Kavitha Rajagopalan
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kxraja.bsky.social
Kavitha Rajagopalan
@kxraja.bsky.social
1.2K followers 880 following 1K posts
Founding director, Asian Media Initiative @ccmnewmarkj.bsky.social. Writer. Previously Sr Fellow Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affrs. Global migration + Asia-Pacific. Pediatric transplant mom.
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Thrilled to kick off this series! Community journalism has long advanced democracy in immigrant communities and is a bulwark against digital authoritarianism — but today faces escalating threats and revenue loss.

This series showcases Nepali, Indonesian, Chinese, and Filipino media. Follow along!
Reposted by Kavitha Rajagopalan
and if you think he's going to willingly leave his newly renovated manse Jan 20 2029....
This demolition is a statement of *ownership*
the president has destroyed the east wing of the white house without so much as a word of input from anyone else to build a royal ballroom paid for with bribes
NEW: After The Washington Post reported Monday on the demolition of the "East Wing facade," a new picture obtained by Law Dork that was taken on Tuesday shows that a substantial portion of the entirety of the East Wing has been demolished.
Reposted by Kavitha Rajagopalan
Read this: "Nothing is Holy," by Ava Razavi. I taught a course on writing about the Trumpocene. Ava said, "I don't want to think about it." But she couldn't stop thinking about it. Gorgeous, heartbreaking prose by a new writer on looking for answers. callingallsyllables.substack.com/p/nothing-is...
Nothing is Holy
Ava Razavi on trading in American dreams for nightmares.
callingallsyllables.substack.com
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On top of everything the fuck else, a crucial task of the insurgent wing of the Democratic Party right now is to make it the anti-Nazi party in US politics.
Reposted by Kavitha Rajagopalan
like in the past two days he started illegally tearing down the white house to build a ballroom paid for from money extorted from american companies and demanded that the government secretly pay him a quarter of a billion dollars for investigating him for crimes he more or less admits to
there is a new scandal as bad or worse than what got trump impeached the first time about every 48 hours
Reposted by Kavitha Rajagopalan
One of the many public health impacts of data centers - In Mexico, a community experienced a hepatitis outbreak because the data center had depleted the village's water supply.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...
From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy
www.nytimes.com
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Here is my fuller dispatch from this afternoon in @hellgatenyc.com
Also very bad for local journalism when people like this destroy trust and cause harm like this. Why we need a news ecosystem that skews heavily toward community centered / in language reporting by journalists with cultural competency.
So stupid that some influencer can shitpost and then people get kidnapped
Over on X, a conservative influencer is taking credit for this.
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I have to say I’m really fucked up by the events of today. I have been interviewing recent arrivals from west Africa and stories include political persecution, people fleeing to protect daughters from FGM, people escaping enslavement in Mauritania.

To think they’re just rounded up? It’s too much.
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Hundreds of people protesting ICE in downtown manhattan right now. Reads and Broadway. NYPD cops in riot gear on scene.
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State rep. Hoan Huynh shared video of agents surrounding his vehicle/stopping him + staffers shortly after he said one agent pointed a gun inside his vehicle at him while another threatened to break a window. They were following feds in Albany Park after four people were reportedly taken.

Story tk.
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NEW: Scientists are using non-targeted analysis to detect wide swaths of whatever chemicals are lingering out there, ones that government agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency aren’t looking for or don’t even know about.

This story was first published by @knowablemag.bsky.social.
Tracking Down the Hidden Pollutants That Make Wildlife Sick
Since some chemicals become increasingly concentrated in animal tissues as they move up the food chain, long-lived, top predators like alligators — which may spend 50 years or more swimming and eating...
www.thexylom.com
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1. outrageous and offensive

2. speaking as someone who's spent eight years running an organization with a very clear rule that "when the primary's over we get behind the winner, no matter what", I do not think centrist Democrats understand the pandora's box they are unleashing with this bullshit
Daniel Goldman went onto CNN earlier *TODAY* and said

1) He isn't sure if he'll vote for Andrew Cuomo
2) And that he won't endorse Mamdani because Mamdnai has not done enough condemnations of anti-Israel violence
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You're also not a sucker for believing in people. I get the sense that this needs to be stated from time to time.
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You simply cannot be a political journalist today if you don't know the deep ins-and-outs of the nonsense conspiracy theories. Because people will just constantly say stuff that is blatantly false and you NEED to be ready to call it out with receipts.
Lankford: "I think now history has proven that Russiagate was a hoax. It was actually formed by James Coney and Brennan and others that were behind the scenes to push a narrative they knew at the time was false." (This is a lie -- would've been nice for Kasie Hunt to point that out.)
“Maybe you should show a little gratitude that you get to live in a country with such healthy, Aryan, sexually attractive horses.”
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Maybe it was a sign when the person Trump put in charge of the DOJ's Civil Rights division was a protege of Jeffrey Hart at Dartmouth, a man who wrote this column in 1977.
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ICE is stockpiling arms, including chemical weapons, guided missile warheads and explosive components. The spending dwarfs anything we've ever seen in the agency - a 700% increase.

The President is building an army to attack his own country.
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Fellow academics, I'm doing it. Going all in. Pulling the plug, literally.

This is on my syllabus for Spring 2026: "This is an analog class. No Canvas; this syllabus is your guide."

All readings are printed books; hand-written exams; no laptops. #academicbluesky #Highered #academia #Rutgers
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To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?
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Oak Park resident Scott Sakiyama reports feds pointed weapons at him across from an elementary school today. They then arrested him and took him to Broadview. While in custody, he saw agents texting in a group chat called "Chiraq Team 2."

Full testimony: www.facebook.com/share/p/1GqB...
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“.. They are the asylum seekers, the rule followers. They go into the federal building holding papers .. hoping for a measure of due process. Some leave the courthouse with a hearing date set months or years from now. Others disappear into ICE’s prison system.”

@nymag.com
nymag.com/intelligence...
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"While Johnson & Johnson’s hip implants caused immense harm worldwide, the company treated Indian lives as less valuable than those in richer countries, with the company exploiting weaker regulatory systems across the Global South."

Disha Shetty:
Johnson & Johnson’s dark history in India and the United States
IT IS A MARKETING STORY for the ages. In 1918, the American pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (J & J) launched the largest advertising campaign in
buff.ly
Reposted by Kavitha Rajagopalan