Recently released grand jury transcripts show the extreme lengths federal prosecutors went to in order to secure indictments against the "Br
On her second attempt to secure an indictment against a group of protesters who would come to be known as the “Broadview Six,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg kicked out a grand juror who described the case as a “crock of shit,” according to grand jury transcripts released on Tuesday.
Prosecutors pursued the case anyway, accusing the group — which included Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh — of blocking an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle outside the Broadview detention center during an immigration crackdown in Chicago in late September of last year. On the third attempt, prosecutors secured felony conspiracy charges against all six defendants as well as misdemeanor counts of impeding a federal agent.
The case quickly fell apart: Earlier this year, prosecutors dismissed two of the defendants and dropped all felony charges, leaving only the misdemeanors. The case collapsed entirely last month, after a federal judge criticized prosecutors for improperly trying to influence grand jurors and removing those who disagreed with their case.
“I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury,” U.S. District Judge April Perry said last month after reviewing the transcripts. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
Those transcripts, released to the public on Tuesday, show the extreme lengths to which federal prosecutors went to indict the Broadview Six, even after grand jurors repeatedly expressed skepticism about the case.
sorry but once you notice how often ppl use a southern accent as shorthand for being unintelligent you can never unsee it. classism is baked so deeply and why are you acting like anyone who talks the way my grandfather talks is stupid.
The culture keeps rejecting what politics is trying to impose.
Mike Nellis at Endless Urgency:
There is a jealousy at the heart of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that I find endlessly fascinating. More than anything else, they crave cultural relevance. They want to be seen as cool, influential, and admired in the broader culture, but the conservative movement in this country simply doesn’t have that kind of juice—because they’re dorks.
And that’s why Trump and his movement feel the need to insert themselves into everything.
Yesterday, Trump went to the NBA Finals to see the Knicks. The Knicks were on an incredible run, and there were a bunch of genuinely fun storylines surrounding the team. As a sports fan, I’ve especially enjoyed the story of a professional wrestler named Danhausen whose character is a demon that can curse people and who supposedly “uncursed” the Knicks before their winning streak. Sports are fun because of weird little stories like that.
But Trump couldn’t just let the day belong to the teams and the fans. The most corrupt and least popular president I’ve seen in my lifetime needed to make himself part of the story. And the result was predictable. Instead of the focus being on the game, the attention shifted to Trump. Security became a massive operation. Fans dealt with additional disruptions. The conversation became about him, and the Knicks lost, I would argue, in part because of that.
There he was, sitting behind layers of security and glass, eating French fries and pretending to be part of a culture that has never really embraced him.
When cameras showed him, he got booed. As he should be.
People are angry. They’re angry because he promised to make life more affordable and failed. He promised to challenge the corrupt Washington establishment and became the corrupt Washington establishment. He promised transparency. He promised to release the Epstein files. He promised not to drag the country into another forever war. Instead, people look around and see rising costs, political chaos, regressive and hateful politics, and a president more interested in his own wild fancies than solving problems.
Which brings me back to the cultural relevance issue.
It wasn’t that long ago that Barack and Michelle Obama showed up at the NBA All-Star Game and received overwhelming applause. And that’s the kind of thing that drives Trump absolutely crazy. He wants that admiration. He wants people to genuinely love him the way they love figures who have earned public respect.
But the difference is that admiration for Trump has to be manufactured.
He gets it on friendly media outlets like Fox News. He gets it from cabinet members who seem obligated to praise him every time a camera is present. He gets it in controlled environments where criticism is unwelcome. But when he enters spaces that aren’t built around him, reality tends to intrude.
That’s why the boos bother him so much.
For all of Trump’s wealth and power, he’s never escaped the fact that what he’s always wanted to be is a respected New York socialite and cultural figure. He wants the acceptance. He wants the invitations. He wants to be viewed as one of the people who matter.
And despite becoming president twice, he still can’t reach what he actually wants.
The same thing is true of the broader MAGA movement. They’re constantly fighting culture wars because they’re obsessed with cultural relevance. They’re angry about movies, television shows, athletes, celebrities, corporations, and social media trends. They’re perpetually upset that the culture keeps moving in directions they don’t like.
Despite all of Donald Trump’s efforts to dominate pop culture, he has been getting rebuffed in that field.
