Notices by Matthew Sheffield (mattsheffield@mastodon.social)

Elon Musk was a fall guy. This was always the plan for him by Trump.

Now that he's out, Russ Vought, the guy who was actually holding the chainsaw the entire time, needs to come into focus https://jacobin.com/2025/06/trump-administration-musk-russell-vought

Keyboard Blackberrys have been dead for years, but there's yet another project trying to resurrect them https://liliputing.com/hackberrypi-cm5-is-an-open-source-raspberry-pi-powered-handheld-pc-with-a-blackberry-keyboard/

In keeping with their perpetual desire to harm their own voters, Republicans' desires to cut more than $600 billion from Medicaid is going to force many rural hospitals to close, which will not only make people unable to receive healthcare, it will drastically harm rural employment.

In many small communities, hospitals are by far the largest employers. https://newrepublic.com/article/195532/republican-medicaid-cuts-rural-hospitals-unemployment-crisis

The far-right attacks on science and sex are part of its larger war on reality and knowledge.

Savannah Sly and I talked about how and why Republicans are so obsessed with criminalizing porn on the latest Theory of Change episode https://plus.flux.community/p/the-right-wing-wars-on-science-and

The United States needs China far more than China needs the United States. Trump's stupidity is not only elevating China as a world power, it is barely harming China internally https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3308223/chinas-food-energy-supplies-secure-without-us-imports-official-says

Elon Musk knew Trump was going to nuke the economy with tariffs. This is why he restructured his Xitter debt, which was leveraged against his Tesla stock.

The sale to xAI seems like it was insider trading.

Republicans were crazy long before Donald Trump. In 1980, Ronald Reagan claimed he wanted schools to teach creationism. https://ncse.ngo/reagan-favors-creationism-public-schools

@timo21 Yep. It's unfortunate that a lot of people do not realize how insane that Reagan was, and that Trump is really just an exaggerated version of him.

Trump wants to make gonorrhea great again.

The regime closed down the CDC's tracking lab for STIs last week. RFK Jr must have gotten tired of having to provide samples all the time. https://archive.is/nmE30

1/2 Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admits that he wants robots to replace manufacturing jobs.

The last lie that Trump was selling to his supporters was that trashing the US economy would somehow bring back manufacturing jobs to Americans.

The oligarchs don't want this though. Instead, they're having Trump tank stocks and other assets so they can scrap America.

💀☠️💀

@Beldarak It's only Trump supporters who cannot see these problems you describe.

Sadly, many of them are totally ignorant about politics (knowing far less about it than many non-Americans) and would have to be personally affected by Musk or Trump in order to know about it.

This short video is the best-yet summary of what tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to do to societies everywhere.

They want you to own nothing, drop out of school, eat industrial slop, lose your money on shitcoins, and live in terror of 14 trans athletes.

Please share this clip far and wide. Even your normie friends can understand it. The author's site is here: https://www.vezanmatics.com

The #JeffreyGoldberg Signal chat is the latest instance of how everything Republican elites say is in bad faith.

After they pretended for months to be outraged at Hillary Clinton's emails, they deliberately tried to evade records laws and then accidentally included a journalist.

This came just hours after Trump claimed that he didn't sign an executive order bearing his signature -- right after Republicans claimed Joe Biden was a puppet who didn't sign his own executive orders.

Everything they say is fake.

That last graphic is critical.

Trump's puppet master Elon Musk is killing tens of thousands of jobs nationwide for an issue that almost no one cares about. Just 3% of Americans say spending is the country's biggest problem.

Trump is ignoring what people want him to focus on.

🧵Most voters everywhere do not follow politics much. They don't need to because in most countries, the political parties who have power are not wild extremists like the Republican Party is.

Thus far, Trump's reckless budget cuts have affected agencies that don't impact most Americans, so they have not cared. This will change with Trump's attacks on the Education Department. Millions of people will be negatively affected by him.

It's a huge mistake to think that policy positions are the basis of voter decisions. Most Republican positions are very unpopular.

What matters much more is how often people hear your pitches. Quantity is much more important than quality.

Propagation is the chief value of right-wing media.

Trump is destroying the American economy. His chaotic and vindictive policies are smothering consumer confidence.

Multiple outlets reporting that remaining USAID staff have been instructed to destroy classified documents.

This is surely a violation of federal record-keeping laws. Will be interesting seeing what the motivation for this policy was. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/usaid-employees-told-burn-shred-classified-documents-rcna195853