“if you convince people that there’s no difference between a blood thirsty dictator and a dedicated leader who is human and thus unable to solve every problem, the dictator wins.”
Millions died of covid because Trump dismantled the international disease task force with some of the hardest hit areas being minority communities and Native American reservations.
Hundreds of thousands of people overseas now will die of aids because he dismantled the USAID.
None of that would’ve happened with Clinton or Kamala. Not voting because you think they’re the same or being tired of democrats being uninspiring is the White Person moment. Everyone alive in the US needs to humble themselves that they were privileged and lucky enough to survive Trump’s first term, because a lot of vulnerable people aren’t alive to say the same. Not participating doesn’t make you a sovereign citizen, it’s just avoiding responsibility for our out of control country so you don’t have to get a bad taste in your mouth.
The central message of the campaign is underscored by the statement, “A Free America begins the moment we stop cooperating with fascism.” Organizers are urging participants to disrupt daily routines to advocate for civil liberties and oppose systemic oppression.
They cut off usda funding from Minnesota, which includes wic and snap. Please consider donating to food banks around the area or food drives. Many immigrants are too scared to leave their homes to shop as well and a community member is doing great work.
“Friends outside of Minnesota please read. I’m sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor: Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:
ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.
ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.
ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Wednesday. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.
They are targeting hospitals and clinics. Patients are scared and are cancelling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.
They are smashing windows in cars and homes.
ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans—again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.
They are arresting and beating legal observers. A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.) I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later.
But the community is fighting back.
Protests are happening every day.
Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.
Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.
Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.
Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait for my takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.
Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.
Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.
Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.
Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.
Mutual aid money is going out to folks who can’t make rent because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed.
THAT is what is happening here. This fight is ongoing and it’s horrifying to watch. But we are not backing down. To my friends in other cities and states, don’t think for a minute that this won’t happen in your town. It will. Be ready. Learn from us, as we have learned from Portland and Chicago and New York. Fight back. Don’t let us get to the last line of Martin Niemoller’s poem.”
If you’re a USAmerican and rightfully horrified by what the government is doing right now, I just want to rq share 5calls. They have a really simple tool for finding your reps and contacting them, as well as a variety of scripts for anyone not confident speaking off book. Emails can be filtered out, phone calls, voicemails, and physical letters are much harder to ignore. Calling your reps isn’t the end all be all of anti-war action, but it’s a place to start while you process what the fuck just happened.
The cultural theorist Mark Fisher noticed the link between neoliberal ideology and the changing face of psychiatry, describing the shift towards individual illness framings during this period as just another form of privatisation: the privatisation of stress. Fisher saw biological psychiatry as politically convenient to neoliberal capitalism, because it pinned distress on our brains in the form of ‘chemical imbalances’, rather than our social or material conditions. If we look at, for example, the framing of the workers’ struggle since the dawn of neoliberalism, we can see evidence of this ‘privatisation’. Over recent decades, strike days have fallen while working days lost to ‘stress-related illness’ have skyrocketed. Biological psychiatry has provided us with a lens of analysis that ignores political disorder in favour of individual disorder.
Micha Frazer-Carroll, Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health
HEADS UP: The U.S. Postal Service quietly changed how postmarks work.
Mail is no longer automatically postmarked with the date you drop it off. Instead, the postmark now reflects the date it’s first processed by an automated sorting facility — which can be days later.
If you mail something right at a deadline, the official postmark could be later than your drop-off date and may be considered late.
If mailing date matters to you, go inside the post office and request a hand-stamped postmark.
Mixed-race non-binary queer, social justice hooligan, fannish elder and nerdy butch. Here there be intersectionality, fannish shenanigans, queerness, silliness, politics, and scribbling when I can manage it.
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