Trump gets BRUTALLY booed at red state football game
You know things are going just great when the Republican president is getting booed by the crowd at a college football game in TENNESSEE, possibly the most MAGA-friendly setting you could imagine outside of a guns-and-Bibles-convention.

Take Action: Tell the FBI and DOJ: Stop targeting Trump’s political opponents!

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VIDEO OF THE DAY: Jimmy Kimmel humiliates Trump with hilarious “Natalie Harp” sketch
The late-night funnyman and Trump nemesis roundly mocked the president’s relationship with his “human binkie” in a scathing sketch that imagined what it would be like if Kimmel had his *own* Natalie Harp.

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Republicans throw our service members under the bus for Trump
The Hell Cats: While they wrap themselves in the flag and extoll the heroism of our service members, House Republicans have been gleeful collaborators in Trump and Pete Hegseth’s efforts to tear down the military and remake it in their own sick image. They’ve stood by and said nothing as Hegseth terrorizes LGBTQ soldiers, fires and denies promotions to Black and female leaders, and erases the history of Black Americans in the US military.

They’ve stood by and said nothing as Trump and Hegseth send our troops into a pointless war with no considerations for their safety — and then cover-up the casualty counts when tragedy strikes. It’s time to replace these fascistic yes-men with leaders who will stand up for our troops and put their best interests first because THEY’VE been there before.

Democrats Rebecca Bennett, JoAnna Mendoza, Cait Conley, and Maura Sullivan all know what it means to fight for this country. All four of them served in the military, and they’ve seen enough of Donald Trump and his MAGA insanity. If we want to flip the House this November, these candidates need our support! Chip in today to help elect the Hell Cats and flip the House blue!

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Trump’s angry tirade over failing press ban reveals his Achilles’ heel
Greg Sargent, The New Republic: “One of the most frustrating things about the capitulation of elite institutions to Donald Trump—from law firms to universities to media companies—has been that the logic of the situation so clearly counseled the opposite. As many have noted throughout Trump’s second term, if institutions facing Trumpian persecution had shelved short-term self-interest and banded together in resistance instead, it would have hobbled his authoritarian tactics at the outset. Helpfully, this has now been confirmed—belated but significantly—by none other than Donald Trump himself. Late Thursday, while erupting in a wild fury over media companies that have joined forces against his effort to ban select ones from the White House grounds, he accidentally revealed an Achilles’ heel of sorts.

After Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS NOW—ostensibly on national security grounds, but in reality out of pique—the networks that run the press pool joined them in solidarity, which suspended the pool’s rolling coverage of the president. As my colleague Tim Noah observed, this has only worked to Trump’s detriment. Though a judge has now temporarily blocked Trump’s ban, the immediate result of the pool suspension was that the participating networks didn’t film Xi’s arrival. So there was no widely aired coverage of Trump’s grand ceremonial reception of him—hence his fury. In angrily pretending the news organizations boycotted the event to deny him attention during a successful moment, all Trump really demonstrated is that he badly needs their attention. Thus, their decision to join together in defense of excluded colleagues has located a real weak spot—and nailed it with a direct hit. That’s the true source of his furious outburst.

As Michelle Goldberg writes in The New York Times, a big factor driving all that early capitulation was serious elite miscalculation: Figures at these institutions got spooked into overestimating the price of getting on Trump’s bad side. Indeed, if the last two years have confirmed anything, it’s that the logic of collective resistance is sound. Not only is the immediate price for bucking Trump small; it actually works. It’s one of the only things that can really disarm him. Trump’s own furious reaction to the media’s stand against him neatly underscores the point. And it’s useful to have it confirmed, even if it came awfully late, at a moment when his tailspinning public standing made it a whole lot easier.

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Literacy is another casualty of the decline of democracy
John Livesey, Jacobin: “Approximately two years ago, a bizarre new genre of AI-generated content began to emerge online. Suddenly social media was filled with short-form videos depicting hypersexual anthropomorphic fruit, embroiled in increasingly far-fetched and soapy plot lines. It is easy to dismiss these shlocky and incoherent narratives as mere “AI slop.” But they are also endemic to a broader culture. In 2026, the average American spends at least two hours a day doomscrolling — significantly more time than Asians and Europeans, whose social media use is in decline. What, one might ask, is the cost of this new form of consumption? The answer, argues British journalist James Marriott in The New Dark Ages, is human literacy.

Evidence of declining literacy rates is stark. In 2004, almost 30 percent of Americans read for pleasure; by 2023, that figure had fallen to just 16 percent. Unlike short-form videos, books exercise the human attention span. They challenge us to follow a line of thought to its logical conclusions, for instance. This makes writing a particularly subtle form of expression, capable of holding nuance and contradiction unlike more visual media. As greater numbers of people turn to digital entertainment, however, these cognitive skills are under threat. Consider again the phenomenon of AI fruit videos. They pander to the shallowest human desires: providing an emotionally saturated spectacle, complete with bright colors, unexpected narrative twists, and thinly veiled forms of sexual taboo. A similar degeneration is evident in our politics. Data shows that political speeches given in parliaments across the West are getting shorter. However, they are also getting louder, using quasi-hysterical appeals to a public that is no longer able to process or participate in any other form of rational debate. As Marriott rightly observes, this highly affective politics is embodied by President Donald Trump who, by no coincidence, refuses to read memos or policy briefs on principle.

