Adam Cohen (My Personal Views Only)
@axidentaliberal.bsky.social

Follow
More Supreme Court “shadow docket” decisions which needlessly endanger immigrants by severely restricting their Constitutional rights

Imagine letting ICE deport an El Salvadoran woman-not to Central America, but to Africa, where she has no contacts, no way to communicate and nobody to help her
https://bsky.app/profile/axidentaliberal.bsky.social/post/3mwrwypg5ss2s

More of the evil

@donwinslow
Don Winslow
@donwinslow
CNN witnessed 25 migrant children, some as young as 3, in a Texas immigration court on Monday, many without attorneys amid the Trump administration’s push to speed up deportations of unaccompanied minors rescued by Border Patrol. The judge denied asylum to Angel, whose family lives in the U.S. and who feared danger back home, then issued a removal order with an appeal deadline at month’s end. Court sketches captured the children’s distress, like a boy with his head in his hands, fueling online divides: supporters praised ending child trafficking, while critics decried the emotional toll and lack of representation.
7:06 PM · Sep 30, 2026
https://x.com/donwinslow/status/2105449213907870161

I believe the truth will all come out. But, the pure evil being done in the name of the United States of America, with regards to all the evil happening with these deportations..cannot be quantified.

I hope that you are enjoying this weekend with family and friends.
Since they announced a couple of weeks ago that the annual vaccines were available, please go and get your shots.

JUST.THE.TRUTH.

@trouble_man90
Tim
@trouble_man90
14h
Democrats gave yall two incredibly smart, experienced, and capable women, and a mild mannered old man, and yall acted a damn fool over them. So enjoy your $5 gas, we’ve babied yall long enough, you’re just going to have to feel these consequences for a little while
https://x.com/trouble_man90/status/2100055829835550798

UH HUH
UH HUH

@intelligentfilm
e.m. lake
@intelligentfilm
White people, on both sides of the aisle, DO NOT want equality.
Joe Biden was the MOST PROGRESSIVE POTUS in HISTORY.
Student loan forgiveness. Infrastructure. Union Pension bailout. $35 insulin. CHIPS Act. Most diverse admin.
Which is why they threw him under the bus.
https://x.com/intelligentfilm/status/2100067292193423807

From The New Republic:

Trump Moves to Cut Off Student Loans for Tons of Degrees
Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money, you won’t be able to get a student loan.

President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the Education Department has finalized a rule that will force schools to prove that the loans students are taking out are paying off.

Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music, and cosmetic certification programs will be hit the hardest. For-profit programs will also be hit particularly hard.

While the Trump administration is framing the policy as “accountability” for higher education, and some are welcoming the move, others see it as an attack on those whose work is important regardless of salary.

The Education Department intends to use IRS data to determine students’ salaries four years after they graduate and compare them to those of people similar in age who just have high school diplomas. If they’re below that baseline, that degree will be ineligible for loans.

“We need social workers,” American Council on Education Ted Mitchell told the Times. “Whether it’s the fentanyl epidemic or homelessness in L.A., we need people who can work on the street with people who need it the most.”

Even some on the right are concerned.

“The government shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money,” said Gregory Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nonprofit that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a designated hate group.

“In certain fields of study, especially in the humanities, whether or not that program has been successful and has done a really good job in its educational mission might not be all that directly tied to immediate earnings potential,” added Stanford professor Jonathan Gienapp.

The policy will be implemented in 2027.

Becca
@BeccaRBRoyalty
OH? This is going to have massive repercussions. Music is probably one of the clearest examples of what happens when you judge education by immediate earning potential. You can look at someone’s paycheck, but that doesn’t tell you the full story of what music programs produce: composers, producers, educators, engineers, archivists, performers, and all the people who help build and preserve an entire culture.
https://x.com/BeccaRBRoyalty/status/2104621407883677846

@BeccaRBRoyalty
Becca
@BeccaRBRoyalty
1h
And this is why the music degree part really stands out to me. Quincy Jones spent years talking about musicians and producers losing touch with the musical principles, history, and technique that previous generations were expected to know. He always stressed knowing where you Show more

☆.｡.:* t0m0ko .｡.:*☆
@mootsheep
we need more liberal arts students, not less. we wonder why everyone is getting dumber. we wonder why no one can read. we wonder why everyone lacks critical thinking skills. it’s because higher education is completely inaccessible
11:40 AM · Sep 28, 2026
https://x.com/mootsheep/status/2104612108013027390

@Malinowski
Tom Malinowski
@Malinowski
This is actually crazy. For years, we’ve prioritized scholarships and loans that enable students to choose low paying public service careers like teaching, social work, religious ministries, etc.

