The Dallas man who killed migrants while targeting ICE agents is one of those examples of there not really being a good killer. "Causes" become a violent person's excuse for their own violence. When violence is excused, it puts the already disenfranchised in the line of fire.

When I was Christian & conservative, I ran into a paradox concerning race and religion. If slavery was the reason I was born Christian, did I owe slavery for my "salvation"? Religion was used to sever people from their other identities. Present-day, it can lay the foundation for racist apologism.

When I hear people talk of a war, it's not a war on gun violence or political violence. It's a war on minorities - on the LGBTQ community and people of color. But minorities have nothing to do with a Mormon from a conservative family in Utah. The problem is gun violence and political violence.

As much as people wanted to blame the guy's death on people of color or transgender people or faithless people, he turned out to be a similar profile to all the other shooters. This isn't a war. There is no other coming after you. This is you, hitting yourself over and & and saying that we did it.

Bolsonaro has finally been defeated ✊🏽

Bolsonaro has finally been defeated ✊🏽

So, the Supreme Court ok'd racial profiling.

👀 The redesign was bland, but they're giving away what they think their current logo is about.

People claim bad outcomes for teens and young adults mean the child is bad, while good outcomes mean the parents are good. Youth are granted “agency” only when it shifts blame away from adults, never to respect their autonomy. This isn’t raising kids into adults—it’s about control and domination.

Leaving evangelicalism is realizing conservative sexuality never protected anyone. Evangelical leaders saw teen pregnancies & refused to teach contraception. They saw abuse & refused to teach consent. My abstinence came from undiagnosed anxiety & a deep fear of attachment—not from purity culture.

Growing up in a town where classrooms were almost entirely one race, I longed for diversity. At times, I wanted it so badly that I tolerated racist views just to be around people from other backgrounds. But that wasn’t truly shared or integrated space—it was a white Christian space bound in spite.

I never knew racists were so mediocre. Growing up, I accommodated them, imagining they were rational people who had a misunderstanding. But they fail to understand because failing in thought is part of what they do. That's how they became racists. It was so obvious, and I never saw it.

Luke 12:49-56 was radicalizing for me growing up. The verses say Jesus said that he didn't come to bring peace but to divide people. It says he said that family members would turn against each other over him. It's concepts like these that rationalized my descent into far-right religious ideology.

This is why after leaving MAGA and leaving the right, I left my religion. The religion leads people to extremism. It turns people against their own interests with the allure of a heavenly reward for the denial of humanity.

The dictator did dictator things: "The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country's National Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years."

You know, I don't know how someone is supposed to have "good genes". Define "good genes." What makes "good genes" and bad genes? If "good genes" exist, how do you promote "good genes" and discourage bad genes? There's no positive way to market "good genes."

Macron said in a post on X that he will formalize the decision at the United Nations General Assembly in September. “The urgent thing today is that the war in Gaza stops and the civilian population is saved,’' he wrote.

When you think about the prisoner swap -- neither of the sets of prisoners were supposed to be imprisoned. Authoritarians use wrongfully imprisoned people as bargaining chips because they're not sophisticated enough for legitimate diplomacy.

The Venezuela-US prisoner swap is bad. This isn't Maduro trying to free Venezuelans from El Salvador. This is Maduro trying to get back people who fled Venezuela. These are 2 authoritarians abusing people to their own ends and making deals with each other over whether the people live or die.

The matriarch of our family has passed on. We were lucky to have such a courageous woman lead us. Our family started in the Delta farmlands and rose up into professionals in the towering cities. She taught us the value of education, hard work, and moral character. She was well-lived at 102 years

I really like this piece from DW on the history of immigration in the U.S. Also, I didn't know that before things like the 14th Amendment, the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to "free white persons of good character."

A newly completed investigation by Wyoming’s largest county found no evidence of noncitizen voting in the 2024 elections, undercutting claims used to justify the state’s controversial proof of citizenship law. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

I hate this because Brazil survived a right-wing coup attempt in 2022. Brazil moved on from its far-right authoritarian government and survived attacks from remnants. The U.S. is trying to rile up extremist movements in foreign countries. The U.S. is trying to destabilize Brazil.

Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a "deliberate, inflammatory attack" against a Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.

