But this doesn’t change the widespread expectation among people close to the process that Democrats will eventually agree to the GENIUS Act, once they have a piece of paper to wave around to claim that they made improvements to the package.
Lat night, the Prospect reported, based on several sources, that Democrats had agreed to a modified version of the GENIUS Act, which would enable Big Tech firms to create their own private currencies.
History-dropping followup:
Step 1: On coming into office, Biden endorses the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. Instance of antisemitism, according to the Biden administration’s understanding of this definition, include “efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel,” “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards [to Israel] by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” Any of these speech acts could be considered antisemitism under the Biden policy.
In its 2023 “US Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism” task force report, issued months before the latest war on Gaza began, the Biden administration cites, as evidence of antisemitism on campus, that “50% of Jewish students feel they pay a social cost if they support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state” and that “Jewish students, educators, and administrators have been derided…because of their actual or perceived views on Israel.” (Swap out “support for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state” with “support for the existence of South Africa as an apartheid state”—or “derided because of their actual or perceived views on Israel” for “derided because of their actual or perceived views on the relationship between race and IQ”—to see how problematic this definition of hate speech is. One does not even have to believe that Israel is an apartheid state to acknowledge that this is an extremely contested political question that cannot be swept under the rug of hate speech.)
Step 2: Biden administration ramps up investigations of antisemitism on campus, putting considerably more effort and energy into prosecuting this matter than Trump did the first time around. Biden opens over 100 cases, including one targeting my campus. So alarmed by these investigations—which involved the DOJ, the DOE, and Homeland Security (which houses ICE)—was the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia that it issued a public letter to Biden’s Attorney General and Secretary for DHS, saying, “We are concerned about the possibility that the administration’s new initiative will usher in the same kinds of surveillance abuses that occurred in the years after 9/11. The rush to brand legitimate student protest as extremist has eerie resonances with the rhetoric of that era, including with former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s infamous charge that those who criticized restrictions on civil liberties were ‘aid[ing]the terrorists.’”
That was just a few months after October 7. It’s only gotten worse since then.
Step 3: In Spring 2024, Biden denounces campus protests over Israel, claiming that they are creating “disorder” and denying other students their rights. Leading Democrats urge universities to crack down on student protesters, decrying a wave of alleged antisemitism on campus.
Step 4: When the semester begins in fall 2024, universities so strongly and preemptively crack down on student protest, that the NYT can only marvel in wonder, in November, at the situation that was produced, a full three months before Trump was to be inaugurated: “Colleges and universities have tightened rules around protests, locked campus gates and handed down stricter punishments after the disruptions of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments last spring. The efforts seem to be working. Universities have seen just under 950 protest events this semester so far, compared to 3,000 last semester.”
If you don’t think this history of events—that is, increasingly collapsing any and all criticism of Israel into simple racist hate speech, which can be investigated and prosecuted by the government; and increasingly encroaching upon long-protected and/or long-tolerated student protests, so that even the purest forms of speech, the least conduct-like, are no longer considered protected or tolerated but instead can be prohibited in advance and punished harshly afterward—has anything to do with universities’ disciplining student commencement speakers and threatening to deny them their diplomas, simply for mentioning atrocities in Gaza, we have a very different understanding of political reality and causality.
Again, the simplest parallel is the Second Red Scare. I’ve traced repeatedly, in interviews and in print, just how intense was the repression of the Left during those years, and easily the worst of it began in 1946 and 1947—years before anyone had ever heard the name Joseph McCarthy (1950) or the Republicans took back the White House (1952).
Separately, it really bugged me that Biden kept repeating this nonsensical talking point:
The idea that “no matter how involved” my family members are in the United States, they’re still reliant on a foreign nation to keep them safe is basically saying that they can never really truly be full Americans. The notion that all American Jews are just Israelis living abroad and have questionable loyalties is a terrible trope that Trump loves to repeat, and it doesn’t sound any better coming out of the mouth of a Democratic politician.
Yeah. And the idea that “no Jew in the world would be safe without Israel” implies that Israel is the safest place for them. Which does indeed seem nonsensical, considering the constant danger there of retaliatory violence in response to heinous Israeli governmental policies and action.
Fuckin’ Ossoff!!! 
FYSA, the Congressional Switchboard (at least, when I’ve called it since January) is normally automated. I am not sure what happened today, but it’s an actual, and audibly exasperated, human on the other end.
Biden’s call to bring the full force of federal law against students exercising their First Amendment right to protest was one of the final straws for me identifying as a Democrat. Free speech is one of our most fundamental rights as citizens, and if party-line policy was going to shift from protecting it to punishing it… then I could no longer consider myself a part of them. (There were quite a few other issues I’ve had and still have with the party, but that one shook me hard.)
No Jew in the world is safe anymore BECAUSE OF Israel. 65 years of unprecedented goodwill, worldwide, gone.
Unironically they should buy up the domains for about 60 defunct local newspapers in swing states. Hire two reporters to write almost exclusively about highschool sports and new restaurants opening with every 10th article about how the local GOP is screwing over people.
NEWS:
Democratic mega-donors are debating plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on a range of influencer plans to “find the liberal Rogan.”
We’ve got pitch decks, investor meetings, and internal docs.
One Democrat has a spreadsheet of 26 different proposals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/us/politics/democrats-influencers-trump.html
“We need a figure for non-authoritarians to flock to just like the other party has for authoritarians” is definitely some kind of strategy. 
Wow. Til I learned that I have no place in democratic fundamentalism.
Not long ago I was having trouble opening a bottle with my arthritic hands and my young BIL mockingly said “I’d offer to help but I’m a feminist.”
This is the democratic party’s support of women to me in a nutshell. Meanwhile the conservatives are like “it’s ok I’ll cut off your hands so I can open all the bottles for you…” So idk anymore.
And that’s not even touching the race side of this statement.
I don’t know if I could be more disillusioned.
I guess the thing is now I have just learned not to trust “white guys who call themselves progressives.”
Jesus managed to do it.
Like The New York Times and The Washington Post…
This. Politicians should be judged on their actions and capability rather than age. I’ll take Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders over 1000 David Hoggs.