Future corporate execs and lawyers aren’t the ones who need subsidized loans!
https://x.com/Malinowski/status/2104597616441033183

Dr. Jasmine Harris
@DrHarrisJay
They want to remove critical skill-building from higher ed.

Going to college isn’t JUST about getting a job. It’s about learning to think, learning to write, learning time management, and group participation. This administration knows that.

This will make students dumber.
https://x.com/DrHarrisJay/status/2104607362426535960

Becca
@BeccaRBRoyalty
OH? This is going to have massive repercussions. Music is probably one of the clearest examples of what happens when you judge education by immediate earning potential. You can look at someone’s paycheck, but that doesn’t tell you the full story of what music programs produce: composers, producers, educators, engineers, archivists, performers, and all the people who help build and preserve an entire culture.
https://x.com/BeccaRBRoyalty/status/2104621407883677846

Renzo
@fwrenzo1
Rich people send their kids to $60,000/year private schools, then vote to defund public education. They don’t want school choice, they want their kids separated from yours. Segregation is the goal. “Choice” is the language.
4:10 AM · Sep 28, 2026
https://x.com/fwrenzo1/status/2104499039400087786

Rachel Bitecofer
@RachelBitecofer
No more musicians. No more actors. No more artists or theologians.

No more social workers.

Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest.
https://x.com/RachelBitecofer/status/2104624298023604530

jezz
@JezziiB
Imagine cutting off federal student loans for programs leading to careers overwhelmingly held by women.

Women make up:
• 80% of teaching assistants
• 81–84% of social workers
• 73–80% of counselors
• 79% of elementary/middle-school teachers
• 85% of special-ed teachers
• 92% of hairstylists/cosmetologists
• 93% of childcare workers

Yup, just a coincidence.
2:14 AM · Sep 29, 2026
https://x.com/JezziiB/status/2104832139661312015

The United States versus Elon Reed Musk
@Needle_of_Arya
America, it looks as if the right-wingers & Libertarians finally won, all those white dudes born from 1946-89 who told you that they didn’t think that people should take up any major at uni that didn’t “earn its keep”

they finally got a president to defund all the humanities
11:11 AM · Sep 29, 2026
https://x.com/Needle_of_Arya/status/2104967421937528870

The United States versus Elon Reed Musk
@Needle_of_Arya
It’s not the government’s business to pick and choose which degrees the DOE will help fund. I thought you right-wingers & Libertarians wanted *less* government intervention in people’s private lives?
https://x.com/Needle_of_Arya/status/2104959456685822269

DO.YOU.HAVE.AN.ELECTION.PLAN.FOR.NOVEMBER.

In most states, there are three ways to vote.

MAIL VOTING – YOU apply and receive a Mail Ballot. You fill out the ballot and return it to your local election authority.
There are usually three ways to return a mail ballot:
1. You take it to the Election Authority
2. Mail Ballot Dropboxes controlled by the Election Authority (IF AVAILABLE)
3. Mail Back the Ballot via the USPS.
I cannot stress this enough.
IF your only option to return you Mail Ballot is through the USPS
a. DO NOT give it to the Postman
b. DO NOT put it in a Mailbox

TAKE IT TO THE POST OFFICE. GO INSIDE AND REQUEST THAT THE POSTAL EMPLOYEE PUT A DATESTAMP ON YOUR RETURN ENVELOPE IN FRONT OF YOU.

The two largest rejection reasons for Mail Ballots are:
Signature on returned envelope DOES NOT MATCH your Official Signature on file at the Election Jurisdiction
The date stamped on the return envelope IS TOO LATE FOR THE ELECTION

Contact your local Election Jurisdiction and see if there is a form that you can use to Update your Official Signature, so that you can try and make sure that the signature on the ballot envelope matches what is in their database.

If you have a Mail Ballot, you need to call and ask:
Does your ballot have to be AT your local Election Jurisdiction BY ELECTION DAY
Or
Does it have to be POSTMARKED BY ELECTION DAY.
If the latter, what amount of time is the ballot given to arrive at the Election Jurisdiction?

The second way to vote is Early Voting.
Does your election jurisdiction have a time set aside, before Election Day, where you can go cast your ballot?
Early Voting is good for me. Get it out of the way. You never know what could happen on Election Day.

