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Mark Grueter

@markgrueter.bsky.social
251 followers 78 following 591 posts

History PhD, adjunct instructor. I teach courses on Russian, European, and US history. Portland, Maine

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Reposted by Mark Grueter
Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 2h
Please, for the love of God, can the media stop calling random cranks who write fan fiction about their personal heroes in the past "historians."
Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: “Watergate As Lawfare.”
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 10h
I feel like this project will likely be as successful as the Reagan Administration’s anti-drug campaign in the 1980s. Remember how everyone just stopped doing drugs when the schools started telling them not to?
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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 14h
The mind that boggles at this phenomenon—the inevitable result of putting violent xenophobic assholes in power and letting them run amok—is probably reeling at all sorts of basic cause and effect situations.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 30/09/2026
Trump is standing like no human has ever stood before
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 29/09/2026
The authors of the report don't even understand what postmodernism was (and they assume it held a coherent meaning across disciplines). They say that postmodernism "repudiates the rhetoric of truth and objectivity." That is not what postmodernism did or does.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 29/09/2026
I hope people can see that this is the logical end point of the "measure the value of disciplines by ROI were R is conceived solely in terms of $" thinking that has, quite frankly, been enthusiastically embraced by both parties, to the detriment of students, faculty, and democracy itself.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Who says they “don’t make enough money”? Compared to what? You don’t need to grant the far right authoritarian party’s premise. You can write that they’re using arbitrary numbers based on no standards that should not be taken seriously, & you can just say that plainly instead of stenographizing
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026
Reuters got some of the IPO docs. Anthropic is a total dog of a company. Spent $12.6bn to make $4.6bn in revenue in 2025, $7.33bn of which was compute costs. Operating loss of $8bn. Losses getting worse year over year. Amazing stuff www.reuters.com/business/fin...
Summary
Companies
• Anthropic IPO could value the company at more than $2
trillion
• Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025
• Al lab spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year
• Operating loss widened to $8.06 billion in 2025 from $2.98 billion in 2024
• Execs, industry analysts have expressed concerns over harms of Al tech
Sept 28 (Reuters) - Anthropic is making a massive bet that Al will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.
But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming year, according to the
prospectus.
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I know Rahm Emanuel. I worked with him for years in the Clinton administration, and then when he was Obama’s chief of staff. Rahm Emanuel represents everything that’s been wrong about the Democratic Party for the last 30+ years. Be warned. robertreich.substack.com/p/the-rahm…
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
When they get back in power, Democrats need to go all-in on higher education. We need a campaign of reinvestment in public universities across the country that makes the Morrill Land-Grant Act look like nothing by comparison *and* a GI Bill of Rights-style program of tuition grants.
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Brian Goldstone @brian-goldstone.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"So many people are coming to us who have never come to the food bank before. It used to be people who were working hourly-wage jobs. Now we see salary employees." Maybe we should measure the "strength" of the economy not by the stock market but by the length of the line at our local food bank?
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Kevin Rothrock @kevinrothrock.me · 25/09/2026
Russian historian Yuri Dmitriev, known for documenting Stalinist repression and helping discover the Sandarmokh mass graves, has been hospitalized in prison with a suspected stroke, according to rights activists. He's 70 & serving a 15-year prison sentence on dubious CSAM charges. t.me/tvrain/111557
t.me
Дождь | Новости
70-летнего историка Юрия Дмитриева госпитализировали из колонии с подозрением на инсульт Об этом сообщает ЗПЧ. По их информации, Дмитриева экстренно этапировали из ИК-18 в Мордовии в лечебно-исправи...
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
DoorDash spent $1.4M trying to stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor. This week's historic $131.5M enforcement action against DoorDash for underpaying NYC delivery workers shows why. Yet another reminder that the only thing that can beat organized money is organized people.
theintercept.com
DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why.
In a wage-theft settlement, DoorDash now has to pay its workers around 100 times what it spent trying to beat Zohran Mam
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Jacobin @jacobinmag.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
At a Walmart distribution center in Mississauga, Ontario, workers have made history by winning the first-ever union contract with the logistics giant in North America. Their fight has meant pay raises for the company’s workers across Canada.
jacobin.com
The First Walmart Union Contract in North America
At a Walmart distribution center in Mississauga, Ontario, workers have made history by winning the first-ever union contract with the logistics giant in North America. Their fight has meant pay raises for the company’s workers across Canada.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 25/09/2026
The provost of UMass (R1) literally told a group of historians this: “research” means pulling in large external grants and unless you do that, you don’t matter and get nothing internally. “Research“ is about $ and institutions support only those disciplines that bring in $ or raise it privately.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
My entire life I've heard centrists scolding leftist candidates with "oh, but how will we pay for all that? isn't your agenda unreasonable? shouldn't we run on a modest proposal for means-tested tax rebates?" Then Mamdani gets elected and makes it all look pretty easy. No wonder they hate him.
