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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP

@tnicholsmd.com

7.7K followers 2.1K following 7.8K posts

I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others Humanist | Emergency+Addiction Medicine | Health policy and advocacy | Health technology and innovation | Views my own (he/him)

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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · Oct 17

Hi new friends, welcome!
I’m an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician interested in health policy and advocacy. I post about harm reduction and the intersection between politics and health and healthcare, and my otherwise meandering thoughts of political despair.

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Bobby Kogan @bbkogan.bsky.social · 4h

Trump's mechanism to pay the troops during the shutdown is by far the most illegal budgetary action he's taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything.

It's also needless because Congress would easily pass a troop pay bill if Johnson were willing to gavel in.

Long thread.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/national-security-presidential-memorandum-nspm-8/

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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 2h

Stop allowing this hypocrisy. Hold them accountable. Keep pressure on. Keep talking about this.

Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 2h

JD Vance when people makes jokes about Charlie Kirk: "call their employer."

JD Vance when Republican staffers say "I love Hitler" and fantasize about throwing political opponents in gas chambers: "that's what kids do...we're not canceling kids because they did something stupid."

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Jack Tripper @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 9h

This is the result of a lot of people pretending racism is one of the greatest taboos in our culture while failing to address racism substantively. People are appalled by the idea of being called racist while being totally committed to upholding racism throughout society.

karl rove knausgård @uhactually.bsky.social · 11h

Every time a Democrat gets caught on tape saying like “Some Trump voters are racist” we have a national scandal and JD Vance demands an entirely new kind of apology and meanwhile every Republican group chat is like “Good morning fellow SS members. Who’s ready to respect Hitler today?”

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Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social · 12h

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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Eric Carroll @ericcarroll.bsky.social · 9h

I have seen the disinfo marketing charlatans running the COVID playbook of the debasement of expertise come for computer science & technology.

The flag they fly this time has the marketing banner of "AI". The trojan horse is the LLM.

And just like COVID, people I respect are buying into it.

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David Bier @davidjbier.bsky.social · 10h

Cato filed an amicus brief in RAICES v. Noem, the case challenging Trump's Border Dictator order that purports to suspend all immigration law because it is "ineffective." Our brief describes how the government's arguments are baseless www.cato.org/legal-briefs...

RAICES v. Noem

The government’s assertions are based on either misinterpretations or tortured readings of the data, attempting to find justification for a spurious legal argument in facts that simply are not there.

www.cato.org

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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 22h

The official government account for DHS appears to be run by far-right trolls deliberately trying to provoke a response by using a term openly associated with ethnic cleansing. They will attack anyone who points this out and express faux outrage at the suggestion. They know what they are doing.

Remigration Wikipedia Page.

Not to be confused with Return migration.
Remigration is an originally European far-right proposal of ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants, sometimes including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry.
It is popular especially within the Identitarian movement. Some proponents of remigration suggest excluding some persons with non-European background from such a mass deportation, based on a varyingly defined degree of assimilation into European culture.

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Tess Bridgeman @tessbridgeman.bsky.social · 1d

The President is announcing more extrajudicial killings today.

A reminder that the administration has provided no limiting principles and these killings are completely untethered from the law (there was no "armed attack," there's no "armed conflict," and these aren't "unlawful combatants").

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CavsKermit @cavskermit.bsky.social · 20h

This isn't a crackdown on immigration. They're using tear gas on U.S. citizens engaged in protests protected by the 1st Amendment.

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 21h

As the intensity of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has risen, residents of Chicago are increasingly pushing back. Federal agents repeatedly have been observed releasing smoke bombs, tear gas and pepper balls to disperse residents who gather or capture videos.

ICE Is Cracking Down on Chicago. Some Chicagoans Are Fighting Back.

Residents have begun forming volunteer groups to monitor their neighborhoods for federal immigration agents. Others honk their horns or blow whistles when they see agents nearby.

nyti.ms

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 21h

To be clear:

LA County has declared a state of emergency BECAUSE OF the federal government.

The Feds, LA County is (correctly) saying, have CAUSED the emergency.

This is a striking political moment of internal collapse. Local govts feeling compelled to protect their ppl from … their own govt.

Los Angeles County declares state of emergency over immigration raids

Los Angeles County officials voted on Tuesday to declare a state of emergency over ongoing federal immigration raids.

abcnews.go.com

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 21h

Same time that Pritzker is telling city and state officials to start arresting and prosecuting federal officials for assaulting Illinois citizens.

OT1H, this is clearly really bad.

OTOH, our federalized design might end up being an absolute godsend.

JB Pritzker looking at prosecuting ICE agents in Chicago

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has suggested that state prosecutors might examine the conduct of ICE agents.

www.newsweek.com

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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 1d

The Dennis Green theory of politics never fails.

They are who we thought they were.

www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat

Thousands of private messages reveal young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape.

www.politico.com

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Jenny Cohn @jennycohn.bsky.social · 1d

Balaji (a close associate of Thiel & Andreessen) leads the “network state” movement, which encourages tech elites to build their own “countries” by acquiring physical territory w/in host countries & building “parallel institutions” to replace existing ones in media, education, finance, & science 1/

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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 1d

The leopards will continue eating faces until morale improves.

Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 1d

Does anyone have a gift link or screenshot of the article? Paywalled on MarketWatch

Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 1d

❤️❤️❤️

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George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 2d

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 2d

It's almost like this guy gets it and should be in public office or something. Bringing meaning to the term "public servant."

Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft.bsky.social · 2d

Honestly, it needs to go further than this.

We need to confront the fact that democracy and wealth hoarding cannot coexist. Allowing people to amass the resources of a small state/country allows them to act as such, which is inimical to a shared society of “one person, one vote.”

John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 2d

“No Kings” is great , but we really don't get a functioning democracy back until we internalize, bone deep, the instinctive response to this and every other statement like it: “I don’t care what that rich guy thinks.”

Make it your morning affirmation. Say it ten times at the top of every hour.

Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 2d

Keep talking about what is happening.
Law enforcement continues to be complicit.
If you know people in law enforcement and care about them, like care about them that you don't want them identified after power changes hands for being complicit in these crimes, then you should tell them to stop.

Ruth Delgado @heylookitsruth.bsky.social · 2d

A mom in Houston reported her 15-year-old son with autism missing. She spent 6 days terrified, searching for him. The whole time, Houston police knew exactly where he was since they helped ICE place him in a refugee facility.

This is beyond cruel.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...

Missing teen with autism transferred to refugee facility by HPD

He is currently being held at an Office for Refugee Resettlement facility.

www.houstonchronicle.com

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Julie Greene @greeneland.bsky.social · 2d

I just learned, Thomas Alter, tenured professor, has been terminated effective immediately. Shame on Texas State! We mst build support for Tom. spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-tex...

Texas State upholds the firing of associate history professor Thomas Alter

Alter’s termination occurred on Sept. 10, stemming from his remarks at the Revolutionary Socialism Conference on Sept. 7.

spectrumlocalnews.com

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Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social · 2d

Was worried that this was going to be *yet another* of the "people should all go back to Twitter" nonsense pieces, but @ianbetteridge.com's law of headlines rarely fails. The answer here is a clear "no" with good reasons:

Well – no. Bluesky may or may not be, as one centre-right friend who felt unwelcome put it, “self-righteous island”. But the idea that that is the reason why we went is nonsense. That I’ve largely stopped posting on a site that’s done more to shape my career and social circle than the rest of the internet combined is less about avoiding rival opinions (I love arguing with people who are wrong) than with the fact the site simply became unusable. It stopped generating the things (good jokes, interesting debate, clicks) I wanted; it became extremely good at generating the things (racists, pornbots, racist pornbots) I did not.

Those who stayed behind have lost something, too: the ability to not have their worldview shaped by some of the maddest people on the internet. One of the Tories’ big conference announcements was the promise of an Ice-style border force that would deport [citation needed] 150,000 people a year. That mass deportations of most existing migrants is not actually popular in the UK – that such a policy places yet more distance between the Tories and the mainstream centre which deserted them last year – seems not to have occurred.

It’s hard not to connect this to the fact that much of the political class remains on a platform now dominated by the political extremes. They might do well to remember: Twitter is not the real world.

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Olivia Messer @oliviamesser.bsky.social · 2d

In which John Oliver methodically unpacks how thin it is to claim you’re all about “the truth” when you’re only running essays don’t get properly fact-checked — and don’t hold up to even basic reporting scrutiny www.youtube.com/watch?v=gieT...

Bari Weiss: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

YouTube video by LastWeekTonight

www.youtube.com

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Miranda Yaver @mirandayaver.bsky.social · 2d

If you have a student who's interested in pursuing a doctorate in health policy, we are now accepting applications for Pitt Public Health's Health Services Research and Policy PhD Program. We've got a great group of faculty (no bias) & students working on interesting stuff. Feel free to reach out!

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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 2d

Keep talking to normies about what is actually happening! Keep telling them these stories.

Again, these are not popular policies! People do not like this. They are not aware, information ecosystems have been intentionally broken to try to break our shared reality. Tell them.

Nick Kristof @nickkristof.bsky.social · 2d

In Portland, an ambulance was summoned to the ICE office to treat an injured protester (not clear how he was injured). But when the patient was loaded inside, ICE officers refused to let the ambulance leave and threatened to shoot the ambulance driver: www.wweek.com/news/2025/10...

Documents Allege a Federal Agent at Portland ICE Threatened to Shoot an Ambulance Driver

Feds delayed medics who had come to pick up an injured protester. Then, according to confidential incident reports, the agents became aggressive.

www.wweek.com

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Taylor Nichols, MD FACEP @tnicholsmd.com · 2d

On this day of hope for progress in achieving peace, I want to make sure people hear this message and bring this kind of energy to any renewed discussions among ourselves and individuals and especially as Jews.

youtu.be/X5kXCdzt_us?...

Peter Beinart - "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning" | The Daily Show

YouTube video by The Daily Show

youtu.be