Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
~The phrase "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" was written by Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to explain how interconnected all people are. It means that allowing injustice to go unchecked in one place weakens the foundation of justice for everyone, as every person is part of a single "garment of destiny". This quote is a call to action, urging people to stand up against injustice wherever it occurs
Data journalists start news site to track extremist movements
Decoherence Media is an independent, journalist-founded nonprofit investigating authoritarian and anti-democratic movement seems using open-source and data-driven methods.
At a time when masked agents of the state act with impunity, emboldened neo-Nazi groups march in the streets, and one institution after another legitimizes authoritarian consolidation, there is a need for unflinching reporting to hold these forces to account. We will identify and expose fascists, whether they are wearing khakis, a suit, or a badge.
Decoherence Media is a 501(c)(3) registered nonprofit. Read more about our mission and approach here.
As reporters and researchers, we have years of experience exposing far-right and neo-Nazi networks, first anonymously and then for outlets including Bellingcat, The Texas Observer, The New Arab, and Left Coast Right Watch.
ICE Buys Powerful AI Software for Social Media Surveillance Scanning 8 Billion Posts Daily
ICE is building a social media panopticon
The Verge – no paywall – “The agency’s latest surveillance contract is an ’assault’ on democracy and free speech. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries out raids across the country, the agency is working rapidly to expand an online surveillance system that could potentially track millions of users on the web.
Press Freedom Watch
Poynter – An ongoing catalog of federal government actions affecting journalists. “A free press is the bedrock of American democracy, vital enough to be enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
It informs citizens, holds leaders accountable and preserves democratic principles. After decades of relative freedom, the press now faces a precarious future. Since January, President Donald Trump and his administration have taken actions that have hindered the media’s ability to cover the government, including cutting funding, investigating outlets and detaining writers.
Some actions appear tied to broader strategies, such as Project 2025, the 900-page conservative roadmap for reshaping government. Others focus on outlets that Trump has repeatedly singled out for criticism.
To document these developments, Poynter is compiling a list of federal actions affecting journalists, including lawsuits, policy changes, investigations, funding cuts, firings and detentions. The list will be updated periodically and does not include verbal attacks, threats or media companies’ anticipatory compliance.”
What if the Big Law Firms Hadn’t Caved to Trump?
But law firms are in a special position. They don’t just use the legal system; they play a critical role in creating and upholding it. Even more than other private actors, such as universities and media companies, law firms and lawyers have an established duty to uphold the integrity of the system they work in, not only for their own benefit but for the benefit of society. As the inscription on the New York State Supreme Courthouse in lower Manhattan says, “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.”
The New Yorker: It’s not inconceivable that, had the firms resisted the President’s executive orders, his momentum for lawlessness might have been curbed. “That expression of the corrosive damage done by the failure to protect people to whom we owe a duty has new resonance lately.
In just the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has successfully pressured the Department of Justice to bring baseless criminal charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comeyand New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom he perceives to be his political enemies, and he has threatened to arrest both the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois. Trump has ordered the National Guard into blue cities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
His close adviser Stephen Miller has said that judges, prosecutors, and lawyers are protecting a movement of “leftwing terrorism,” and that “state power” should be used to dismantle “terror networks,” with the clear implication that those judges, prosecutors, and lawyers who oppose the Administration are part of those networks and should be punished accordingly.
Then there are Trump’s long-term efforts to shred the Constitution, such as his executive order purporting to eliminate birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Bedrock legal principles of prosecutorial independence, separation of powers, and rule of law have been shattered, and it’s not clear when, or even if, they can be restored.
A central goal of the first nine months of Trump’s second Administration has been to establish an unbridled and unopposed “unitary executive”—a fever dream of the far right which holds that the President has absolute authority over the entire executive branch, and that any independence of agencies or departments of the federal government is impermissible.
It is obvious now, if it was only hypothetical in the early days of the second term, that achieving that goal requires making the Justice Department merely a tool of his political aims and forcing lawyers and judges to go along with his demands, or else. It is worth considering how we got here, and whether we could have done anything to slow this downward spiral. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but it doesn’t require a giant speculative leap to conclude that, had major U.S. law firms not so quickly surrendered to Trump, this spring, he would have been denied early momentum for his lawlessness.
Perhaps a united opposition might have even provided the opposite momentum, toward a defense of the rule of law…”
Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration
Even prior to the current administration’s actions, both parties presided over decades of disinvestment in federal government capacity, too often abdicating power to private market forces where public institutions once shaped outcomes in the public interest—as Roosevelt has written much about. Conservative efforts to undermine the federal government and hamstring its very ability to function compounded the problem.
Decades of underfunding and hollowing out agencies, outsourcing expertise, layering on procedural hurdles that slow action to a crawl, and stacking courts with ideological allies have weakened the government’s ability to deliver for working families, stand up to special interests on their behalf, and earn the public’s trust.
And while the Biden-Harris administration had a fundamentally different vision of the government’s role in the economy—rejecting laissez-faire, hands-off approaches to markets—it often sought to restore the governmental institutions and norms that had existed prior to the first Trump administration, rather than dramatically reimagining them to create more progressive, action-oriented government institutions.
The long-running undercutting of the government’s capacity to solve national problems is not just a bureaucratic problem. It is a democratic one, because democratic legitimacy requires a government capable of speedily and visibly responding to ordinary Americans’ aspirations and discontent.
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government.”
To avoid that fate, American policymakers must prove that democracy can still deliver—that democratic institutions can operate with urgency to meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary people, and that the government is answerable to the people, not just the monied few.
Doing so will require reimagining and building a new, more responsive, and more effective set of federal government institutions, rather than simply restoring what existed before Trump. Future administrations must flip the government’s risk profile away from status quo bias and toward delivering bold, timely, and resonant results for working people.
To ground conversations about government institutional reform in practical experience, we interviewed more than 45 recent federal officials—senior political appointees from the Biden-Harris administration who worked on economic policymaking—to capture while still fresh their candid insights into the institutional obstacles to execution and innovation.
To better understand the bureaucratic hurdles and gaps in capacity that undermine robust federal economic policymaking and delivery, we interviewed appointees from a wide range of agencies, roles, and modes of government administration—including specialists in regulatory policymaking, enforcement, service delivery, federal funding deployment, personnel processes, communications, and more.
In this report, we recount their lessons learned, and we provide 161 practical ideas they offered for institutional reforms to create a more effective, nimble, and responsive government. These ideas are not meant to be consensus recommendations—i.e., they were not each endorsed by every interviewee. Rather, they serve to provide an “options menu” of credible, actionable solutions offered by practitioners with a shared passion for building a democracy that more quickly and effectively delivers for working people. Of course, we could not speak with every appointee, and we recognize that there are different perspectives; this report offers a window into the experiences and ideas of those we interviewed. We organize the report around core principles for reform gleaned from these interviews, as follows…”
