Nick Fish
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nickfish.me
Nick Fish
@nickfish.me
5.1K followers 690 following 2.1K posts
President of @atheists.org. Adopted. Philadelphian by choice, but forever a Midwesterner.
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Reposted by Nick Fish
briankaylor.bsky.social
Good NYTimes piece by @ashleyahn88.bsky.social on how Trump administration pushed sectarian messages on Christmas: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/a...
This fits problematic trend of Christian social media posts as DHS & DoW have co-opted Bible verses & others like DoL have pushed Christian content. 1/
Trump Administration Emphasizes Religion in Official Christmas Messages
www.nytimes.com
December 26, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
donmoyn.bsky.social
Trump is using Christmas to extend white Christian nationalism.
*Official messaging emphasizes "our Lord and savior"
*Trump ordered two additional federal holidays around Xmas
On top of:
*Encouraging proselytizing in workplace
*Seeking evidence of anti-Christian bias
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/a...
Trump Administration Emphasizes Religion in Official Christmas Messages
www.nytimes.com
December 26, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
donmoyn.bsky.social
Texas Universities are now like police departments who would prefer to pay out the inevitable lawsuits rather than stop breaking the law
texastribune.org Texas Tribune @texastribune.org · 2d
Texas A&M University will not reinstate a lecturer who was fired after a video of her teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class went viral, despite a faculty appeals panel unanimously concluding that her dismissal was not justified.
Texas A&M won’t reinstate fired lecturer despite findings
A vice chancellor upheld the firing of Melissa McCoul, seen in a viral video being confronted by a student on her gender identity teachings, saying the termination was done with “good cause.”
www.texastribune.org
December 26, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
maxberger.bsky.social
Trump says the people who “thought Epstein was the greatest guy on earth, only to drop him like a dog when things got too HOT” are “sleazebags.”

Trump is criticizing people who…stopped hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein?
December 26, 2025 at 12:24 AM
Reposted by Nick Fish
normative.bsky.social
A government that can officially declare that Jesus is your savior can just as easily declare the opposite.
markjacob.bsky.social Mark Jacob @markjacob.bsky.social · 1d
Here’s the U.S. government being officially religious in a country with no official religion.
Homeland Security tweet: Merry Christmas, America. We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.
December 25, 2025 at 7:09 PM
nickfish.me
But sure, it's atheists and religious minorities saying "happy holidays" that's the REAL War on Christmas.
December 25, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
jacobtlevy.bsky.social
[butterfly meme] Is this ceremonial deism?
December 25, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
feolski.bsky.social
“We are blessed to share a nation and a savior”. Through the official messaging channels of a Cabinet-level department. Christian Nationalism 101.
Screenshot from DHS tweet. Image: children walking through the snow. Superimposed text: “remember the miracle of Christ’s birth”. Tweet text: “Merry Christmas America. We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior”.
December 25, 2025 at 1:23 AM
Reposted by Nick Fish
adambonin.bsky.social
I want to ask the flipside question: what will it take for wealthy progressives to fund the infrastructure and entities needed to identify, support, and sustain emerging voices on *our* side of the aisle?
nkalamb.bsky.social Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 2d
Anti-trans demagogue and fifth place swimmer Riley Gaines earned $470,000+ last year from a conservative non-profit.

Notably, $420k was incentive-based.

A neat little window into the way the transphobic grift is being compensated.

I wonder what the per-post rate is?
December 24, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
adamserwer.bsky.social
The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
The reason so many of yesterday’s free-speech champions transitioned so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors is that their definition of free speech never included the right of others to talk back. They were not defending a universal right to freedom of speech; they were defending a right to monologue. They could say what they want, and you could shut up and like it. The cynicism of the effort can be known by its fruits: an administration that issues executive orders “protecting” free speech while engaging in the most sweeping campaign of state censorship since the Red Scare.
December 23, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
adamserwer.bsky.social
The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
Every society that has ever existed has had views that are mainstream and views that are fringe. The free-speech frauds who captured the discourse over the past decade understood this, but their true objection was that they did not unilaterally have the power to define which was which. For example, in a 2018 Times column, Weiss complained that “leftists” were engaged in a “concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” This was meant to sound sinister, menacing. In fact, this is politics. Every faction is always trying to “redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” In a free society, the government allows people to have those arguments. Such disputes are not a threat to free speech; they are free speech. When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.” What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.
December 23, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
Yes, CECOT is a concentration camp in the guise of a prison. The Venezuelans were the first people to *ever* be released from CECOT since Bukele opened the prison in January 2023. Seriously. The first.
eladn.bsky.social Elad Nehorai @eladn.bsky.social · 4d
These are concentration camps. No other way to describe them. Truly horrific, and none of it surprising in the least.
akivamcohen.bsky.social AkivaMCohen @akivamcohen.bsky.social · 4d
30 minutes. Some deportees described sexual assault. Detainee describes the guard sexually assaulting most detainees. Lights left on all day. Prisoners not given clean water.