The Final Way is voting on Election Day, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2026.
Most jurisdictions open before you go to work. I would always suggest go early, because you never know what will happen throughout the day.

Have a Family Chat? Ask them what their voting plan is?
Do you have Seniors on your block or in your church/synagogue/mosque? Ask them if they have a Voting Plan, and if they need assistance? Maybe they don’t now how to go online to request a Mail Ballot? Maybe they don’t know where their local polling place is – you should be able to help them find that online. Maybe they can catch a ride with you to the site during Early Voting.

Do your Elders live in a Nursing Home? You can ask the Administrator if the local Election Jurisdiction has a Nursing Home Voter Program. If so, is your Senior signed up for it? If not, how can they participate?

Do you have family in the Military or Live Overseas?
They can vote, using the last address where they lived in the United States.
They Need to fill out a Federal Post Card Application for Military and Overseas voters.

Do you know when Voter Registration closes for your state? Look up on your State Board of Elections website.

If you are in Illinois:
Paper Voter Registration closes TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2026
Electronic Voter Registration closes, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2026 AT 11:59 PM (if you have an Illinois Drivers License/State ID with the address that you want to use for voter registration)
https://ova.elections.il.gov/

Grace Period Voting begins Wednesday, October 7th. That’s when you register to vote and vote at the same time. You will need 2 pieces of ID, but only ONE has to have your address on it. Illinois is a state with a long list of acceptable forms of ID:

Acceptable Forms of ID
Passport or Military ID
Driver’s License or State ID card
College/University/School/Work ID
Vehicle registration card
Lease, mortgage or deed to home
Credit or debit card
Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid card
Insurance card
Civic, union or professional membership card
LINK/Public Aid/Department of Human Services card
Illinois FOID card

Examples of first-class mail addressed to voter that can be used as ID:

Bill, Transcript or Report Card from School
Bank Statement, Pay Stub or Pension Statement
Utility, Medical or Insurance Bill
Official mail from any government agency

Grace Voting is in limited places for both the Chicago Board of Elections and for the Cook County Clerk’s Office.

CBOE:
• Downtown Voting Supersite (137 S. State St.)
• CBOE Office (69 W. Washington St. – 6th Floor)

Cook County Clerk’s Office:
The Five Courthouses and 69 W. Washington St – PEDWAY.

Monday, October 19, is when large scale Early Voting Begins. [OCTOBER 19 – NOVEMBER 2]
In Cook County, the voting is divided:
Chicago Board of Elections: City of Chicago proper
Cook County Clerk’s Office : Suburban Cook County
For the Chicago Board of Elections, there will be an Early Voting Site in EVERY WARD, beginning October 19th.
In Suburban Cook County, there will be 57 Early Voting Sites open, beginning October 19th.

For the rest of the Chicagoland area:
Will County Clerk
DuPage County Elections
McHenry County Clerk
Lake County Clerk
Kane County Clerk
Kendall County Clerk

If there is Judge Retention on your ballot – Google your local Bar Association. Most have a guide, with recommendations. The ones to look out for are the ones with NOT RECOMMENDED– these candidates couldn’t even get a Qualified rating by the local Bar Association?

Please get your VOTING PLAN in place.

UPDATED:

Hillary Rodham Clinton

@hillaryclinton.bsky.social
Over a dozen states have important voter registration deadlines today. Check your registration and make a plan to vote at IWillVote.com. Then ask friends and neighbors to do the same.

(RNS) — Michael Spangler does not look like a white supremacist and antisemite.

He has no visible tattoos, no shaven head, no black overcoat or jackboots. No hood, no Confederate flag and no Nazi images appear in the background as he sits in front of a screen for a recent Zoom interview.

Instead, the soft-spoken Christian school teacher and pastor of Piedmont Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, was dressed in a charcoal suit and sat in front of a fish tank that seemed straight off the set of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo.”

Then he began talking about Jews. And a broad smile broke across his face.

“You’re asking if I oppose the Jews who murdered Christ?” said Spangler as he paraphrased a verse from the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, which he says labels Jews as “the enemies of God and all men.”

“We need to consider them and treat them accordingly.”

A segregationist and “race realist” whose start-up church, which has a handful of families, bars Black people out of fear of “harmful race-mixing,” Spangler is one of a small but growing group of pastors and internet influencers who openly embrace racist and antisemitic views, casting them as true Christian ideas.

