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Donald Clarke

@donaldcclarke.bsky.social
2.4K followers 470 following 446 posts

Professor emeritus, George Washington University Law School, specializing in modern Chinese law. "Softhanded scribe". Gradually shifting over from Twitter/X. Website: donaldclarke.net Twitter: @donaldcclarke

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Reposted by Donald Clarke
CNN @cnn.com · 12h
The FBI arrested a 34-year-old California woman who has been charged with acting as an unregistered agent for China and allegedly surveilled the Taiwanese president's son and his family, federal officials said. cnn.it/3VMrwqg
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 11h
No, no, it’s nothing … just some dust in my eye …
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Marty Lederman @martylederman.bsky.social · 14h
Samuel Alito: We won't overturn Obergefell because it's engendered reliance interests. Jan Crawford: Well, many people had organized their lives around Roe v. Wade. Alito: No, they didn't. Women merely had an "abstract" interest in "ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in."
cbsnews.com
The Alito Court: A rare interview with the influential Supreme Court justice
Justice Samuel Alito discussed his opinion in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the leaked draft and its aftermath, same-sex marriage rights and why he's not retiring yet.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 12h
A 10K contribution and a $900 million return. The scale of the graft in Homeland Security is a) off the charts and b) possible because no-one believes they will face any accountability
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Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Announcing the merger with Titanic footage is an incredible bit
David Ellison • @ellisonskyd... 2h
What once was the peak, is now just the beginning.
Paramount and Warner Bros. shaped over a century of culture. By combining them, we aren't rewriting history — we're equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine. Together, we are Skydance: a creative-first ho Show
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David Higham @oldtrotter.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Denis Healey on David Owen
Healey kept a shelf of Spitting Image puppets as latex mementoes of his turbulent political life - among them Margaret Thatcher, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and David Owen. As he picked up the Owen puppet and squeezed it to make it squeak, I quoted Owen's view that when Healey stood for the Labour leadership in 1980 he “didn't have the guts to take on the left wing of the party”. “That's absolute bollocks," snorted Healey. “David Owen was a very self-centred person. He was good-looking, he was intelligent, he had immense charm and all these presents were given to him by the good fairy and then the bad fairy came along and tapped him on the shoulder and said, '... but you'll be a shit.”
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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I keep seeing people say some version of "it used to be normal to politely disagree on things before the Internet," and I don't think that's right. It was and remains normal to not be a shithead in face-to-face communication. We just have less of that now, and WAY less with people we disagree with.
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Nikki McCann Ramírez @nikkimcr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Trump straight up doxxed Senator Tom Cotton this morning
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Our robot masters not quite ready to take over yet.
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Dan Miller @dan--miller.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Not even The Onion could make this up: Before deciding whether to intervene in Venezuela, Trump reportedly spent hours consulting an AI chatbot about how Venezuelans would react to his plan to invade the country and overthrow Maduro.
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Edward Swaine @edswaine.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
There's much complaint about how all the press (and this interview) is negative, but this synopsis is incredibly generous. It's like saying Tristram Shandy is about a man and his Uncle Toby, or Infinite Jest concerns both tennis and Quebec.
Over the course of the interview, Trump discussed a wide range of issues, including the war with Iran, the artificial intelligence boom, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court, and his outlook for the midterms.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Document dated Nov. 14, 1933 from a local government in the Chinese Soviet Rep.: "Collect Shares from the Worker and Peasant Masses to Establish Consumer Cooperatives." It's indignant that shopkeepers, having been attacked essentially for being shopkeepers, stopped keeping shop. How dare they!
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Reposted by Donald Clarke
Kharis Templeman @kharist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My new article on Taiwan's slow-motion constitutional crisis is out today at the Journal of Democracy. The main theme: Taiwan's constitutional framework is poorly designed to handle divided government. www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/ta...
journalofdemocracy.org
Taiwan’s Deadlocked Democracy | Journal of Democracy
A wealthy, high-quality democracy has seized up. No populist, no stolen election—just divided government colliding with a constitution built for single-party rule. With Beijing watching…
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Hilarious.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The Xinjiang Victims Database is a very worthy cause that desperately needs support. If you cared about this stuff back in 2017 when the news first started leaking out, please don't let compassion fatigue affect you! www.gofundme.com/f/xinjiang-v...
gofundme.com
Donate to Xinjiang Victims Database Work, organized by Gene Bunin
[The above photo is of the Kashgar night market, taken by the database curator in April 2018… Gene Bunin needs your support for Xinjiang Victims Database Work
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Reposted by Donald Clarke
Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Excuse me, what?