Now the DHS tour. Nobody spoke to the detainees. Noem's video was in a different area of the prison.
December 23, 2025 at 1:04 AM
Reposted by Nick Fish
jamellebouie.net
really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense
alexshephard.bsky.social Alex Shephard @alexshephard.bsky.social · 4d
One explanation for Bari killing the story is that she did so as a public act of fealty to the administration. But another is that, as an inexperienced journalist, she doesn’t understand that a refusal to go on the record is a kind of comment in and of itself
December 22, 2025 at 2:19 PM
nickfish.me
Ah yes, the "two sides" of the GOP's bigotry: outright blood and soil religious ethnonationalism or conspiracy-addled eugenic antisemitism. Well at least he's staying neutral on that! Thanks, NYTimes.
pgourevitch.bsky.social Philip Gourevitch @pgourevitch.bsky.social · 4d
This is NYT headline morning after JD’s grotesque hot blast of white supremacist nativism at Turning Point’s hate-fest?!
December 22, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
pgourevitch.bsky.social
At least we have the foreign press to tell us how it is
December 22, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
gbbranstetter.bsky.social
This to me is the biggest issue. These men spoke at grave risks to their own safety about being beaten, raped, and tortured at the order of the President of the United States. All of Weiss's odes to free speech and "dangerous ideas" is and has always been horseshit
December 22, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
eschatonblog.com
Something which isn't always acknowledged is that "contrarian thinkers" are just regurgitating conventional wisdom with a little extra racism, and these forbidden views are generally expressed by the most platformed mainstream figures, like Pinker.
December 22, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
markharris.bsky.social
This is Bari Weiss in stonewalling, chin-out, "I won't let the haters get to me" mode. Whether she gets away with it will be determined by whether Sharyn Alfonsi's colleagues at 60 Minutes and CBS News decide to fight back. Pelley, Stahl, Cooper--this decision goes on everyone's permanent record.
mmasnick.bsky.social Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social · 5d
Almost every story Weiss greenlit at the Free Press lacked sufficient context. It's kinda their entire schtick.
Ms. Weiss said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
December 22, 2025 at 5:46 AM
Reposted by Nick Fish
adamserwer.bsky.social
The maga divide summarized: does the gutter racism that is the mortar of our coalition apply to Jews or not? And if it doesn’t do we mean that or are we just pretending for the moment?
December 22, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
davidfolkenflik.bsky.social
CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls 60 Minutes story

Weiss said investigation had to include comments from Trump administration

60M's ⁦‪Sharyn Alfonsi‬⁩ said multiple US agencies refused to comment - and this lets WH veto coverage

My NPR story

www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g...
CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls '60 Minutes' story, sparking outcry
CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a 60 Minutes segment on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants.
www.npr.org
December 22, 2025 at 12:11 PM
Reposted by Nick Fish
seriouspod.bsky.social
God this is such a fucking bummer. The thing they think DEI is is actually what they are. Bari Weiss's talents are: getting rich people to give her money, and cosplaying as a "journalist" by using centrism and faux objectivity language to obscure her persistent bias and sizable incompetence.
December 22, 2025 at 10:21 AM
Reposted by Nick Fish
anamariecox.bsky.social
So Bari Weiss’s first real editorial intervention at CBS is to repress coverage of American concentration camps.
December 22, 2025 at 3:05 AM
Reposted by Nick Fish
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
Bari Weiss spiked the CECOT story because she wanted to have Stephen Miller included and demanded to control the language 60 Minutes used to describe the men who were brutally tortured after being sent to El Salvador without due process.
One of Ms. Weiss's suggestions was to include an interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump's immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the "60 Minutes" staff. Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term "migrants" to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said. In her note, Ms. Alfonsi said that her team had requested comment from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. "If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting they find inconvenient," Ms. Alfonsi wrote.
December 22, 2025 at 4:19 AM
nickfish.me
This email from Sharyn Alfonsi to her colleagues after Bari Weiss killed their @60minutes.bsky.social piece on CECOT is powerful and worth a full read. (h/t @yasharali.bsky.social)
BREAKING: 60 Minutes Correspondent Says Trump Story Was Spiked For Political Reasons
In an email to her colleagues, Sharyn Alfonsi said that CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss spiked a story about the Trump administration and El Salvador prisons for political reasons.
open.substack.com
December 22, 2025 at 4:18 AM
Reposted by Nick Fish
donmoyn.bsky.social
The CBS reporter who led the story calls pulling it a "political" decision.
"The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment."
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
December 22, 2025 at 3:10 AM