This group, many of whom fit the Reformed Christian theobro typology — known for their distinctive beards, suits and penchant for exegeting over whiskey — has wedded old-school segregationist theology from the Jim Crow-era South with the hypermasculinity of the manosphere and the savvy of the attention economy to preach white supremacy, antisemitism and patriarchy, mostly to disillusioned young men on the internet.

And along the way, they are turning outrage into cash.

Selling white supremacy
In May of 2026, Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and self-described Christian nationalist with more than 100,000 followers on X, launched On the Nose Media LLC, a new for-profit media company.

The company, which does business as NXR Studios — short for “New Christian Right” — bought the YouTube channel formerly run by Right Response Ministries, a nonprofit founded by Webbon in 2019. Along with the channel came more than 180,000 subscribers and a library of videos with more than 20 million views.

……………………………………………………….

No longer taboo
Partridge and Webbon, along with Calvin Robinson, a British cleric who lost his ministerial credentials for making a Nazi-like salute at an event, recently took part in a long YouTube discussion on what to do about “the Black problem.”

Along with arguing for mass deportations, the panelists claimed the Civil Rights Act has held Black Americans back, that Black Americans are less intelligent than white Americans and that interracial marriage, while not banned by the Bible, is ill-advised, and minorities should know their place.

George Yancey, a professor of sociology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, believes the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have created space for these kinds of racist ideas to thrive.

“When Trump was elected, and the way Trump talks about race, that created a permission structure for people to talk about race,” he said. “Some people had these racist ideas, but they were afraid to say it before Trump.”

It is not inherently evil to own another human being.
YouTube influencer Joshua Haymes

Yancey also wonders if the George Floyd-era discussions about racism have played a role as well. In those discussions, the definition of racism was expanded beyond what he called “no-doubt about it” hateful forms of racism to include disagreements on how best to address racial disparities.

“I really want to reserve that term for people who engage in the sort of hateful racism that I grew up seeing,” Yancey said.

Webbon, who declined a request for an interview, recently sat down in a wood-paneled studio with Thomas Rousseau, founder of the Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization. After a promo for the NXR’s upcoming fall conference, “Christ is King: America After Trump,” which offered deep discounts for families, they discussed, among other things, whether Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is Black, should be deported to Africa along with other Black Americans.

UH HUH
UH HUH

I hope that you are enjoying this weekend with family and friends.
Since they announced a couple of weeks ago that the annual vaccines were available, please go and get your shots.

I have been watching the Different World reboot on Netflix.

So….WTF IS THIS NONSENSE???

DOW Rapid Response
Department of War
@DOWResponse
.@SECWAR “Today, at my direction, I am establishing the Office of Religious Affairs. Starting today, and for Secretaries of War after me, the Office of Religious Affairs will report straight to the top.

No staff filters. No bureaucratic dilution. A direct line to the Secretary. This won’t be a policy shop pushing paper. It will have real teeth. It will protect budgets, demand infrastructure, and strengthen religious support.

The experts – our chaplains – will finally have an advocate at the highest levels. Policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother it.”

02:43
4:06 PM · Sep 30, 2026
https://x.com/DOWResponse/status/2105403935506813211

@RonFilipkowski
Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
So what if you just want to serve your country in the military now and don’t want Christian nationalism shoved down your throat and pushed on you by military leadership? I guess you are out of luck. Because that was our military for the entire history of the country until now.
4:52 AM · Oct 1, 2026
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2105596707438289077

Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
Pretty clear Hegseth’s primary mission is to transform the military ideologically by overtly indoctrinating troops with Christian nationalism and apocalyptic holy war messaging while rooting out those who don’t want to participate and just want to serve their country admirably.
8:56 PM · Sep 30, 2026
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2105477035917214199

Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
Everything George Washington and the founders feared about unhinged fanatics gaining control of the military power of the federal government is now happening. They designed a framework to prevent it, but that framework is premised on a Congress participating in government.
9:01 PM · Sep 30, 2026
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2105478206677570037

Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
Pretty clear Hegseth’s primary mission is to transform the military ideologically by overtly indoctrinating troops with Christian nationalism and apocalyptic holy war messaging while rooting out those who don’t want to participate and just want to serve their country admirably.
8:56 PM · Sep 30, 2026
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/2105477035917214199

This is not hyperbole. Take it seriously.