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The kids these days will hardly believe it, but a mere two years ago, the mental & physical (lack of) acuity of Elderly Presidents was the Great Issue of Our Time. Someone should tell Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson, so they can write a book on it.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
If you don't have time to read the book, check out the podcast. open.substack.com/pub/chinatal...
open.substack.com
Logan Wright on Broken China
.5% growth...how did it get so bad?
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James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Do we seriously have to do Maoist newspeak every single time an 80 year old posts his idiotic ideas on the internet. It has been AI since before I was even born. Can literally anyone have a shred of dignity.
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Ian Miles Schlong @tedcruznipples.com · 29/09/2026
New way for trillionaires to debase themselves in breathless servitude to another man just dropped
Mark Zuckerberg C
@finkd • 1d
We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses. Meta already serves billions of people at scale and helps hundreds of millions of businesses reach customers. Today we are starting the next major pillar of our business, Meta Enterprise Platform, to help businesses use Al to grow and transform in new ways as well.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
renaissance painting when the renaissance is really fucking stupid
senator schmitt and his two idiot staffers after making a generational fuck up
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 29/09/2026
extremely weird shit during the Jack Smith hearing -- Sen. Eric Schmitt's team briefly displays a poster board that Schmitt claims contains evidence Smith committed perjury, but then Schmitt's team takes it down before anybody can read it and refuses to show Smith what it says
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Cake or Death @johngcole.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The good news about this is every generation needs a series of movies about heists of nazi gold. The bad new about this is that we're the nazis. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/w...
nytimes.com
Trump Brought Venezuelan Gold to the U.S., but Refiners Won’t Touch It (Gift Article)
The administration is brokering deals in a notoriously corrupt industry, including one with a company that the United States deems a security threat.
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 29/09/2026
For years we've heard that Biden created a "Ministry of Truth," which didn't actually happen. But, I still hear people talking about it. But then Trump directed his FCC boss to be a literal Minister of Truth and the story disappeared within a day or two. What are we even doing here?
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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Earlier this evening a federal jury struck down a brazenly unconstitutional traffic stop scheme "that turned mass surveillance of American drivers into a pipeline of pretextual traffic stops and unconstitutional searches." ij.org/press-releas...
The unconstitutional program ran in five steps: First, surveillance cameras across the state and country recorded license plates and logged when and where cars went. Second, analysts and anonymous tipsters flagged ordinary travel, like driving toward the border and back, as suspicious. Third, Bexar County sheriff’s deputies invented a traffic violation to justify pulling over the flagged driver. Fourth, deputies pulled drivers into their front seats, interrogated them and asked consent to search their car. Finally, fifth, if the driver refused to consent to a search, a K-9 alert from a manipulated dog supplied the probable cause to search anyway. This practice happened for four years to countless motorists.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Not sure there are *that* many, but it’s probably still in 8 digits.
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Walter Olson @walterolson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Woman accuses Idaho drag performer of exposing himself, uploads edited version of his act blurring out what she claims are his private parts. After he sues her for defamation, her appellate filings misstate and hallucinate Idaho law. Idaho Supreme Court upholds $1.1 million verdict in his favor.
reason.com
$1.1M Libel Award to Drag Performer Who Had Been Accused of Exposing Himself Upheld
Idaho Supreme Court finds false caselaw quotations, after jury found false factual assertions.
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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“I am a Dutch mother who did not give birth to children to send them to trenches!” Bad news the Russian Orthodox church is explicitly telling women to have children to send to trenches
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Phil Klinkner @pklinkne.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Great research by @tesler.bsky.social on the GOP man crush on testosterone. I really loved this chart.
goodauthority.substack.com
Republicans’ fascination with testosterone in three charts
Why depictions of testosterone as a measure of manhood resonate with Republicans.
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Ryan Enos @ryanenos.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
One note about this, because I was curious: remarkably, the state-level explanatory power of Google searches for testosterone and Trump vote survives controls for education, income, and rurality.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Here's a good analysis by Feng Zhenghu of some problems in China's new exit-entry regulations. H/T to @gaodawei for the translation. davidcowhig.substack.com/p/2026-feng-...
davidcowhig.substack.com
2026: Feng Zhenghu | Those Words “May Refrain from Informing”: The Weight of Article 6 of the New Exit-Entry Regulations
Some other translations on law in China:
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Reposted by Donald Clarke
Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I like that in becoming a nazi, you get glowing coverage as a brave iconoclast, and then when you stop being a nazi, you’re get glowing coverage as a brave dissident. Money coming and going. Only way you lose is having normal opinions like “racism bad” bsky.app/profile/trac...