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Sure, the top 1% owns about 1/3 of all of the net wealth in the country (and far more than they did in 1990), but I’ll bet you never considered how grievously oppressed you are by the 1% at the BOTTOM of the socio-economic ladder! Some typically mind bending insights from the OR GOP here.
•ORTGOR
CARTEN EAT
Oregon Republican Party • 11h • O
•..
X
Everyone loves to rage about the top 1%. They have the money, the houses, the influence. Fair enough.
But on a day-to-day basis, the people most actively making life more expensive and less livable for regular working people are the bottom 1%.
#TaxPayersMoney #oregontaxpayers #toxiccompassion #enabling #Grifters #mentalhealthcrisis #Oregon #middleclass
Blue Mountain Journal • Follow
21h • O
The Real Cost of the Bottom 1%
Everyone loves to rage about the top 1%.... more
TOP 1%
THE 98%
DEBT
OVEROUE
OVERDUE
5600
AIL
F/I
OTTOM 1%
6A chart showing how the percentage owned by the top 1% increased from 22.5 to 32.5 between 1990 and today
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This seems like a pretty big deal: donors made illegal contributions to Susan Collins and then were awarded lucrative contracts after her office intervened with the Navy. An FBI investigation was dropped under Trump. www.propublica.org/article/fbi-...
To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where
the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said - and that Navatek would get its government contracts.
After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek's CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.
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Casey Michel @cjcmichel.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
We're not in a new Gilded Age. We're in something worse. My latest at @theguardian.com on how US wealth inequality has now blasted past anything we've seen before, and how we've now entered the Age of Oligarchy. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
We’re not in a new Gilded Age in America: inequality is now far worse | Casey Michel
Today’s wealth gap is much bigger, and the country’s richest have much more power than they once did. It’s an Age of Oligarchy
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 21/09/2026
Industrial capital invested in the expansion of culture and literacy to create an educated working class (tho they couldn’t control how workers thought). Tech capital is investing in mass deliteracy while building no public cultural institutions. They haven’t abandoned culture, just privatized it.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 21/09/2026
Public education and public services are supposed to provide people with the ability to live free and fulfilling lives, but they've been defunded and disempowered to the point that they often do not. Instead, you have to get in on the latest tech IPO at the right time.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 21/09/2026
Everyone really should read this piece alongside the Nikole Hannah-Jones piece and reflect on whether we really want to live in a society in which achieving self-actualization requires lots of money as opposed to one which strives to provide opportunities for all through redistribution.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Heart's first album came out fifty years ago and it remains the purest distillation of the 1970s ever achieved.
youtube.com
Heart-Magic Man
YouTube video by SuperKevinheart
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Truthdig @truthdig.com · 21/09/2026
Nuclear-armed powers are locked into a spiral of Arctic escalation, and the guardrails that once managed it are gone.
truthdig.com
Ukraine War Spreads to Arctic as Nuclear Tensions Escalate
Kyiv's strikes on Moscow's energy infrastructure in the Yamal region was the deepest, and likely most expensive yet.
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Taxing the rich is absolutely essential to saving our economy and our democracy. Don't believe me? Look at this chart.
youtube.com
The Hidden Danger of America's Wealth Gap
Taxing the rich is absolutely essential to saving our economy and our democracy.Don't believe me? Look at this chart.
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David_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The baseline level of Dumb Guy Pretending To Be Even Dumber in our culture is incredibly high at the moment, but this is an all-time performance in that category. Hall of Fame work in any era.
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $8 trillion. The entire bottom 50% of American households is worth just $4.27 trillion. Read that back. Remember: Wealth can’t be separated from power. Power begets wealth and wealth begets power.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 18/09/2026
Universities are structurally vulnerable when dependent on private funding sources, but they are also structurally vulnerable when they are reliant on public funding sources when government funding structures lack safeguards against ideological takeover. This is the lesson of Trump 2.0.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
promise kept
thehandbasket.co
Republicans don’t have a Nazi problem—they are the Nazi problem
A spate of recent revelations have shown the ideologies and their adherents are one and the same.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026
AI has exposed the austerity con game in higher ed. For years, we have been told there is no money for students, faculty, staff, capital improvements, libraries. But somehow universities have suddenly come up with the money to pay for AI services??
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026
If you are willing to drop $47 million on AI services but unwilling to invest in research support & infrastructure for humanities faculty & students, you show that austerity is a choice. It’s not “too expensive” to give people the resources they need; you just don’t want to. bsky.app/profile/ashe...