The U.N. Human Rights Council voted on Monday to renew the mandate of an LGBTQ rights expert, a move welcomed by advocates amid the absence of the United States, a former key supporter that is now rolling back such protections.

The mural is titled "The Statue of Liberty's Silent Protest" and was created by Dutch artist Judith de Leeuw. In an interview, Leeuw revealed to Storyful that it is meant to reflect shame for the United States over President Donald Trump's immigration policies. www.rawstory.com/statue-of-li...

I'm sorry, but racists don't go to heaven. You're not getting an eternal reward for this stuff. You live a POS, you die a POS. There's no higher power to welcome you. If there is a higher power, it wouldn't want you.

Now, to be honest. I didn't celebrate today. I've just really been thinking: I really hope we're really free someday.

America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.

America started with a declaration. We're still in the implementation of that declaration. I'm grateful we can push forward together toward that perfect union - a future where we can all truly be free.

There are people who slip into right-wing extremist movements and people who are raised into them. The people who slip into them can slip back out if their reality changes. The ppl raised into them cling to them more and would more likely limit their reality in order to stay in the movement.

I spoke to a white acquaintance still in MAGA on Facebook. He was giddy abt Alligator Alcatraz & the BBB for "taking illegal immigrants off Medicaid." He asked why I care abt immigrants since I don't know them. Even when I was in MAGA up until 2020, I was oblivious to the cruelty. He's drawn to it

More than 14 million people could die over the next five years because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to an analysis published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski on the Big Ugly Bill she just voted for: “Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests, but I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill"

That bill is so ugly. The ugliest thing for me, as someone in risk management, isn't just the suffering it'll cause, but that there's no upside to the suffering. If you're going to take on excess risk, you need a proportionate reward. But here, there's no upside. So it comes off as self-harm.

When I was still religious, there was this idea authorities would teach us that LGBTQ people weren't really happy & that we had to help them find real happiness. As evidence of LGBTQ people's "faux happiness" were the social and psychological challenges they faced [that religious people caused].

Israeli settlers are in a perpetual rampage. Now, they rampage against the military that enforces their ill-gotten possessions. The IDF cheers when Palestinian natives are subjected to violence but perks up when it's subjected to settler violence. The base instinct of settlers is aggression.

The whole "I love you, but not what you do" approach doesn't work with disability. For me, it made me think that the person saying that did everything they could for me and that now I needed to demonstrate my love in return by changing behaviors that I could never figure out how to change.

They showed out! Even with the new ban on public assemblies supporting LGBTQ rights, they showed out for Pride.

The times are bringing racial trauma to new generations.

Wladimir Vera Villamizar, a 33-year-old welder, had a whole lung removed — an uncommon procedure that requires months of intensively managed recovery, according to doctors.

The United Nations' human rights office has slammed Israel for the deaths of hundreds of Gazans trying to get aid through a new delivery system. The UN says over 400 people have been killed near aid hubs since the Israeli and US-backed "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" started operating.

I'm relieved that New York City said "no" to sex pests.

The European Union says there are ″indications″ that Israel’s actions in Gaza are violating human rights obligations in the agreement governing its ties with the EU — but the block was divided Monday over what to do in response.

My first love was a Latina who was colorist against brown skin Latinos. I've spent my life a part of communities marked by internal racism & high stratification. There was colorism in the segregated town I was raised in, too. White flight & supremacy leave deep marks on minority communities.

I think that a lot of these guys' journey to find a "woman of god" is really them looking for their chief enabler. I'm glad I didn't find a "woman of god" when I was a religious conservative. Under certain circumstances, family formation seems to lead men to understand women less, not more.

When our circumstances are poor, our values will be our wealth.

I didn't know until later in life that the white pastor of the church my grandmother attended was an outspoken opponent of race mixing. But this was when I was already down the religious conservative pipeline and was getting praised by him for being a "smart black man" for supporting his politics.

If you're going to go to war for a dumb reason, at least make it your dumb reason. Going to war for someone else's dumb reason makes it even dumber, and what Bush did was already dumb enough.

After more than three months in detention by the Trump administration, a judge ordered Mahmoud Khalil released on bail. He was met on Saturday at Newark airport by his wife, their son and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with other supporters. nyti.ms/44sUa1y