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Thomas Bloom

@thomasjbloom.com
738 followers 4.5K following 306 posts

Based in STL. Mostly news and politics content but also sourdough, Survivor, Big Brother, D&D, figure skating, gardening, Katmai bears, and more

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Reposted by Thomas Bloom
Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 17h
Over the last decade, there were two hypotheses: H1: the political right genuinely cared about threats to speech from the left. H2: they were using campus speech wars to impose their values and silence dissent. Today, the answer is clear, but I can't find any of the H1 people admitting their error.
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 18h
After years of championing "free speech," Texas lawmakers have enabled a dramatic rise of censorship in Texas universities, banning concepts, canceling courses and closing departments seen as "woke," and even using AI bots as censors. All in the name of freedom. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...
In other professors’ syllabi, the bot flagged the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, essays by the Mexican American MacArthur genius grant recipient Sandra Cisneros, and materials related to a class about the Holocaust (that professor was told to drop material regarding Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people).

Putting aside the ideological slant of the new rules, the bot, like many large language models, seems to “hallucinate,” or make mistakes. The AAUP lawsuit lists texts banned for their “sex-based ecofeminist framework” and “gendered ecofeminist frameworks.” These phrases might sound persuasively like academese, but the academics behind the lawsuit had never heard of them; these concepts “do not exist,” the complaint says. Matthew Pehl, a history professor at Tech, told me that he knew several people who’d received reports from the system that were “plainly written by an AI that had hallucinated content or confused content from one class to another.”
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Andy Rose @andyrose12.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
“Kennedy would never be able to do the trial in the US because of its significant ethical concerns, Offit added. “He’s taking advantage of a developing country … Is it because children in Africa are more expendable than children here?”
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Democracy and trains @wingedisis.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I don’t know any parent who’s gonna react to an attempted carjacking with their kid in the car in any other way.
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Thanks be to God that we no longer have to live under the tyrannical yoke of the woke radical left language police.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
The White House considers anyone that uses the term, "Artificial Intelligence," as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term,
"Super Intelligence," THE ENEMY! President
DONALD J. TRUMP
524 ReTruths 1.73k Likes
10/8/26, 12:14 PM
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 09/10/2026
"You hired half the Third Reich to staff your office ... If John Lewis were marching today, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club" -- here's a supercut of Jon Ossoff SMASHING Mike Collins during tonight's debate
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Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This is petty and least important aspect of this but: I reported on this years ago and the trump campaign falsely denied the reporting, and now via Hegseth they’re just doing it. Monstrous
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 09/10/2026
Ossoff: "If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club"
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I think people should listen to what the administration trying to bring back spectacle lynchings, race riots, and middle passage-esque deportation voyages are trying to tell you about themselves. bsky.app/profile/bren...
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Brad Reed @bwreed.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The president of the United States is inciting a fucking pogrom.
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Tom Joscelyn @tomjoscelyn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
So the Department of Defense is openly promoting QAnon symbolism:
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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
While there’s no shortage of rank hypocrisy among the MAGA elite, it’s nonetheless rare to see a pundit condemn their own future behavior in such stark terms. www.mediamatters.org/kimberly-gui...
mediamatters.org
FLASHBACK: At Fox, U.S. Ambassador Guilfoyle endorsed criminal investigation into Clinton “pay-for-play” claims
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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Guilfoyle, in her prior role as a Fox News host, endorsed the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton for “racketeering” and “corruption” because Clinton was supposedly “willing to sell access” through the Clinton Foundation in a “pay-for-play” scheme. www.mediamatters.org/kimberly-gui...
mediamatters.org
FLASHBACK: At Fox, U.S. Ambassador Guilfoyle endorsed criminal investigation into Clinton “pay-for-play” claims
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
If you are arguing that there is no innocent [person of any nationality whatsoever] then you are making the case for genocide
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 08/10/2026
the funny thing about this of course is that "athenian democracy" was a cautionary tale to the framers, who saw it as unstable and prone to demagogues and tyrants like the one rubio works for
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Jonathan Bernstein @jonathanbernstein.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Trump is basically claiming that he pardoned a crook who didn't deserve it for purely political resasons. This alone is worthy of impeachment and removal; overall, Trump's abuse of power pardons are easy calls for legitimate impeachment and removal. Whether he brags about it or not.
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Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
the Vice President of the United States has gone on record citing this man as one of his biggest intellectual influences if you didn't know this, it's probably because for some reason literally no mainstream political media outlets think it's worth mentioning
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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Is there one person in this administration—say, the person who changes the urinal cakes in the Agriculture Department men’s room—who is not shamelessly using their position to grift every dollar they can? Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
wsj.com
Exclusive | ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account
Text messages with a MAGA ally show Guilfoyle seeking funds and offering access to top administration officials before becoming ambassador to Greece.