Marriott is a journalist at the right-wing Times newspaper, incapable of thinking seriously about class. One searches the book in vain for any discussion of the relationship between inequality and the crisis of literacy. Studies conducted by Ofcom, a UK media regulator, have shown that low-income families watch twice as much TV and spend significantly longer on social media each day than their wealthier counterparts. Why is this? As many parents have pointed out in response to social media bans in both the UK and Australia, screen time is a begrudged substitute for twenty-four-hour childcare. The growth of the screen-free childhood movement, adopted disproportionately by wealthier parents, has only worsened the disparities between children from different class backgrounds. Childhood is increasingly two-tiered. Some kids spend hours on social media every day, while others have parents who are happy to read them the classics, in some cases even while they are still in the womb.

It is now widely understood that capturing users’ attention — and refusing to let go — is part of the business model of tech billionaires. The longer we spend looking at our phones, the more ads we are exposed to and the more metadata we hand over to internet companies. This means that there is a clear financial incentive to use the algorithm to keep us looking, liking, tapping, and scrolling. Instead of identifying and criticizing these trends, Marriott is keener to extol the virtues of Western literature. “We face the serious possibility that writers like Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jane Austen. . . . are not going to reach the next generation of readers,” he writes with glib sanctimony. This seems unlikely. The elite culture that Marriott feels so protective of is not going anywhere; we will always live in a world in which there are places to read the classics — at least for some.

What is at stake is the existence of the mass culture, a unique historical development that came into existence only within the last hundred years, when working class people, women, and non-Westerners shaped global politics collectively for the first time. From the Nobel Prize–winning poetry of Rabindranath Tagore to the revolutions that humiliated European imperialism in nations as distinct as Algeria and China, the culture to which mass literacy gave rise was always a by-product of the struggle for, and achievements of, mass democracy. It was and remains the only successful challenge to Western chauvinism and the navel-gazing court culture that has flourished everywhere in the absence of inspiration from the popular classes. Without a renewal of the fight for democracy, we are unlikely to see a return to the culture of informed engagement with the world. If this happens, the end of literacy may be the least of our worries.

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I spent an hour watching Trump TV. It’s a digital pathway to hell
Dave Schilling, The Guardian: “Are you currently at an airport? Strapped to a hospital bed, with various tubes protruding from your body? Maybe you’re on a treadmill or visiting an elder care facility? Chained to a radiator in the basement from the Saw movies? If you said yes to any of these questions, you might be watching cable news while reading this column. Or maybe you’re one of the hundreds of people currently watching Donald Trump’s answer to cable news, Trump TV – a YouTube streaming channel that airs nothing but White House-sanctioned content 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Kudos to you for multitasking, and thank you for the click. I know Jacob Soboroff is hard to look away from, but at least finish this.

I don’t typically watch cable news. Or broadcast news. I feel like the best way to consume vital information is through the glorious written word, full of context and detail, rather than various “experts” yelling at each other about which one is the harbinger of the antichrist. Instead, I can yell all I want at a newspaper or an internet article and no one can tell me not to. Except the people in the dentist waiting room with me.

Trump TV is kind of like cable news, if it served absolutely no purpose and had even fewer human beings watching. I gave myself the challenge of watching this neverending digital pathway to hell for one single hour, hoping I could capture whatever joy is being derived from this American horror story. When I first logged onto the stream, I was “treated” to a 11 March 2016 speech Donald Trump gave in Hebron, Kentucky – which Trump on more than one occasion pronounced ‘Keentucky,’ presumably to mimic local speech patterns. I came in right smack-dab in the middle of the remarks, which very clearly were not prepared. As someone hyper-allergic to cable news, I don’t often witness the president’s speeches in full. I immediately felt as though I were succumbing to a form of intense psychosis, where reality had begun to melt before my eyes, like an ice cream cone that’s sat out in the sun too long.

We got a brief respite from Trump up next, with a re-airing of Melania’s ad … excuse me, speech about how great artificial intelligence is, from 16 January. ‘The most powerful skill is knowing what to ask,’ she declares. I realized the thing I should be asking right then was: “Why am I watching this?”

Trump TV seems like the next escalation of the president’s obsession with and animosity toward cable news. I remain flabbergasted that someone could care about anything on television that much. Yes, there are people who can’t seem to just turn their TV off out there, but MSNOW, CNN, and Fox News aren’t capturing the same level of enthusiasm as the latest episode of HBO’s Lanterns or your local bird-watching club. That cable news retains any significance in our daily discourse is a testament to how fiercely committed our nation’s leaders are to using it as a battlefield for their ideological warfare. And as a retirement community for ex-politicians.

The launch of Trump TV has been a fairly obvious disaster. Unlike cable news, YouTube has real-time data to tell you how many people are watching something. Trump TV was obviously never meant to be anything significant. No one in charge of this stream is trying, unless you count trolling Thomas Massie as ‘trying.’ Maybe Trump TV is actually the best way to consume our sitting president. Nothing else presents him in all of his repugnant glory: vain, myopic and worst of all, deeply, deeply dull. This holiday season, turn on Trump TV for your conservative family members. There’s always a chance that the uncut, unfiltered lethal dose of nonsense will break the spell for good.”

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Food for thought

The Sunday roundup

Hope…

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