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truth-is-truth.bsky.social @truth-is-truth.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
So, ICE agents were "shocked and frustrated" that they were supposed to go after "the worst first" as opposed to cowardly and lazily rounding up landscapers, kitchen staff and maids? Did I read that crrectly?
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Shelly Kraicer @shellyk.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Yuja Wang celebrated Glenn Gould’s birthday here in Toronto at his sculpture in front of the CBC building on Front Street. She looks deferential, attentive. There is Gould in her playing: his clarity, immaculate structural articulation, and a formal, unsentimental address. An entirely apt pairing.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
ah there's the cowardice I know
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CJ Fogler @cjzero.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Wait... WHAT???
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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This is a book about how completely unprincipled attention hounds will always make their way to the right because they know the right will have them. The NYMag piece? I guess that’s a story about how unprincipled attention hounds deserve attention as long as they’re shitting on democrats.
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Darren M. A. Calvert @dmacalvert.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
"You see, they sign up for health care, they pay for health care, and then they don't *use* that health care. It's the perfect crime and they thought they were going to get away with it."
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Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · 26/09/2026
PSA from Gangsters of Capitalism
Footnote 15
X
15 This was false. As a journalist who'd been to Fascist Italy later recounted: "The author was employed as a courier by the Franco-Belgique Tours Company in the summer of 1930, the height of Mussolini's heyday, when a fascist guard rode on every train, and is willing to make an affidavit to the effect that most Italian trains on which he travelled were not on schedule-or near it.
There must be thousands who can support this attestation. It's a trifle, but it's worth nailing down." David Dudley, "The Problem with Mussolini and His Trains," Bloomberg, Nov. 15, 2016, www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2016-11-15/stop-saying-mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time.
See all footnotes
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The match isn't "controversial." 🇮🇪 doesn't refuse to play against 🇨🇳, 🇷🇺, or any other country doing awful things or committing war crimes. They played against Yugoslavia under Milosevic & 🇷🇺 through Putin's many war crimes. Either you apply this standard equally to all countries in sports or you don't
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Brian Beutler @brianbeutler.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Wild. This should create a Streisand effect, which Dem ranking members can enhance by sending the companies document preservation demands. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...
hollywoodreporter.com
The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ (Exclusive)
YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all turned down the trailer for the Oct. 9 doc, citing “political” content. X won't even take Bleecker Street's calls. The distributor is appealing.
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The Editorial Board @editorialboard.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The weakest, most pathetic sanewashing you will see. China really is laughing. Wow.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Department of Ballsy Arguments That, Alas, Didn't Fly
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Will every Republican running for office be asked to disavow this Nazi supporter?
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Shocker
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
www.cartoonshateher.com/p/behind-eve...
cartoonshateher.com
Behind Every Left-Lib Is a KN95 Lesbian Bar Experience
Why are so many liberals and leftists loving a wacky story about dogmatic leftist bar patrons? Because everyone can relate.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
donaldclarke.substack.com/p/a-1932-jud...
donaldclarke.substack.com
A 1932 judgment from a Chinese Soviet Republic court with a surprising twist
Take a look at the 10th charge against the defendant
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 24/09/2026
i once again ask what in the hell is going on with Trump's huge ass and the contraption he has on it
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Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus @capac.house.gov · 24/09/2026
3 days after DHS made a racist post saying, “you don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh,” a Sikh truck driver was stabbed 17 times at a Wyoming rest stop. Hateful rhetoric has real-world consequences, and it's putting Sikh and South Asian American lives at risk.
nytimes.com
A Sikh Truck Driver Was Stabbed at a Rest Stop. Others Feel Targeted Too. (Gift Article)
A crackdown on immigrant commercial drivers and a DHS social media post targeting Sikh drivers preceded the attack, which has left the Sikh community deeply unsettled.
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Donald Clarke @donaldcclarke.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Just out: a Career China map from the amazing Career China newsletter. careerchina.substack.com/p/now-live-c...
careerchina.substack.com
Now Live: Career China Map 🌏
I’m excited to share a new career resource developed by the team at Mapping Global China: an interactive, searchable map of every China job featured in this newsletter:
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