i don't often think "boy i'm glad my dad is dead" but the "warehouse concentration camps yellow star identification symbols" of it all make me sorta relieved that my father—a jew born in 1935 whose family spent the first 5yrs of his life GETTING THE FUCK OUT OF GERMANY—is not alive right now.

How about I put that yellow star on my arm? Like an identifying badge of sorts?

my dad took my brothers and me to see jesse jackson speak at oregon state university in 1984. i was 12. i'm pretty sure i didn't know that what he was doing was such a big deal, but i love that my dad thought it was important for us to see. i wish i knew where my jackson 1984 campaign button was.

Said it before but: An attack on my neighbors is an attack on my values and the fabric of our shared community. I presume that's a fairly universal feeling or at least easily understood, no matter where you live. But it feels especially common and pronounced in Minnesota right now.

Wow, I feel seen in the worst way.

Sorry your health insurance costs so much more this year, we needed to make fancy airplanes for illiterate dog-murderers

Every member of congress is older than ICE and DHS. Any elected who cannot fathom abolishing these agencies has no business in office. The case against these irredeemably wasteful, violent, and unconstitutional agencies gains strength by the day. We can do this. They are not inevitable.

In reality, we're the ones who would like never to get to the Ghorman stage, where we’re plotting bombings in secret. I don’t ever want to have to be that brave. We’re the ones who don’t want to get to the second line of the Martin Niemöller poem. And in Minnesota, I think we’re the majority. 4/9

Forgive the Andor reference, but I think it’s helpful: the administration desperately wants a narrative where the anti-ICE movement in Minnesota is basically the Ghorman Front—shadowy and underground, agitators plotting complicated acts of sabotage. Nothing could be further from the truth. 3/9

🧵This is ridiculous. DHS needs help to “expose” anti-ICE accounts? These accounts are not hiding—they’re not even “accounts.” They’re regular people. I am an anti-ICE account. Fully public, real name, employer in bio. In this regard, I am not weird—certainly not by the standards of 2026. 1/9

🧵 My neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota still appears to be inundated by feds. A few blocks from my house, a car with plates that didn’t match the vehicle sat idling in a church parking lot for hours. I first noticed it at 7:30 this morning. Four hours later, the pastor spoke to occupant. 1/7

In this Ohio diner, McLaughlin still means Sarah. But they do know this: DHS isn't exactly delivering ICE detainees into the arms of an angel.

I cannot stress enough that automatic translation into English will flatten your world. We need the delicious friction of different languages; we need to celebrate diversity.

Wow.

On occasion, we all do battle with motivational paralysis Unable to perform some simple task Trapped at the stage of analysis

2026 has already made re-posting BILL KRISTOL a thing I have done without irony, and now it has added re-posting the FUCKING CATO INSTITUTE what on earth y’all

If you’re a parent, your kid doesn’t need your permission to do a walkout or a protest. Your kid is not your property.

“In less than a year, DHS has attacked the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 10th, 14th amendments to the US Constitution, the writ of habeas corpus, the independent judiciary, and much more,” states David Bier before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee. Read full testimony: https://ow.ly/z2aT50Yfcri

History rhymes, and we can learn from the cadence.

The wellness to eugenics to fascism pipeline is well documented. It’s why disabled people beg you to stop treating us as expendable. Health supremacy devalues other human beings. It leads to deciding some lives are “worth” more than others. It paves the way for atrocities.

I’m on a “comfort food British TV” binge and rewatching Downton. I had forgotten how positively ODIOUS Mary and Edith both are at the start.

and they might need you too

Always an adventure at the #BackPorchBistro. (no humans were harmed in obtaining this video. no critters harmed, either, for that matter, even if 🦝 was a little offended by the menu options.) www.instagram.com/reel/DUzln4j...