I think the OP is right about a lot of this, though I have a few small thoughts.
MAGA does have support, though not usually all that much outside of the deep red areas of the country. Their media makes it seem that the only people who dislike them are in the big cities. They want to make it seem that they are relevant and a strong cultural force inside the country that has broad support.
They don't. It is an illusion based upon spatial representation. They see the "area" that has their representatives (the low populace rural areas that cover the majority of the country) and equate that with popularity. But even in those rural states and areas there are cities where their influence and ideology is rebuffed.
That all boils down simply because of what their ideology is based on. Control through hatred and coercion. They hate gay people, non Christians (and some Christians), they hate everyone who doesn't respect them "enough," and they hate anything that contradicts the belief that they are the foundation of everything. Many of these people aren't bad, by themselves, but get them into groups and they let that hatred and cruelty be known. It is fundamental to their belief. If you won't conform you MUST be punished until you do, and the more cruel the better.
On an average day, ICE has 25 children aged 3 or younger in custody, according to joint research by MS NOW and The Marshall Project.
On an average day, ICE has 25 children aged 3 or younger in custody, according to joint research by MS NOW and The Marshall Project.
Parents in ICE detention have complained of substandard conditions that frequently left their young children sick, isolated and regressing in their physical and intellectual development.
Jun. 9, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT
By
Jacob Soboroff, Kay Guerrero, Anna Flagg and Shannon Heffernan
In the first years after birth, the human brain develops at a remarkable pace. Every second, more than a million new neural connections spring into being, shaping a person’s physical and emotional health for the rest of their life.
Since the Trump administration entered the White House last year, at least 500 babies and toddlers have spent some of that pivotal time in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE has dramatically increased detentions of children aged 3 and under, holding 25 of them in custody on an average day between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a new analysis by The Marshall Project and MS NOW of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers who collect and share federal immigration data. That number is 10 times higher than it was in the previous 12 months under former President Joe Biden. Back then, on an average day, fewer than three babies and toddlers were held at facilities across the country.
Everyone makes fun of the millennial overpriced burger restaurants but the worst part is that they got you hooked on some bullshit and promptly shut down because their polycule broke up or whatever. You’ll never get to eat the caramelized onion apple parmesan sex bomb burger again. And it was $23 and good.
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
Many [Italian immigrant] women expressed an understanding that their exploitation was directly tied to the emergence of industrial capitalism and the attendant forces of imperialism, racism, and nativism. They denounced U.S. imperialism in Asia and Latin America, and the aggression of the Italian government in Africa. They called these “civilizing missions” into question by drawing on the rhetoric of American nationalism to expose how “liberty” and “freedom” were elusive for many in the United States. The multiethnic nature of New York City and New Jersey’s radical subcultures meant that they heard firsthand about the effects of U.S. imperialism abroad, and their writing linked these policies to the violence of European colonialism. In 1907, for example, amid a flurry of essays on women’s emancipation, Titì wrote an essay titled “Il Congo” (The Congo) in which she reminded readers how Belgian King Leopold disguised policies of violent brutality in Africa with the language of benevolent paternalism. Italian anarchists believed deeply that nationalism was at the root of the problem. In describing what it was like to be an immigrant, Ersilia Cavedagni wrote, “How evil is this, a society in which its members have developed a stupid aversion to others who do not speak the same language, or are born under another sky, and wear different clothes. . . . Ah, this damned and miserable concept of country separates those who nature intended to be brothers, so stupidly, uselessly, and ferociously.”
Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo
happy one year anniversary to this post getting marked as "potentially mature content" and then never leaving content review when i appealed. tumblr's own default loading graphic is considered by their own tos "potentially sexual" it seems.
@support you got any explanations for how this post got flagged? or why it never got reviewed? or what mature content might potentially be happening? believe me i am ALL ears
For context: this came out in 2011 in Australia. Same-sex marriage would not be legalized until December 2017.
It was only legalized in 8 US states (the 8th only a few months before), and wouldn’t be legalized nation-wide until 2015.
It was only legal in TEN COUNTRIES in 2011. We wouldn’t hit 20 countries until 2017. (Australia was 23rd)
As of today (April 14, 2026), I believe only 38 countries have fully legalized same-sex marriage. Out of somewhere around 200 countries in the world. That’s only ~19% of countries.