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Don't forget: Intuit also gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. This is how our government has been corrupted: 1) Donors give huge sums to politicians 2) Elected officials rewrite rules in the donors' favor 3) Donors make huge profit 4) Repeat We must end this vicious cycle.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
These people believe that individual choice, powered by the invisible hand of the free market, will naturally reveal what is good and what is bad, except when it comes to their own beliefs. Then they're gonna force you to sit there and listen.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 15/09/2026
"A smarter way to respond to the latest disaster is to avoid codifying the preferences of the very companies who are generating the panic. As former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has indicated, companies are already liable for creating dangerous products." prospect.org/2026/09/15/a...
prospect.org
Congressional Democrats in Hysterics About Saving the World From AI - The American Prospect
Why panic when you could just use existing laws?
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 15/09/2026
Has anyone considered orienting college education around the practice of sitting together and discussing real books, read on paper? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/u...
nytimes.com
Universities Sound Warnings About A.I. Even as They Embrace It
As A.I. upends education, university leaders have been all over the map about how to respond. It can be very confusing for students.
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Mark Grueter @markgrueter.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I'm a fan of Chris Hayes, but I wish he's stop saying the word "like" in between his statements
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Yeah, we used to get treated to a blizzard of pseudo-facts and figures that at least took the general shape of an argument. Now it's just a big, dumb, shit-eating grin and "well, golly, I trust our lord and savior Donald Trump to do the right thing, he's always right, you see"
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 13/09/2026
Universities paved the way for student AI ambassadors for tech companies through their ever closer imbrication with private companies in the provision of basic services on campus. The campus center cafeteria has a Chick-fil-A, a Starbucks & a Chipotle; in this context, selling Claude seems normal
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Mark Grueter @markgrueter.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 11/09/2026
Universities are subsidizing internal AI tools that are, from the perspective of the humanities, enabling cheating & cognitive outsourcing. The cost in resources is certainly an issue, but the fact that these tools undermine the work we ask students to do is ridiculous www.umass.edu/it/genai/pla...
umass.edu
GenAI Platform : UMass Amherst Information Technology : UMass Amherst
The UMass GenAI platform is an intuitive and user-friendly platform designed to provide the UMass community with equitable access to leading generative AI models, including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic...
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 12/09/2026
AI companies will pay college students to be “ambassadors“ for their products on campus claude.com/programs/cam... openai.com/student-coll...
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
In an effort to combat childhood hunger, the USDA and the Dept of Ed has partnered with the Faith and Freedom Coalition, and the Idaho Potato Growers to create a new program where public school kids can recite a Bible verse and then get a double serving of tater tots. It's called "Tots and Prayers."
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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Since becoming president again, Trump has promised: -$5000 stimulus checks via "DOGE dividend" -$2000 stimulus checks via "tariff dividend" -$1000+ checks via "savings" from expiring ACA subsidies -$5000 "dividend" if Rs win midterms No checks have been issued www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-magi...
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Perhaps, during his private education, fake bloke Daniel Thomas read PG Wodehouse's Code of the Woosters and thought "that Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts sounds like a spiffing fellow, and just the chap I want to be when I grow up." And there they are, black shorts and all. A dream come true.
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David Simon @audacityofdespair.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Good thing we obliterated their military capabilities several times or these people could become a real pain in the ass.
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Trump’s illegal war on Iran has cost the average U.S. household more than $760 in higher energy costs. That’s on top of the military spending an estimated $1B per DAY to keep waging it, with no end in sight. Trump is losing his own war of choice — and we’re paying for it.
axios.com
Iran war drives $100 billion in extra energy costs for U.S. consumers
The average cost burden is more than $760 per household.
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Get the laptops out of the classroom!! No internet!!! Print readings for the students! Use real books, pens, & paper! We are doing a “low-tech” classroom this semester, and just a week in, I can tell it has made all the difference
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 07/09/2026
When manuscripts first emerged, people didn’t stop studying papyrus. When moveable type first emerged, people didn’t stop studying manuscripts. The emergence of AI suggests the need for massive investment in the history of media over the very longue duree to really contextualize it properly.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 07/09/2026
What if universities hired more human faculty, reduced class sizes, returned to paper and face-to-face interaction? Has anyone thought of this yet? Or does more human faculty = more potential organized workers, whereas reducing faculty #s & increasing class sizes helps admin achieve labor control?
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Mark Grueter @markgrueter.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Troy Jackson: the GOP knows that they "suck" on all issues that matter - mostly economic ones - so they try to distract from that fact by attacking me on the trans issue.
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