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Thomas Bloom @thomasjbloom.com · 07/10/2026
Horrifying.
phoenixnewtimes.com
Congressional candidate is raped while repairing her campaign signs
Embarrassed, she initially didn’t want to report attack. Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office's investigation is ongoing.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Horrifying: Arizona Democratic congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia was raped by a man after he knocked her out. Another man approached her to do the same. “She began swinging her foot at him. ‘Not even worth it,’ she heard the man say as he moved away.”
phoenixnewtimes.com
Congressional candidate is raped while repairing her campaign signs
Embarrassed, she initially didn’t want to report attack. Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office's investigation is ongoing.
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Deidre Eversull @thorsmom.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The Brits have released some of the evidence they have against the Tate brothers. Here is an excerpt where Andrew Tate admits he’s aware that a child is working for him, creating porn videos. Members of the Trump administration went to bat for these pedos.
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elias isquith @eliasisquith.blog · 07/10/2026
it's not even fair to say this is peasant-brained. peasant-brain would be to say "jesus gives me the right to till whatever land i want without paying taxes." this isn't that. this is child-brained. "jesus is my muscle-bound daddy who will beat your daddy if youre mean to me"
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Law360 @law360.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
A former FBI agent has come forward with a claim that when U.S. Circuit Judge Emil Bove was at the U.S. Department of Justice, he directed the Los Angeles field office to illegally investigate protesters. www.law360.com/artic...
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/10/2026
interesting that conservatives were militantly “we must reward hustle” when the target was affirmative action at elite universities and now, when faced with the success of south asians and other groups, it is “i think we are too meritocratic”
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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 06/10/2026
ah more of those harmless "brief investigative stops" Kavanaugh told us about ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...
ballsandstrikes.org
Brett Kavanaugh’s Imaginary Immigration Stops Opinion Gets More Embarrassing Every Day
The fact that ICE officers do not allow wrongfully detained people to “promptly go free” is a surprise to only one man in America.
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Luis Paez-Pumar @lpp.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Queen Hayley
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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 06/10/2026
Uh, whoa. But if you're curious as to WHY the Kansas Senate race — which features Methodist megapastor Rev. Adam Hamilton as the Democratic nominee — is suddenly a toss up, I went down and spoke to and members of his church last month. What I found was striking: religionnews.com/2026/09/23/h...
religionnews.com
How megapastor Adam Hamilton could break the GOP's hold on Kansas
LEAWOOD, Kansas (RNS) — While Democrats have long been considered a longshot for statewide races in Kansas, the Rev. Adam Hamilton's candidacy has proven unexpectedly competitive.
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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Bro you should read about laws there’s all sorts of them
He also allegedly told law enforcement during the drive, "I will get you paid if you let me go,"
the arrest report said.
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Joe Sudbay @joesudbay.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
It's true. Every word: “She thinks we’re stupid. I mean, that’s really what it comes down to. She thinks that we don’t understand the process, that she didn’t know what he was going to do. And everyone in the country knew exactly what she was going to do. It’s not us that were stupid. It’s her.”
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
one of the ways the media shows which side they prefer, is which politicians they quote uncharitably out-of-context and which they clean up for even when what they actually say and do is offensive (the Biden story ran on the front page less than a week before the 24 election)
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/10/2026
i also read his op ed on originalism in the WSJ and i would love to know how presidential criminal immunity emerges from the structure of the constitution, especially when the literal authors of that constitution insisted that a president could he tried and even straight up executed
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/10/2026
one funny thing about Alito is he is constantly fuming over his critics. just a big blubbering baby.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/10/2026
8/ Amanda Trebach, a nurse and member of an immigrant advocacy group, was detained in California while filming and protesting immigration enforcement operations. Trebach says she was held for almost 36 hours without access to a phone call or a lawyer.
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Alex Awoos @alex-awoos-backup.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I feel like more people should be talking about this part
Screenshot from the article that reads, The Stud, San Francisco's oldest gay bar, was only able to have its Meta pages restored because of the bars popularity among gay tech executives with connections to Meta
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
India is one of the major cases of democratic backsliding. The Modi government is abusing state power to give itself advantages in elections, purging voter rolls—with a flimsy pretext—in ways that target Indians Modi doesn’t like, in particular Muslims, the minority he’s been violently repressing.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/10/2026
4/ Fernando Vasquez, an 18-year-old citizen, was on break from work when agents chased and handcuffed him, then put him in their truck. After realizing their mistake, the agents left the teen alone in the woods, with no way to get home. Then they threw his ID out of the truck.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/10/2026
The government *still* isn’t tracking how often immigration agents detain U.S. citizens. We are. 500+ Americans have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or held against their will in Trump’s second term. Our tally is almost certainly an undercount. THREAD (content warning: violence) ⬇️
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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Justice Alito devotes an entire chapter of his new book to the emergency docket—and to responding to people like me (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”). As I explain over at “One First,” it … didn’t go well: www.stevevladeck.com/p/256-so-une...
