Michael Bates 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿🇮🇪🇮🇱 @BatesLine

I remember every time I was called an insane conspiracy theorist for pointing out problems in CA elections years ago. My reach got permanently limited on here because I spoke up. And I was so much more polite about it than the wolves currently at the door.

🔥 Happy Pride Month from Tulsa Public Schools: 'We proudly support every student... celebrating the uniqueness of every child.' Translation: We endorse gender ideology, explicit books, and sexual content in our schools influencing our minor students who should be learning to read. Parents, sexualizing innocence isn't inclusion. Our children need protection! Tulsa's chidren deserves better. #ProtectTPSKids #TulsaParents

This is absurd. Once a ballot is received in Florida it is immediately logged as received. Once the election ends at 7pm on election night, we know how many ballots have been cast. Once you know the total number of ballots it closes off avenues for cheating.

SCRIBEMOON @SCRIBEMOON

4 hours ago

@RonDeSantis I dropped my ballot on May 13 in a West LA drop box. Tracked it. Got confirmation of receipt on May 15th. It STILL HAS NOT BEEN COUNTED. The official LA registrar spin to the local news is that these "are all late/day of ballots." THIS IS A LIE!

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It is starting to look like people at the New York Times lured in one of Graham Platner’s victims to try to bury the story for him, but were forced to publish something watered down, due to apparent infighting, which is what came out yesterday, in a way that would leave enough grist for bad actors to portray Platner as a victim of a right-wing witch hunt, exactly as happened: “It dawned on me that this really was a set-up all along. The journalists I trusted, who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell, methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life.”

Lyndsey Fifield @lyndseyfifield

11 hours ago

Anyone who has ever extracted themselves from a relationship with a narcissistic abuser knows it isn’t clean or easy. I cringe remembering how many times I tried to play the “cool girl” or fawn in response to what was clearly abusive, coercively controlling behavior by Graham.

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Have we underrated how much of the rise in secularism is just poor parent-child relationships?

"America should be baseballish. Baseball preserves our patience, our memory, our fathers, our summers, our statistics, our hot dogs, and our sense that a thing can be slow and still be glorious."

Uriesou Brito @uribrito

2 hours ago

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Campaigns aren't won by the loudest, most vocal supporters. They're won by who the quietest voters vote for. Just sayin'. 🤷‍♂️ 4/4

I'm going to make everybody mad & break some hearts here with some truth. Just because you're seeing a lot of posts about your candidate in your social media algorithm, or seeing a lot of signs in yards/street corners/empty lots, does not mean he or she is "in the lead". 1/4

I am sure everyone wonders why I am now aggravated when people start pontificating about brain death criteria. Because unlike most of the people posting, I actually developed the gold standard at academic medical centers. In fact I would state the neurology stand is not as rigorous as the one we developed. Fifteen years ago, at an academic medical center, I helped write the protocol. I sat through the legal, ethical, and medical debates. I dealt with the cases. I watched families go through the worst day of their lives. I then had to work horrific cases and testify as to why the standard must change and become law. A California physician wanting to up his donor rate, took an alive patient to the OR to harvest his heart. How did I know, because he administered anesthesia. Dead people do not feel pain. Next death is a legal status. The physicians document the clinical findings. As I said the criteria begins when the patient's pupils are fixed, dilated and blown. Then an EEG is preformed to validate no brain activity. None. Then you move to bedside. There is a neurologist present who performs the testing and reports outload the findings. Anyone in the room can intervene, but the testing is recorded, so the family can't say I saw them sit up and talk. The RN documents the findings in real time in the chart. Then the physician documents it. Hospital counsel MUST BE PRESENT TO VALIDATE THE FINDINGS. The family can be present, their legal representative can be present. The last part of the testing includes the physician turning off the ventilator and then waiting three minutes for spontaneous respiration. By that point, the family knows the person is gone. But the gold standard requires the process be repeated a second time, by a different physician with the GC and RN present. Again family can be present. Once the criteria are met, death is pronounced, the legal consequences attach. That is why families do not consent to testing for death. Think about how absurd that would be. A family can consent to treatment. A family cannot veto whether their loved one died. What infuriates me is that 15 years later, we still do not have a national standard. Instead, every time one of these cases appears in the news, people who have never been in the room start screaming that the doctors are murderers, the hospital wants organs, the family gets to overrule death, or some other nonsense. No. The reason this rigorous protocol exists and a national standard must exist is to address responsibly these issues. We understood that death determinations must be independent, documented, transparent, and insulated from conflicts of interest. We understood that families should be present and informed. We understood that physicians should not be left standing alone while the public invents conspiracies. And yet here we are, still fighting fifty different state battles over something that should have been settled with one national law years ago. Patients deserve better. Families deserve better. Physicians deserve better. The public deserves better. And frankly, after dealing with this issue professionally, I am tired of watching people who have never done the work pretend they know what they are talking about. I am sorry if I offended anyone. I will likely lose followers. That's fine. I am not on here to win friends. I simply cannot stand by and watch this again. Every family I ever dealt with on this issue agreed after being present, their loved one was dead. The better question is why is the Texas hospital not following this standard. I welcome any physician to produce a single case where this criteria was applied and death had not attached. I know of none.

