Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is an open thread. Talk about anything you’d like, including today’s links, articles and posted comments.
New York Times:
Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts
The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials and tech workers said.
Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.
The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court.
New York Times:
Trump’s Minnesota Retreat Points to the Power of Public Anger
The withdrawal came as polls show Americans opposing the president’s immigration tactics, and as some Republican lawmakers began to find ways to distance themselves.
The withdrawal came on the eve of a funding shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, with a drumbeat of polls showing public opposition to President Trump’s immigration tactics that rose after the fatal shootings of two protesters by federal agents last month.
As Republican lawmakers increasingly worry about their midterm prospects, a few began to offer critical statements on the issue. Others warned that Democrats had been successful at stoking the backlash.
“This is a highly organized, highly coordinated effort of resistance — it’s highly effective,” Senator Ron Johnson, a Trump ally from Wisconsin, said in an interview on Thursday. “The left is very effective at organizing this. They exploited and used their martyrs effectively, and the Trump administration is reacting to that.”
New York Times:
Beyond the Big Cities, ICE Is Rattling Small-Town and Exurban America
Far from the national spotlight, towns like Cornelius, Ore., and Coon Rapids, Minn., are dealing with President Trump’s expanding mass deportation effort, and the effects can be acute.
In places like Cornelius, Ore., Danbury, Conn., Biddeford, Maine, and Coon Rapids, Minn., where moderation, not partisanship, might predominate, the arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and the more aggressive tactics ICE officers often use — have been jarring. In small towns, resources may already stretched, and even a single incident can shatter the tranquillity of neighborhoods unaccustomed to turmoil.
ICE is proud of its reach. The agency is using “data-driven intelligence” to deploy its agents, the agency said in an email, declining to identify a spokesman. It added, “ICE operates everywhere — rural, urban, and suburban.”
Ellie Leonard/Blue Amp Media:
Be Careful! These Files Are No Accident
How unredacted documents, CSAM, and intimidation are being used to silence independent investigators
Every so often we’ll get a drop that interests the rest of the world, usually photos and videos. But after thousands of pictures of Epstein’s water heaters, bookshelves, gravel pits, and empty memory cards, people get bored and shuffle out. The social media commentary dies down.
Not me.
I’m looking in those drawers filled with cosplay, wondering how it lines up with the dentist chair, and that weird Coney Island art on the walls. I wonder why a guy took a $60 million mansion and decorated it like a Hot Topic. I want to know what’s on those blurry documents sitting on his desk. I’m reading every label of every floppy disk. I’m image-searching obscure sex toys (unbeknownst to me). I’m double-checking every redacted photo to see if I can find another copy online, careful to avoid AI fakes.
Gabe Fleisher/Wake Up To Politics:
The Sandcastle Presidency
Trump is building almost nothing that will last long term.
Let’s start here: the Republican Party is likely to lose control of the House of Representatives this November.
What makes us think that? A bunch of things. It’s what the generic ballot polling tells us. It’s what the results of special elections suggest. And it can be gleaned from the fact that more Republicans are retiring from Congress than Democrats, normally a telltale sign of which party is expecting to lose seats.
But even more fundamentally than any of that, we know that GOP losses are a smart bet to make because the party in control of the White House practically always loses House seats in midterm elections.1 (And, because Republicans currently control a very slim 218-214 House majority, losing seats basically guarantees losing the majority in this context.)
Ali Breland/The Atlantic:
The Epstein Emails Show How the Powerful Talk About Race
The files reveal the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science.”
The exchange was included in the Department of Justice’s latest public release of the Epstein files and is one of the clearest examples of the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science,” the pseudoscientific practice of ascribing racial inequities to genetics. It is a way of thinking that has been refuted on multiple levels. IQ is a complex trait that results from a series of factors—many of them cultural and circumstantial—that are not neatly reduced to a specific gene or set of genes. Even if it weren’t, the consensus among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists is that race isn’t a biological phenomenon. Race-science proponents tend to ignore all of this, as well as any other relevant context, and use correlations between race and IQ (and also things such as race and criminality) as evidence that racial stereotypes are in fact justified.
When stu Rothenberg talks about elections, pay attention.
