Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

October 31, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Happy Halloween!

Photo credit: 

Lindsay Beyerstein. 

The Best of the Week’s News

 

  • Trump regime erects roadblocks for breast cancer treatment for male vets who get the rare but deadly cancer (ProPublica)
     

  • Trump slashes refugee quotas and prioritizes white South Africans fleeing an imaginary genocide. (NYT) 

     

  • Former Trump golf course employee wrongly deported to Mexico. (NYT)
     

  • Germany’s far-right AfD party gains influence and deepens ties to Trump administration. (Reuters)
     

  • Undocumented workers in Michigan could win the right to worker’s compensation. (Sentient) 
     

  • Hillman Prize-winner Phil Williams asked why a local sheriff jailed and pressed felony charges against a liberal activist for posting a meme, and the charges were mysteriously dropped the next day. (NewsChannel 5)
     

  • Tucker Carlson is mainstreaming antisemitic MAGA host Nick Fuentes. (Bulwark)

October 24, 2025

Sidney's Picks:

Photo credit: 

The East Wing under destruction. Victoria Pickering, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • Corpses with burns and missing limbs wash ashore in Trinidad after US murder spree in the Caribbean. (NYT)
     

  • Trump swore he wouldn’t touch the East Wing of the White House to build his ballroom, but he razed it to the ground. (NYMag, WaPo, ABC)
     

  • The government shutdown gets dire on Nov 1. (NYMag) 
     

  • Are your meds made in a contaminated factory? The FDA won’t say. (ProPublica)
     

  • The first politically viable wealth tax may appear on the ballot in California in 2026. (Prospect)

October 20, 2025

Sidney's Picks: The Panopticon

Photo credit: 

Surveillance Capitalism. Terrence Faircloth, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • ICE ramps up surveillance of “antifa,” a catchall term for their critics and political opponents (WaPo)
     

  • A 17-year-old asylum-seeker and her mom were thriving in the US, but ICE deported her back to Guatemala and disaster. (NYT)
     

  • Trump considers overhaul of immigration to favor white people. (NYT)
     

  • Sec Def Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, criminalizes routine reporting at the Pentagon. (CNN)
     

  • Starbucks closes Capitol Hill Roastery and hundreds of other stores with no notice. (Seattle Collegian)

October 10, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Department of Ed is Killing Public Education

Photo credit: 

Bill B, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • “The Final Mission”: The Secretary of Education is destroying public education (ProPublica)
     

  • Children are starving to death in Myanmar because of Trump’s destruction of USAID. (AP)
     

  • How forward-thinking philanthropists and union leaders helped build the New Deal and save our democracy. (NYT)
     

  • Why does everything taste the same? Mega-distributor Sysco is taking over the restaurant industry. (More Perfect Union)
     

  • Trump is deporting people to an absolute monarchy in Africa. (MoJo)

October 3, 2025

Sidney's Picks: White House Threatens Universities

Photo credit: 

Eden, Janine, and Jim, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • White House threatens to bankrupt nine universities unless they change programs that “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” (CBS)
     

  • New research reveals exactly how heat kills workers. (WaPo)
     

  • On a junket to New Zealand, FBI director Kash Patel modeled law and order by presenting his hosts with illegal replica guns. (AP)
     

  • MAGAs are dragging Starbucks baristas into the culture war. (NYT)
     

  • Student journalists sue to stop Trump’s deportations of students for their political speech. (Press Freedom Fnd)

 

 

September 26, 2025

Sidney's Picks: An Oral History of DOGE

Photo credit: 

The original DOGE, Brian Bald, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

September 19, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Project 2026

The Best of the Week’s News

September 12, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Feds Finally Give Masks to Firefighters

Photo credit: 

Project LM, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

 

  • After prohibiting them for years, the feds will now provide masks to firefighters battling wildfires. (NYT)
     

  • A year into the tenure of new CEO, the battle for the first union contract at Starbucks continues. (Guardian) 
     

  • Trump is colluding with Putin to send dissidents back to Russia. (Times of London)
     

  • The people who brought you Project 2025 have thoughts about the US Constitution. (NYT)

     

  • Scenes from Sudan’s forgotten humanitarian crisis. (Time)

September 5, 2025

Sidney Picks: Fourth Person Dies in NYC Custody in One Week

Photo credit: 

Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News
 

  • A Turkish immigrant became the fourth person to die in New York City custody in a week. (NYT)
     

  • Trump’s tariffs are hurting the workers who voted for him. (WaPo)
     

  • Uber and Lyft drivers can now join a union in California. (Prospect) 
     

  • Howard Lutnick’s family stands to profit off refunds if Trump’s tariffs are declared illegal. (TPM)
     

  • Trump ends defense aid to European countries that border Russia. (NYT)

August 29, 2025

Sidney's Picks: Wednesday Night Massacre at the CDC

Photo credit: 

Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons.

The Best of the Week’s News

  • “People will die because of this”: Kennedy oversees Wednesday Night Massacre at the CDC and access to COVID vaccines is up in the air. (MSNBC, NYT)
     

  • How Trump’s handpicked housing regulator is generating an Enemies Listbased on mortgage documents. (Credit Slips)
     

  • A federal appeals court deems the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional. (Prospect)
     

  • Tesla claimed it didn’t have data from a fatal crash, but a hacker exposed their lies. (WaPo)
     

  • Denmark says it caught three people linked to Donald Trump running covert ops to soften up Greenland for a US invasion, the White House says Denmark needs to “calm down” about it. (BBC)

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Recent Posts

October 31, 2025
Sidney's Picks: Happy Halloween!
October 24, 2025
Sidney's Picks:
October 20, 2025
Sidney's Picks: The Panopticon
October 10, 2025
Sidney's Picks: Department of Ed is Killing Public Education
October 3, 2025
Sidney's Picks: White House Threatens Universities

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