Correct. See also: “where are all the student protests?!” They’ve been surveilled, terrorized, arrested, evicted, kicked out, and stigmatized maybe?

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

it's hard to name one thing I resent most about how AI has broken our society, but the fact that trust in reality is so shattered that we're just spending all day whispering "are you human?" at everything we stumble across with no real idea how to tell either way? fuckin' exhausting

to criminalize **bail funds** fucking garbage people.

Perfectly said. Absolutely true.

NEW: U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson's "reign of terror" in Mississippi "is over," Gov. Tate Reeves says, urging the ousting of the state's only Black member of Congress through redistricting before the end of 2027. He made that pronouncement even as he canceled a special session on redistricting.

RFK called moms. gov a "one-stop shop" for mom/child health, but it's real aim seems to be "asserting Trump’s pro mom bona fides while preying on vulnerable women with thinly veiled propaganda of an anti-abortion, anti-vaccine, and anti-feminist bent."--my latest for MSNOW www.ms.now/opinion/moms...

They’re like emergency responders who put on their siren and rush to the scene whenever Black people are trying to get representation

This was expected, but it removes any legitimate reason for Republicans to rush to redraw Mississippi's Supreme Court map in a special session this month. They will likely gerrymander the one competitive district to become heavily white and solidly GOP. They might add other maps to the agenda too

Not enough space to fit all the factors in a post, but it’s an objectively hard time for young workers (who typically have less work experience) to break into the labor market. Downplaying that doesn’t cancel out the reality that it’s bad, and a lot of people have never experienced it being good!

they want to turn everyone into a child not to protect children, but because children are vulnerable

Every time I hear someone ask what writers are supposed to do instead of starting a Substack, all I can think is, my god, literally anything else. Go create something! Start a blog with your friends! Make weird stuff! Let some of it fail/succeed unexpectedly! It's 2026—you've got dozens of options!

Go speak life into your friends. Now.

This is the University of Central Florida. So many people really have no idea how much kids hate this shit.

I often say that the fight for democracy is the fight of our generation. But let me be clear, if you aren’t fighting for Black voting rights right now then you aren’t really fighting for democracy.

Apparently there are real people arguing that AI will IMPROVE our idea of a “shared reality” because they think AI tells everyone the same things. People have no fucking idea how this technology even works (or, I’d argue, doesn’t)

“We’ve just pushed 4.5 million people further into poverty. Congrats to us”

Yeah, but they don't actually care about Black disenfranchisement except insofar as Black people are reliable votes for Democrats. The idea that Black people may have needs or concerns for our community beyond that, well that's just too much to think about.

If Black votes didn't matter, they wouldn't be working this hard to steal them. You don't spend millions of dollars and pass dozens of restrictive laws to stop something that "doesn't matter."

One side is like “can we disenfranchise all the Black voters by this weekend” and the other is like gotta follow the rules that govern the rules that control the rulebook

Anyway, get to ground. It's always my *advice* [when I offer any]. Get hyper local. Find your people and fight where you are. This is where you can make the most impact and a real difference. Do this as much as you can, take care of yourself, and take care of your people.

This is a very good thread about AI.

No public service (education, health care, public transit, postal service etc.) should be run like a business. Business only serves investors. Public services serve the people. All of them.

Yes. Very similar to plans for education, the GOP vision for healthcare is three tiers: The rich still enjoy science-based medicine, but privatized and exclusive Middle class gets woo and psuedoscience Poor get nothing - denial of medical care to them serves as a means to discipline the middle.

Witnessing southern states rush to dismantle black voting power is truly truly some heartbreaking shit to behold

Our personal data is being breeched on a regular basis, we’ve all been fraud victims. At what point do we accept that digitizing and centralizing so much information was a bad idea?

Coast to coast, wall to wall, it’s all Mississippi. The actual Mississippi is just on the bleeding edge of Mississippiness. Everywhere else catches up or catches on eventually, more or less. But our food is better than y’all’s. Y’all haven’t figured that part out yet.

Anyway, it seems some folk still don’t realize all of America is Mississippi.

Rep. Justin Jones burning a Confederate flag during the special session on Tennessee redistricting Jones: “It’s a form of Jim Crow terror — this is about race. This is about power. This is about silencing communities that have historically been excluded”

Please do what you can to resist a federal book ban in schools. It will prevent schools from teaching any materials with lgbtq+ characters and severely limit the works kids are able to be taught. authorsguild.org/news/update-...

I was honored to write a chapter for Dr. Alexis Redding's new book. For this project, I hoped students could tell their stories in their own words, too. Thrilled that Mira Ugwuadu, Lauren Barton, and Esha Bajwa are co-authors & loved supporting their work! Link: hep.gse.harvard.edu/979889557075...

This headline from Justice Roberts and the red banner of what Tennessee just did to Memphis after the SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act..

Obama and other liberals keep saying that they want a "strong GOP". Well, this is what it looks like: a brazen and gleeful rejection of Black people having anything worth respecting or defending and alignment with an openly white nationalist agenda that holds nonwhiteness in contempt.

Again this should inspire wall-to-wall media coverage for months. The crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement is dead. Black people just lost all of their remaining political power in the South. This is a monumental moment in American history that simply isn't being treated as such.

Disenfranchising Black voters in the city where Martin Luther King Jr was killed

I continue to think that "backlash politics" is the wrong frame. There has been a counter-revolution against the Black freedom movement for generations. It is a FRONTLASH and I think that not thinking of it this way has done a real disservice. It's been PERMANENT WAR.

More than twice the state’s total electric consumption and siphoning off the equivalent of 20,000 households worth of water. drought.utah.gov

NEW: ProPublica identified at least 79 children who’ve been left screaming, unable to breathe, or otherwise hurt by tear gas and pepper spray during Trump’s historic immigration crackdown.

Well well well looks like those art degrees aren't so useless after all

Today we launched a brand new publication : Humans/Being, A Photo Journal from The Bitter Southerner. bsgeneralstore.com/collections/...

This is how to respond when your university starts pushing Gemini on you

I think it’s bad that the social internet has been reduced to short clips of the full version of things, and creatives will suffer even more because of this demand.

When I was a kid, we actually stayed home when we had infectious diseases. That was standard practice. You stayed out of school or work & watched junk TV. Remember that? Sure grandma, let's get you to bed.

“Forcing”

Okay but EVERY Democrat says the rent is too high these days. The real issue is that they don't ALSO say "Republicans should mind their own fucking business and stop trying to peek into your kid's pants" and "'A.i.' companies are jacking up your electricity bills and fucking up your kid's brains."

They're really stopping an election that's already under way to erase my people from the map.

This was a hard story to report. Newborns who don’t get a vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely to develop a condition where they bleed uncontrollably. But more and more families are declining the shot. And babies are dying. www.propublica.org/article/more...