Ford News
@FordJohnathan5
BREAKINGNEWS: Adolf Hitler formered the Ministry Of Church Affairs that reported directly to Hitler. This appears to be the same thing Secretary Pete Hegseth is directing our military to do as well.
https://x.com/FordJohnathan5/status/2105439699862966507

Whites Only
The disaster the justices have unleashed has its roots in one of the darkest periods of our history.
Ari Berman and Pema Levy
September/October 2026 Issue

On May 8, hundreds of civil rights protesters, carrying signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps” and “Hands Off Our Vote,” descended on Baton Rouge to oppose a plan by Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature to dismantle one or both of the state’s majority-Black congressional districts. They packed a Senate hearing, occupied three overflow rooms, and spilled into the Capitol’s halls.

Just 10 days earlier, the Supreme Court had destroyed the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, triggering a mad rush to eliminate majority-Black districts across Southern states. The next day, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, despite 42,000 already-cast ballots, suspended Louisiana’s House primaries to give his party time to push through a new map reducing Black representation in Congress before the 2026 midterms.

Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields was on the front lines of this fight. It was his district, stretching 200 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, that Callais had set the stage for invalidating, with Justice Samuel Alito calling it “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

The Supreme Court’s decision decimating Section 2 of the VRA—which had required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in elections—threatens to return the country to a pre-1965 America, when white supremacy was the law of the land and Congress contained no Black members from the South. “This has sent us back, in my view, over 60 years,” Fields says.

When he appeared before the state Senate that day to testify against the new redistricting plans, he was joined by three other veteran Black politicians. Although Fields, a 63-year-old lawyer, has a reputation as an even-keeled consensus builder, he grew emotional as he spoke.

“To me, it is personal,” he told the Senate committee. “Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress. And you’re looking at all of them. Four.” Even though nearly a third of Louisiana’s population is Black.

“You said something very profound,” state Sen. Gary Carter Jr., an African American Democrat from New Orleans, told Fields. “From the 1870s all the way through [the] present, just you four gentlemen—that’s it. And now this body wants to reduce that. ‘We want to cut it. That’s too many.’ How do we not be outraged?”

Before these four men, Louisiana had elected just two Black members of Congress, both during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, America’s fleeting 12-year experiment with multiracial democracy. One, Fields told the senators, was John Willis Menard, who became the first Black person ever elected to Congress in 1868. The other, Charles Edmund Nash, served just one term, beginning in 1875. A vicious white backlash to Reconstruction made it impossible for him to get reelected amid the disputed presidential contest in 1876, which culminated in federal troops withdrawing from the South and the official end of Reconstruction. After Nash, “Louisiana went 114 years without a single African American in Congress,” Fields later explains in an interview.

During Reconstruction, racial equality was written into the Constitution through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. As a result, from 1865 to 1877, roughly 2,000 Black officeholders were elected. That number dropped to virtually zero once Jim Crow’s racist legal regime took hold just a few years later, as the federal government—led by the Supreme Court—abandoned enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments.

Fields came to the state Capitol to warn that history was repeating itself. As his colleague Rep. Troy Carter—Gary Carter Jr.’s uncle—told the legislature: “The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”

Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Three weeks later, GOP legislators approved a map designed to oust Fields, changing his district from a solidly Democratic seat whose population was 53 percent Black to an overwhelmingly white one, in which 65 percent of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2024. Immediately after the new map passed, the self-described “non-African American” litigants who brought the Callais case launched a new lawsuit seeking to eliminate Louisiana’s last majority-Black district, represented by Troy Carter, thus leaving the state with no Black representation in Congress.

Amazingly, Fields has fought this battle before. He was first elected to Congress in 1992, but his district was dismantled in 1996 following the Supreme Court ruling in a racial gerrymandering lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of mostly white voters who charged they had been discriminated against. He returned to Congress nearly 30 years later, only to meet the same fate. His political career epitomizes the rise and fall of Black political power in America’s post-civil rights era—a story that darkly echoes the Supreme Court’s shameful elimination of equal rights for Black Americans in the 19th century.

Read the rest of this excellent article at the link above.

We have only been a true representative democracy since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

1965

61 years of being a true representative democracy.

Great comment that I found on Balloon Juice:

Anonymous At Work

September 25, 2026 at 2:37 pm

@prostratedragon: Doonesbury nailed it over a decade ago when Trudeau introduced “James Tiberius Crow, Esquire” as the modern, dressed-up, and legalistic version of Jim Crow. Openly-segregationist Justices died under FDR and Truman, but closet segregationist continued onward thanks to Nixon and Reagan and both Bushes, until they formed a present-day majority.

Originally aired on September 14, 2026