@1goodtern.bsky.social I have 2 minutes to soap box on any topic at a work All Hands meeting. What can I usefully say about Covid to a general audience in 2 minutes? Having been reading non-stop about it for 5 years while the rest of world now ignores it....I hoped you'd have a suggestion?

I’m tempted to dunk, but ok, let’s engage seriously. Putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps was a fascist activity. (And I think that if you were Japanese-American at the time, you were experiencing the US as a fascist country.) Does that mean the US was fascist? Wrong question.

A U.S. citizen detained by federal agents during anti-immigrant raids of construction sites has filed a class action suit against the Trump administration on behalf of “all those who stand in his shoes.” “I got arrested twice for being a Latino working in construction.”

Seriously. Fuck these fascists. Join a No Kings protest on October 18 and stand up for our rights and our democracy.

This one neat trick can help you teach US politics during an institutional collapse: Tell the truth. That's it. Just tell it like it is. Be radical.

Yes, but let's be clear. Watergate was a middle school prank compared to the unprecedented corruption & constitutional crimes now happening Every Day. We left Watergate-level crimes 300 miles back on the interstate.

Wait a minute. Why aren't we celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's dissertation.

I think this comparison is largely right. Yes, it’s a replay of McCarthyism’s ugliest aspects but that was fueled by a widespread sense that the country faced dire external dangers while this is about a deeply unpopular president’s grudges.

FEMA leadership verbally warned employees Monday morning that their social media use may have consequences with regard to their employment. They acknowledged that the employment status of two FEMA staffers had already been impacted by Kirk-related posts.

They don’t have the power to do what they’re threatening on a grand scale. But they want us to think they do.

US President back-pedalling furiously after his administration treated some innocent hard-working Koreans like they were innocent hard-working Latinos.

We shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which the resources of foreign adversaries (including money to influencers and the creation of online influencer accounts and their associated botnets) are contributing to the inflammatory rhetoric driving division within the US.

It’s not a double standard this *is* their standard. Speech for them not for us. Violence for us not for them. The sooner we understand this the better.

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

Not a great leap to go from killing civilians overseas to doing the same thing domestically.

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

I wake up with long covid every day. Decisions about my leisure or work are now guided by disability. When I see doctors, I have to manage their level of ignorance about the illness. In public, I am ostracized, sometimes confronted for wearing a mask. None of this has anything to do with anxiety.

No matter how people resist, they will claim agents were injured and need the protection of the National Guard. This is old school police shit. As someone who has been a protester more times than I can count, I can tell you that when the police hurt people, they claim cops were assaulted.

The United States government is deploying violent criminals to kidnap and disappear mostly nonviolent noncriminals. The only way to effectively teach this to schoolchildren (when they come up for air from their active shooter drills) is to wrap it in racism. USA!

New Q & A is up! Trump, Vance, Epstein, Gaza, Big Tech, and lots more: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/mafia-stat...

y’all know what one of the first nazi book burnings was right? y’all know why they did it y’all know trans people were one of their first targets and even the ALLIES left us in the camps when liberating everyone else y’all see what’s right in front of you, right?

This will kill people. Leave babies without mothers, or kill both. COVID is a reproductive health issue.

Yes. It's textbook fascism. I genuinely think US colleagues better catch up (if they haven't already) on their Italian history, particularly the aftermath of fascism and of the Republic of Salò: because even when this nightmare is over, things will be remain ugly for a while

I can’t square the following: 1. covid, and many other respiratory viruses, are (still) out there causing long-term damage to multiple organ systems 2. well-fitted respirators, by the very laws of physics, protect both you and those around you 3. no-one is masking

i’ll never get over how blatantly and proveably lying is one of the best political strategies of the modern age

The adamant elite refusal to call bullshit is a big part of How We Got Here. The prevailing cultural attitude for years is you must not, under any circumstances, treat anything as bad faith. You are obligated to find some reasonable idea and engage with that, even if you distort to get there.

Understand that Trump voters will see every House seat Trump steals via gerrymandering as a legitimate MAGA gain, and every House seat Republicans *lose* through gerrymandering as "stolen." The effect of this is that there's a good chance Trump orders Mike Johnson to not accept the midterm results.

If you were tasked by an enemy, foreign or domestic, with destroying the United States of America from within, would you do anything different than the actions of this administration over the past few months? You wouldn't. This would be the script.

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center. www.wthr.com/article/news...

You ever just think about how much it sucks that Musk bought Twitter and absolutely destroyed it? Like man, that used to be where I'd meet new people, make real life friends, etc. Now, whenever I glance over there to check something, it's just unrecognizable.

Hello, I'm a hacker in a film. I will be seen infiltrating corporate headquarters by walking in the front door wearing a fake badge tailgating employees. No one will question me because I look confident & disheveled. I will surreptitiously slip code onto everyone's machine that will work flawlessly.

This is why I refuse to support Dems who don’t specifically acknowledge and articulate plans for legal accountability for MAGA’s crimes and governance reforms to restore democracy. Tinkering with policies at the margins is cowardice.

Rather than being protectors of the status quo (as they run in 2024), democrats should be the party of "our institutions are broken and here's a set of reforms we propose: multi-member districts/PR, congress expansion, term limits for judges...."

Poe's Law incarnate. (Poe's law is dead. Trump shot it in the face on 5th Ave in broad daylight in front of a cheering crowd.)

There is absolutely no excuse for any Democrat asked about trans athletes to ever respond with anything but “why are you wasting my time asking about FEWER THAN FIFTEEN CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY WHO WANT TO PLAY GAMES WITH THEIR FRIENDS. What is wrong with you?”

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

Tom Lehrer wasn't just a satirist or a musician. He as a comedian who could quietly tell a joke and wait more than SIXTY YEARS for the payoff. That's dedication to craft. We lost an icon.

when RFK says he wants to “end chronic disease,” what people hear is “he wants to cure us” but what he means is “i want to cull the weak”

i’m finding it requires more and more cognitive dissonance to enjoy indulgences as the fascism becomes increasingly omnipresent and suffocating

In the before times, & in actual democracies with functioning parliaments, this already resulted in his resignation.

The destruction of public infrastructure like transit and radio feels like it’s targeting something beyond immediate suffering of users and workers, a message that none of us should expect to live in a place that functions or sustains us, none of us should even imagine it

Exactly: THe stories on what didn't get done bc Noem required her personal signature (in additional to call centers, the rescue teams) aren't stating clearly that one reason Noem is doing this is bc she's $1B over budget bc she has blown it all on kidnapping grannies.

from apnews.com/article/cali...

I was quoted in this @teenvogue.com article about mask bans and the harm they pose for the disability community. This is the kind of inclusive journalism Teen Vogue has been doing for years. If Bezos purchases them, it’ll be the end to stories about disability, trans rights, immigrant rights etc:

my partner wrote to our former employer, CBC, to ask why it was OK to force us back to the office with no protections when our son was too young to be vaxxed—especially given the CBC’s own science show reported on the danger of repeat COVID infections on this episode: 1/ www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks...

This is literally the definition of a white nationalist police state.

"A government does not pass a bill designating a record amount of money for secret police without sweeping intent." ~ @sarahkendzior.bsky.social