Busses will be running from every major city to Baton Rouge

No Surrender, No Retreat

I'll leave you with where we end the book:

Mike Miller and I have been studying all of this for years, I should add. If you are interested in the history of the VRA and the effects of Shelby County, you could consider preordering our book, which will be out in October: bookshop.org/p/books/an-a...

Abetted by a Supreme Court that refused to enforce the 15th Amendment, the Mississippi Plan was enacted throughout the South by the early 20th century. Poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, and grandfather clauses obliterated Black political power. It would remain that way for generations

And Congress did so! They passed the Enforcement Acts, intended to combat white violence throughout the South and to ensure free and fair elections. And then SCOTUS overturned the laws, determining that they exceeded Congress's scope.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified, declaring that the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It also gave Congress the power to enforce the Amendment "by appropriate legislation"

This week, the Supreme Court finally killed off the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I've spent the past decade studying the VRA and the attacks on it, so I thought I would offer some historical perspective, and where I think we're headed. This will be a long thread; buckle up.

"Benches are where optimistic visions of civic life meet reality. To remove them, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it." NEW: Why benches are slowly disappearing from public spaces — and why we need them back:

I don't have much of a following here but if you see this and want to read a great essay about grief, here you go: www.broadripplereview.com/post/grief-i...

It’s profoundly ignorant to suggest that the Pope should be fighting crime on behalf of the Catholic Church. Anyone who was remotely familiar with Roman Catholicism would know that that’s what Daredevil is for

DeWitt first learns of the incoming prize as Saturn enters Aries, declines it at the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and releases her story as Mars enters Aries and reactivates the point of the conjunction. @chrisbrennan.bsky.social

Pope Leo is the first Pope to have ever experienced the US healthcare system, so there's that

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

Kansas is invalidating trans residents' licenses even if they HAVEN'T changed their gender markers, according to this reporting from @natezuke.bsky.social @assignedmedia.org: www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

Many news outlets are reporting that some trans Kansans received letters warning that their licenses were being invalidated overnight. This morning, Evan Urquhart spoke with a trans woman who found out on Bluesky that it would be illegal to drive her car. www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

I can't even express how important it is to see someone who was willing to give up the thing she was best at, that some would say she was born to do. To only come back when she could love it again, and do it on her own terms. And then win a gold medal BECAUSE she found the joy and the fun in it.

Her father fled China because he organized student protests during Tiananmen. He was a political refugee. The story of this family, and Alysa Liu, would have played out very differently today. This is what we're losing. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/w...

Whenever I see Palantir back in the news I like to point to this excellent project chronicling the rise of surveillance in New Orleans, including serving as an early training ground for Palantir. Check it out: web.archive.org/web/20241119...

in case you're curious about how angry Minnesota is about ICE, it was -20 today

please help if you can

It has been an obvious, sometimes even almost stated project of Trump 2.0 to engineer a redo of the post George Floyd protests of 2020, this time with much more state violence. And now a federal agent has shot and killed a woman in a car at point blank range a mile from where Floyd was murdered.

Thinking about how if this was anyone else, officials would be issuing shelter in place alerts until the person who fired a weapon killing an individual was detained.

My favorite rigorously untrue topics are money and time.

if you can, please donate to help Lyta navigate grief with grace www.gofundme.com/f/help-suppo...

studying astrology is great because you see absolutely bonkers events and say casually “what up Mercury Uranus opposition, I see you”

Fun Fact: I was allergic to breast milk.

Very similar to the trans-kids panic, where the prestige media narrative is that it's far too easy but you talk to any trans person, expert or parent and it's obvious that it's way too hard.

I’m on my way to vote for Calvin Duncan RIGHT NOW

Happy Vote for Calvin Duncan weekend to #nolasky

a better world is possible 💫

$100 donation = 300 meals. If you’re able, please help feed our neighbors.

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification. I glanced down at the message. “Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began. So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

A better world is possible!

Runoff bound!

👀👀👀

read his memoir too! It’s hilarious

Amtrak is trying to add more rail cars to its new Mardi Gras rail service because ridership is already at double projections just a few weeks in. Maybe people in this country actually want to ride trains when they are given the option to?

settings > content & media > autoplay video & gifs = off

In the same way you can draw a straight line from the confederacy to the third reich,you can draw a line from someone organizing for free healthcare in Maine to some future freedom that will be won in Mississippi. Not to be cliche buts it’s always been just one war

“the south” doesn’t really have to be abandoned or defended. That’s mostly just cope or posturing. It needs to be liberated from the boot of capital. And anyone fighting to de-commodify survival anywhere is helping to do that. They are my brother and sister

I could write a lot more on how this stuff is intertwined, but I guess another way of putting it is there is a powerful machine that takes southern whites and strips them of their humanity, and the control panel to that machinery is mostly located north of the Mason Dixon.

And many of the same liberals disgusted with the horrors down here benefit financially from the environmental racism, prison labor, gentrification, etc that white supremacy provides. We aren’t separate regions as much as different organs of a body.

I do understand the frustration with how cruel and paranoid white southerners are as a whole. But the south also functions as an extraction colony for the capitalist class of the north.

Racism is a load bearing wall for capitalism. It provides the strict hierarchies required for exploitation, especially in times of primitive accumulation or crisis. It’s why the planter class & Nazis were never truly defeated and found their ways back into power through the American political system

And to expand on this stuff a little bit more: the social formations of the antebellum south simply reconstituted themselves after reconstruction through jim crow/sharecropping. And then again after the civil rights era through war on drugs, white flight, etc.

I would really love to be transported to a 2005 Ted Leo show