(niche discourse, forgive me, but:) sometimes, things that are bad… are not because of SESTA/FOSTA

25 years I’ve worked in tech as a gay man. If there’s a secret gay mafia running everything you’d think I’d have stumbled upon it, instead of near infinite wildly entitled straight white men who have barely read a book giving a tiny amount of venture to women, people of color and LGBTQA+ people.

it’s really a lot: the stab in the back myth returned, the guy who was no one until pizzagate channeling it, the resonance of racist clowns

I don’t know what her blizzard plans are, but this morning dove pacing back and forth on the window sill outside seems bereft

this is occasioned by whistle-explainers but it just gave me the most visceral flashback to the many dudes (always dudes) who each imagine they are the first guy to tell sex workers about unionizing

I wish I could remember when it became common to come across a guy with a bio like “veteran, SWAT team leader, government contractor, narcotics detective, international sex trafficking investigator, rescue team leader, spokesperson, motivational speaker, private security business owner”

laws aren’t real but cash remains

Two issues I'm pondering. One is that you can't move this many people without inflicting tremendous physical and psychological harm on those deported and on society itself. The second is that left in place for years, mass detention on a whole new level will be normalized. It rarely vanishes. [1/3]

“The site features a graphic of a ghostly horse galloping above the Earth, and the motto: ‘Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.’… it appears to funnel users into an opaque, central system controlled by a US government agency.”

Journalism sucks unless it can incorporate some aspect of unregulated online gambling

all I can add is Epstein apparently knew something about law enforcement and who they really serve

saw a movie last night that made me want to see way more movies with a “Gowns by…” credit

I remember getting my book proposal ready in late 2020 imagining by the time it came out, covid wouldn’t be a book launch consideration………

can confirm—and it stands in considerable contrast from the fact that people with long covid have build strong networks together in spite of this

dubbing this: lo-fi netflix

new-to-me true crime content variant: the made-for-youtube one hour doc special produced by a local news outlet after having followed what became the latest big true crime story from the beginning

and good night

@perrybaconjr.bsky.social: “Considering the obvious usefulness of movements, it’s unfortunate that they face so much resistance from center-left voices in the party these days… Instead of distancing themselves… Democrats should affirm the value of the left-leaning groups and movements publicly.”

“People feel it in their guts, on the streets. Abolish them, because otherwise they will execute us.”

I always say this—if any data or footage is collected anywhere, eventually police will come asking for it or someone will figure out a way to sell them access to it. This is also true of ICE.

it can be done

There have been hugely successful campaigns to fight prison and jail construction across the country, especially in rural areas. These bring together hunters, environmentalists, Indigenous people, prison abolitionists, and immigrant advocates as well as people concerned about land use.

maybe the big tent is “people who have seen through gavin newsom, 2003 - present”

“I was kind of musing about, is my next boss going to be an AI chatbot? We’re the first ones whose lights are going to go out – not the tech billionaires.”

“care is not private property”

Solidarity forever with the workers at DC's cat cafe who were put out of work by their union-busting owner after they announced they intended to unionize. www.popville.com/2026/02/crum...

“Last Wednesday, TikTok creators, finding none of the mayhem they expected to see in Springfield… concocted a conspiracy theory that the churches & nonprofit organizations were, in fact, working to deport Haitian parents to take their children.” The war on trafficking, now nearly wholly imagined.

And today from Reform: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

So glad our culture and news media spent decades responding to people like this with "what would make you say that," and "let's debate this respectfully," and "why do these ideas resonate with people," and "let's hear him out," and "wow so provocative," instead of "man, shut the fuck up."

fyi locking women up en masse is already happening and is only speeding up: "Women’s incarceration has grown at twice the pace of men’s incarceration in recent decades."

mood:

Just going to note again, because somehow we've all completely retconned this and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, that pound-for-pound Biden had one of the most draconian border security regimes of any U.S. president ever, second only to Trump, *many of whose policies he inherited and kept*

this looks great!

anyway, hello new followers, let's abolish all police and prisons, open all borders, etc. etc.

jesus people have some intense, bad responses to the fuentes clip—he needs to get laid (sex does not make you less a male supremacist or fascist); he's gay (again sex does not make you less fascist; also, who cares, he's a male supremacist); he should be ignored (he had dinner with the president...)

This is right out of Swastika Night, a dystopian novel about the long-term outcome of a world run by Nazis, published in 1937 by Katharine Burdekin

The Trump administration is incarcerating migrant girls in, essentially, a forced pregnancy camp.

She is an empty suit, of course. And an absolute nasty piece of cornbread. She is also, to my somewhat trained ear, absolutely, positively terrified here. She is either intimidated by the process or deeply anxious about her relationship with her boss. Or both. But she is terrified.

🌟 Sex workers at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Pahrump, Nevada, are unionizing with the Communications Workers of America @cwaunion.bsky.social Last week, management fired several pro-union workers—including the union’s primary organizer, Jupiter Jetson thenevadaindependent.com/article/sex-...

cannot believe it still needs to be said: suggesting sex workers should just fuck the misogynists is misogyny. you don’t “manage” male supremacy with sex workers’ lives and labor

solidarity w my new CWA siblings! 👠getting fired for union activity is despicable and sadly super common; the brothel owners claiming rights to any IP of any worker is truly disgusting!

Fuentes, yesterday: “Our #1 political enemy is women because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned. They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They're the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people.”

if yr curious about the risks and alternatives out there: freedom.press/digisec/blog...

whatever there is to say about what’s getting thrown in the bucket called AI, I can’t get past how it has been forced on us, breaking things that work. And given the state of things, I need tools that work. There’s no time to waste on something that maybe might work (enrich someone else, poison us).

only thing I want to port over from X-the-CSAM-app, in times like these, is a long thread w/ my own reporting re: who supported SESTA/FOSTA, what then-Senator Harris did and did not do (tldr: SESTA/FOSTA was really Blumenthal and Klobuchar's bill), and what SESTA/FOSTA did and did not do...

i hope one of the downstream effects of what's happening now is more scrutiny on vague anti-trafficking campaigns that manifest mostly in public relations announcements where a big banks or something touts donating millions of dollars to police departments that no one ever hears about again

all I’ll add is Bondi, as Florida AG, used “fighting sex trafficking” to elevate herself—empowering cops at the expense of survivors. long before Trump she was like this

“He doesn’t agree with the phrase ‘abolish ICE’ because he said there are too many interpretations for it…”—we have been here before. “Abolish ICE” is a demand; it is clear. Don’t let electeds turn a policy question into a comms strategy debate so they can dodge stating they oppose the demand.

“From June 2025 into early 2026, I attended hearings with more than 40 ICE attorneys in Manhattan, watching as they helped turn the immigration court system into an increasingly perverse parody of due process.” Great new Debbie Nathan story:

feeling like I put in my decades of sex trafficking discourse and since I’m still recovering from covid I’m okay with sitting this moment out