pulling some CBP agents out of Minneapolis. We should celebrate the courage and decency of the people of Minnesota. But we also shouldn't overestimate what has been achieved. Trump can be made to back down from particular confrontations, yes.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

When an administration of Donald Trump and JD Vance decide you post too much...good god

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

This is extra fun because this week I am putting the finishing touches on a political philosophy paper, in which I argue that a number of the leading accounts of legitimate political authority probably can't apply to representative democracies unless they have a sufficiently independent bureaucracy.

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

“While agents of the state engage in brazen extrajudicial killings, the highest levels of government lecture us that these are law enforcement agents protecting communities. Such claims are not credible, and Americans should decline to participate in this fantasy.” open.substack.com/pub/theunpop...

open.substack.com

In Trump's 'Dual State,' Dissenters Face Extrajudicial Executions, Loyalists Enjoy Protections

America's system of justice has fundamentally broken because the regime believes it can justify attacks on citizens via lies rather than in a court of law

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Also, may I say that I don’t agree with people saying ICE and CBP need “more training.” They’re doing exactly what this administration has trained them to—impose a reign of fear in blue cities. They don’t need more training. They need to be ripped up root and branch.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

I grew up in, and then abandoned, right-wing intellectual circles (BA from Hillsdale College 🙃) precisely because of how often I heard this bullshit excuse-making for what was obvious about the MAGA movement from day one. Every principle abandoned in favor of cruelty and thuggish brutality.

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 24/01/2026

Just staggered by the complete moral void of not even *pretending* to wait for more information before pivoting to “the opponent of the state deserved it.” It is so insanely depraved. Soulless.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

The United States now has a government that will murder you for filming them and will immediately lie about the murder without even a pretense of legitimate investigation.

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Popehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

The official policy of the government of the United States of America is that they will murder anyone they want, that they will tell any lie necessary to justify that murder, and that no one who resists them has any rights they are bound to respect. /1

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The UnPopulist @theunpopulist.net · 20/01/2026

America got along fine for 227 years without ICE. Now Trump has turned it into a rights-trampling, rogue agency that shoots first and asks questions later. It should never have been created—and now it deserves to be shut down. @shikhadalmia.bsky.social

theunpopulist.net

Abolish ICE: It Is a Threat to Americans’ Safety and Freedom

The agent who killed Renee Good should face the same accountability as the migrant who killed Laken Riley

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

The reason new tools cause problems-often dramatic and disastrous ones-is because they offer affordances for previously papered-over problems with people to manifest more strongly or in novel ways. And nobody really knows, in practice, how to solve so many of the fundamental problems with people.

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

This is a problem with the tool, of course, and the most immediate policy solutions will have to do with the tool. But problems with tools usually arise because of problems with people-in this case, particularly problems with men and the way we allow men to be in society-and those too need solving.

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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Stephen Miller is employing state terror in service of the open goal of shifting the ethnic mix of the country. In numerous ways he's doing this at the expense of public safety. We spent weeks reporting on Miller's real aims. Here's the result. We hope you'll read: newrepublic.com/article/2041...

newrepublic.com

Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State

He is descended from Russian Jews—you know, the kind of people who were once denounced as alien and unassimilable. Today, his project is to unleash government persecution of those he deems alien and u...

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Birch Smith @birchsmith.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Can't escape this website even on vacation smh

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