In the pre-publication galleys to his new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, Justice Alito spelled my last name inconsistently. This is, I suspect, the pettiest possible point on which to open in discussing a Supreme Court justice’s new memoir, and I would never have mentioned it except for the fact that inconsistency turns out to be the organizing feature of the chapter in which I (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”) repeatedly appear.The central inconsistency of Chapter 8, which is devoted to the emergency docket, is structural: Rather than tackle the subject holistically (as one might expect in a book), Alito mashed together the speech he gave five years ago at Notre Dame Law School with a “postscript.” The former was deeply flawed even at the time (among lots of other things, Alito repeatedly insisted that there was “nothing new” about the Court’s behavior on emergency applications during the first Trump administration and COVID); and the latter tries to move the goalposts away from the specific phenomena to which critics like me have actually objected.The result is to leave readers with a disjointed, inaccurate, and misleading sense of what the debate is even about—to say nothing of how the Court’s own behavior since September 2021 (including Alito’s) has only further undermined the already-flawed claims Alito made back then. Somewhere between the galleys of Alito’s book and the final product (which hits bookstores today), someone apparently figured out that my last name should be spelled the same way (and correctly!) throughout. The other, more significant inconsistencies were, apparently, harder to fix.
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Ian Bennett @ianbennett.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
This is sobering. This is also negligence. apnews.com/article/iran...
apnews.com
Soldiers seriously wounded in Iranian drone strike tell AP the military's medical system failed them
Some U.S. soldiers gravely wounded in the deadliest Iran strike on American troops say the military medical system failed them.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Just a reminder: Tillis persuaded the woman Hegseth allegedly raped to come forward with her story, and told her that if she did, it would sink the nomination. She did. At great risk to herself. Tillis then cast the deciding vote for Hegseth. Because he’s a goddamned coward.
ms.now
Outgoing Sen. Tillis regrets pivotal vote for Hegseth: ‘He’s an actor. He’s not a manager’
Outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis spoke to MS NOW about regretting his vote to confirm Pete Hegseth and his strained relationship with Trump.
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Gloria Pan @glopan.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Our country is swimming in guns, with few guardrails. This is how corrupting it's become. "The teenagers said ...they buy firearms legally once they turn 18, while others recruit friends who can." 1/2 #FreedomFromGunViolence
nytimes.com
What We Learned About American Teenagers Supplying Guns to Cartels
Our reporting revealed how Mexican criminal groups are relying on teenagers and young adults in border states like Arizona to help supply their weapons.
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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The irony of course is that Originalism’s big selling point was supposed to be constraining the discretion or judges to impose their own political preferences as law. In practice the effect has been very much the reverse: Liberating justices from the constraints of stare decisis.
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@GottaLaff @gottalaff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
"Missouri will not use optional federal exemptions designed to help low-income people keep Medicaid coverage when they are hospitalized, travel for medical care or live in areas affected by disasters or high unemployment." #ProLifeMyAss
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Americans picked Trump II, and their biggest objection is high prices. Hungary chose Orban, and their eventual big objection was corruption. Erdogan and Modi won multiple terms. Brazilians about to go Bolsonaro again. Not always free and fair, but yeah, millions want it. Wouldn’t work otherwise.
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Amy Littlefield @amylittlefield.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I wrote a whole book about the complexity of the motives behind the overturn of Roe and how misogyny wasn’t the only factor but moments like this make clear IT SURE WAS A BIG ONE
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Zack Ford @zackford.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
If Alito sees reforming the Court as "intimidating," it's because he thinks he has something to lose from those reforms. He does; that's the point.
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Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is a powerful article. Infuriating how every time the trucker was trying to find empathy for Pierre and Haitians in general, his girlfriend and mom kept intervening with some racist logic or conspiracy.
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Mr. Dan Zak @mrdanzak.com · 04/10/2026
A Haitian man legally immigrated to Ohio, then was given an ankle monitor bc Trump withdrew his status. He threw himself in front of truck. The trucker, who voted for Trump, is haunted. “Pierre was doing what he was supposed to do. We did not do right by him.” www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
theatlantic.com
A Reckoning in Springfield
A truck driver out on his route confronts what the country has become.
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Thomas Bloom @thomasjbloom.com · 04/10/2026
Proving my worthiness for spooky season 💀🏹
Stringing a tension cable that supports one of those 12 foot Home Depot skeletons
Matt Damon plucking the bow in that Odyssey scene
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