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Jonathan Blanks

@blanksslate.bsky.social

4.6K followers 850 following 920 posts

D.C.-based criminal justice writer and socio-cultural critic who spends a lot of time at the library. Hoosier by birth and college education. Some would call me a libertarian. I would not. https://theblanksslate.substack.com/ Signal: @jpblanks.36

theblanksslate.substack.com

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · Jan 27

Anyway, really think about how you are on here/online.

Try to focus your attention where it can do the most good, because being fucked up about everything all the time is not a healthy way to live. theblanksslate.substack.com/p/now-comes-...

Now comes the hard part

Making the country a better place starts with being a better American

theblanksslate.substack.com

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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 8h

A bar chart from the Economist titled "The ideologies behind political violence in America" showing that most years, most criminal cases involving political violence are instigated by the right, not the left, Islamists, or "other."

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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 16h

Narrator: It is not a statistical fact.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 16h

Vance: "Political violence, it's just a statistical fact that it's a bigger problem on the left. If you had, god forbid, somebody on the left who was assassinated, I'm sure you could find one person who would maybe celebrate it, but the fact that it became mainstream to celebrate Charlie's death..."

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Tess Owen @tessowen.bsky.social · 10h

Heres the link: slate.com/news-and-pol...

Is It Cool to Say “I Love Hitler”? The Republican Party Is Trying to Decide.

J.D. Vance has weighed in ...

slate.com

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 12h

The "anti-woke" backlash was always about white collar labor competition from nonwhites, not hr bullshit. bsky.app/profile/phil...

Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 13h

NBC News has reportedly eliminated its NBC BLK, NBC Asian America, NBC Latino and NBC OUT teams

NBC News’ 150 Layoffs Gut Black, Latino, Asian American and LGBTQ+ Diversity Teams

The cuts affected teams across the NBC News operation and came as the network no longer needed to support two different news operations. MSNBC has begun growing its own newsroom, hiring swaths of tale...

www.thewrap.com

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 13h

You see, Ernie Pyle could have lived a long happy life had he just stuck to covering homecoming.

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 13h

UPDATE: Following the firing of the director of the student newspaper, Indiana University has now cut the print edition of the newspaper entirely.

www.idsnews.com/article/2025...

Indiana University cuts IDS print entirely, hours after firing student media director
By IDS staff
Oct 15, 2025 1:23 pm · Updated Oct 15, 2025 1:23 pm

IU previously directed the Indiana Daily Student to stop printing news coverage in our newspaper. Upon pushback, the university fully cut print, including our special editions. The IDS was not involved in the decision.

Media School Dean David Tolchinsky sent the order to IDS leadership in an email responding to its appeal that the school not censor the newspaper. And the dean attributed the decision to “the campus.” He has not yet responded to a message for clarification.

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 21h

But I AM Gen X.

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 21h

My wife just complained “I’ve got that stupid Soundgarden song stuck in my head.”

::looks at her quizzically::

“The one from the Amazon ad you find hilarious.”

[Collective Soul’s “Shine”]

a man with his arms outstretched in front of a brick arch with the words if you need me

Alt: Gif of Phil (Bill Murray) jumping off a ledge with his arms outstretched in the movie Groundhog Day. The text above the jump says “if you need me, I’ll be”

media.tenor.com

Reposted by Jonathan Blanks

Robin James @robinjames.bsky.social · 22h

Personalized media kills the one thing that's actually powerful about experiencing art: sharing that experience with other people.

This is Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" dressed up in dragons and pinups.

Scientific American @sciam.bsky.social · 3d

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

Want to See Marilyn Monroe in Game of Thrones? AI Could Make It Soon

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

www.scientificamerican.com

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Old White Nepo Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 22h

The thing is that the modern GOP (not to mention its basement-confined moron stepchild, the Mises Caucus libertarian “party”) is accurately depicted by this language and a critical mass of the party is absolutely fine with it.
/1

Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social · 22h

It’s incredible that the VT State Senator wrapped up in this hasn’t resigned yet — every major GOP leader in the state has called for his resignation. Fixing democracy requires restoring shame to public life. And accountability. Lots of accountability. vtdigger.org/2025/10/14/v...

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 1d

They are going to ruin my alma mater.

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 1d

Indiana University has fired the staff director of the student newspaper, after disputes in which university leadership tried to pressure him to prevent students from publishing news.