Another product of my treasure hunt yesterday was this single gold button embossed with an elk. The woodsman I live with seems to think it’s silly to invent and knit an entire sweater for him just to use a single button. He’s probably right, but it’s tempting.

how we got here

In Minnesota, we are all too familiar with false spring. You think maybe winter’s finally over...until the cold snaps back, sometimes even harder. That’s what this moment feels like. You may hear that ICE is “leaving", but they’re shifting, spreading out. Don’t mistake a brief thaw for safety.

Another paper about how Covid affects sperm count, yet antivaxxers are still going on and on about the vaccines being what causes it. Nope, like much else, it's the virus itself: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (More on how vaccines don't affect fertility: www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/lar...)

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

“🎶 After nine days, I let the horse run free cause the desert had turned to sea Failing to name the horse earlier was foreshadowing to my eventual total neglect of said horse Now it’ll drown or die of thirst depending on whether I’m hallucinating 🎶” - America, “A Horse With No Chance”

What’s so weird about men in power is how when they face scandal and should step down the world acts like no one else can do their jobs. Bottstein, Wasserman, these aren’t irreplaceable men! Stop with this delusion.

Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans - facial recognition through the glasses' camera. You look at someone, AI tells you who they are. In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good because civil society groups are busy with politics and won't cause problems.

On a hunt through my grandmother’s (large) button collection to find just the right button to finish a project, I found this tiny friend. Which is not a button. And I’m still not sure I found the right button.

RIP to an Oregon legend

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

It's not an easy thing to get excited about ("Politicians should make more money!") but it's a major issue basically everywhere. Ever wonder why so many state legislators happen to own car dealerships? It's because only wealthy people can access one of the main entry points into US elected office.

The President of the United States raped underage women. Attorney General Pam Bondi has seen the proof in the Epstein files and doesn't care. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Everyone’s talking about Swarovski right now so let’s take a second and dive into the fact that they were NAZI Nazis. Like full-on Seig Heil, prosecuted after the war level Nazis and the modern company has done everything they can to hide all their archives and prevent anyone accessing them.

I've never understood why anyone even imagines sighing and reluctantly pulling a lever two years before the primaries even start. This is the time to wish and hope and support the people you actually like. Why are you rushing into that one part at the end where you have to compromise?

I don't ski or snowboard, but I like having water in August and not losing my home to fire, so I've been hoping for this too.

I feel this way about pretty much all vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. You shouldn't be allowed to dump cyanide into municipal drinking water and you shouldn't be allowed to recreationally spread viruses around shared public spaces.

I understand the need to always find fresh angles on news stories but man...We also need to say the plain facts over and over and over so everyone understands. In plain language: ICE is violently attacking communities based on the president's racist, petty impulses. Everything stems from that!

This is something the Nazis used to do to Jewish children in the camps. It happened to a man I knew when he was a child in Auschwitz. The camp guards thought it was funny as hell.

you know, it still seems like it should be an even bigger issue that the president has been sending armed forces to kidnap and assault people in an ethnic cleansing campaign, with a specific geographic focus on regions that didn't vote for him in the last election

If you use eBird (or would like to start), the Great Backyard Bird Count runs from today through Monday. I just went out to my local wetland and counted my first of the year Virginia Rail. Every observation helps guide science and management to protect #birds. www.birdcount.org

if you are a person who has ever been to my mother's house, this will seem familiar.

all the media being stenographers for the feds and just repeating the drawdown nonsense should go to the whipple building today so they can see the same amount of masked men leaving in convoys of vehicles, and whatever this is too, and report accurately what’s happening on the ground in minnesota

I think there are very few among us who haven't fallen into this trap at one point or another. I certainly have. It's easy. It's lazy. It's also been programmed into us since birth in every media imaginable that virtue is beautiful and evil is ugly. We can all do better at not passing that along.

do YOU have any experience in art, social, organizing, fundraising, comms, graphic design, & want to help us try to raise an insane amount of money to keep immigrant families in MN housed? I am looking for folks who would want to throw down. having a meeting monday evening. DM me if you're in.

Suburban wine moms will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a concentration camp" and then very effectively firebomb a concentration camp