A certain type of pundit is going to spend all their time the next couple years hand waving that Jews pulling the strings are behind everything. The fact is that Platner is a chaotic trust fund failson and as is the case with such people, his personal life is a mess. Platner’s anti-Zionist oinking is now a generic feature of lib politics that is no longer transgressive and to pretend it is is a tired conceit. The problem with Platner is that they tried to market him as a likable working- class regional authenticity. But the reality is that he’s a back-sheep misfire from an accomplished family who has had schizo politics and an unformed adult life and as is the case with such people they’re less likable when you get a close look at them. Elevating Platner was a failure of Dem politics from the get go and libs have no one to blame for this electoral malpractice besides themselves.

Krystal Ball @krystalball

3 hours ago

Very clear double standard at play with Platner reporting because he is anti-zionist and anti-oligarch. For example, Newsom dated a 19 year old when he was 39 and slept with his best friend’s wife but for some reason this isn’t the subject of breathless exposes. Reporters aren’t

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nypost.com/2026/06/05/opi… Not the way I would have chosen to make it into the pages of the New York Post, but yes - today is the 6th anniversary of Fracture Day. This article does a good job of outlining this series of escalating betrayals that led up to Fracture Day. It's at least as good as what I might have written as a follow-up to my defining post last year. I will only add that we need to put Fracture Day in the context of what we know about the mechanisms of totalitarian repression. Totalitarians do not merely crave obedience to force, because that doesn't scale well to controlling an entire society. What they want is for their victims to install the mechanisms of repression in their own skulls, every person his own secret policeman. The enemies of liberty tried to use COVID and the George Floyd protests to do that to us. Never forget. Never forgive. And never relax your vigilance against another attempt.

Speaker Kyle Hilbert introduced two eligibility-verification bills this year to ensure that welfare benefits are provided only to individuals who are lawfully present in our country. The bills cleared the Oklahoma House along party lines but died in the Oklahoma Senate. Fortunately, Gov. Kevin Stitt took action with an executive order. Still, as he correctly noted: “The surest way to protect Oklahoma taxpayers is to pass legislation and get it signed into law.” America is for Americans. #okleg

@Incogniofoshow @lyndseyfifield @TheRobertBshow That group (note the "for real") is valuable. We joined the first CC campus in OK in 2007. Back then CC aggregated the best in curriculum from many publishers, but CC corporate now substitutes their own IP.

"The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign."

Lyndsey Fifield @lyndseyfifield

11 hours ago

I bucked all advice from my friends (and resisted my conservative bias) and decided to fully trust the Times journalists. As they left my home they asked that I not talk to any other outlets and I insisted then and repeatedly over the following weeks that I would keep my word

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This week I came across the obituary of a photographer named David Plowden. I was unfamiliar with his work, but decided to browse his website after reading that he specialized in photos of trains and industry. I’m not much of an art guy, but these photos are astonishing. (1/4)

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Physiognomy

If Fifield were doing this for partisan reasons, she would have dumped the dirt on him only after Platner won the primary, rather than -- as she did -- letting people know about the tattoo as soon as he became a real candidate.

Krystal Ball @krystalball

22 hours ago

NYT published uncorroborated accusations against @grahamformaine of “unsettling” and “toxic” behavior that came from a Heritage staffer who previously worked for a conservative org that backs Collins.

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Amazing turn of events. Remember when Gillibrand brought MeToo heroine Mattress Girl to the State of the Union in 2015?

Manu Raju @mkraju

22 hours ago

Asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, DSCC chairwoman, if she stilll backs Graham Platner after the NYT report: “We are still doing Maine,” she told me as she walked into the Senate chamber

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1987. Mitch McConnell goes off about voter fraud and stolen elections. McConnell has advocated for voter ID laws during much of his career and yet he just voted against the Save Act.

From the NY Times article on Graham Platner: "regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks" "yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car" "he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out" How would you describe a man who did that?