IndyStar 2 . Follow
1h:
"All Media School and IU students, faculty and staff
should be scared by this blatant attack on someone
standing up for what's right," student Editors-ln-Chief
Mia Hilkowitz and Andrew Miller said in a statement.
Read more: bit.ly/43ebKW1
IndyStar.
IDS
The original investigative student
newsroom of Indiana University
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Indiana University fires IDS
adviser amid push to control
student newspaper's content

The director of student media at Indiana University was fired amidst a dispute between university leadership and editors at the Indiana Daily Student over what content gets printed in the student newspaper.

As director of student media, Jim Rodenbush did not directly oversee or have any say over the content published in the IDS, per a charter between the IDS and the university. But he told IndyStar his firing follows a series of meetings with IU Media School leadership in which it grew increasingly apparent they were expecting him to officially prohibit students from publishing news.

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marjtroyer.bsky.social @marjtroyer.bsky.social · 3d

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 4d

Cignetti, man.

a man on a football field is being interviewed by curt cignetti

Alt: Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti smiles and responds to a reported saying “Pretty darn good!”

media.tenor.com

Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 4d

That duck is cooked. #goiu #hoosiers

Brad 🇨🇦 @frontrowbrad.bsky.social · 4d

The duck has spoken

Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 6d

Gonna need a new way to express FOH for the foreseeable future

Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com · 6d

"None of what Trump has done since retaking office should come as a shock... It’s a shame that many of the content creators who helped put him back in office only seem to be realizing it now."

Manosphere Influencers Who Boosted Trump Are Now Cooling on Him

bit.ly

Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 6d

A friend I deeply respect says he uses it for organizing essays —basically he writes it and then the LLM makes it flow better.

Couldn’t be me—organizing my thoughts is the whole point (to me)—but I can at least respect this use case even though the use case might have a global n of 75.

Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 8d

That they eventually had the capacity for industrial murder is not the same as “they started and implemented a plan.” I’m not saying they couldn’t get anything done, I’m saying they began as disorganized and counterproductive as some more modern examples.

Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 8d

I think recognizing Nazi disorganization supports doing more now precisely because tyranny is not as obvious as people think. We teach Nazism as this obvious evil in hindsight but gloss over how a small group of semi-competent fanatic weirdos took over most of Europe.

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 8d

I was trying to piggy back off your comment not correct you, but I get it. No offense intended but I’m sorry for coming off that way.

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 8d

A German academic recounted this after the war, recorded in Milton Meyer’s “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45”

If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately come after the first and smallest, thousands—yes, millions—would have been sufficiently shocked if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German firm” stickers on the windows of the non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course, this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C, and so on to Step D. And one day, too late, your principles—if you were ever sensible of them—all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident—in my case, my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine!”—collapses as it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed, and changed completely under your nose.

The world you live in, your nation, your people, is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there: all untouched, all reassuring: the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now, you live in a world of hate and fear. And the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves. When everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system that rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself, it was compelled to go all the way.

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 8d

I think normies believe that they’ll know tyranny when they see it; they oppose jackboots and swastikas and Gestapo guys in trenchcoats.

But it doesn’t work that way. These things are built over time and each encroachment seems bad but not evil.

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 8d

Nazi efficiency is a myth. There wasn’t a central strategy: there was personality and a guiding ethos, but there wasn’t some well-honed organization or even developed plan. They got in their own way often.

Justin Zimmerman @jztidecat.bsky.social · 8d

Please scream this from the mountains. Do we really want them to be as efficient as the Nazis before responding?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · Feb 5

that said: I think the "it's not fascism unless they're good at it" brand of analysis probably isn't the move

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Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 9d

It sounds like Bublé doing some synth pop karaoke version of a Christmas song.

Jonathan Blanks @blanksslate.bsky.social · 9d

In line and listening to a cover of ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ so bad it might be racist.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 12d

Republicans believe free speech is when they can say what they want and when you can say what they want. bsky.app/profile/bern...

Berny Belvedere @bernybelvedere.bsky.social · 12d

Criticizing Charlie Kirk is a fireable offense that incites domestic terrorism. But calling political opponents "the party of hate, evil, and Satan" is proper and good. Got it.

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 12d

Serious question: has the Fed govt ever arrested so many elected officials in such a short period of time, across multiple cities, and not for legit corruption reasons?

This seems like a distinct degree of anti-democratic escalation.

Eric Reinhart @eric-reinhart.com · 12d

ICE just blatantly violated the law and arrested sitting Chicago Alderperson Jessie Fuentes while seeking to illegally arrest a patient in a hospital. Fuck these fascists.

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