Tuesday, April 15

GOOD NEWS:

• Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders are traveling the country, drawing incredible crowds - even in unexpected areas like Salt Lake City, where they filled a 15,000 seat arena and had overflow crowds of 5,000 outside. They even had a crowd of over 12,000 in Idaho. IDAHO. It’s generating even more buzz about AOC’s future, and I am here for it!

• Harvard University has joined the resistance! On Monday, the university rejected the administration’s demands regarding hiring, admissions, and curriculum. Hopefully this will make other universities feel empowered to do the same. It’s worth noting that Harvards ENORMOUS endowment makes it extraordinarily well-positioned to take a leadership role on this; their endowment means they are well insulated from any major consequences of the withdrawal of federal funding, which came swiftly in the freezing of 2.2 billion dollars in multiyear grant money.

ACTION ITEMS:

• If you went to a college or university in the US, write to your school and let them know that you’d like them to resist the administration’s demands as Harvard did. I’m not even 100% sure who the best person to email would be but my assumption is the office of the university president would be most effective.

• Call your senators every single day about the SAVE act. Remind them that this attempt to disenfranchise millions could really backfire on them by lighting a fire under us to vote them out of office if they support it. Americans do not take kindly to threats to our voting rights. Make sure to tell them it’s unacceptable that the administration is not working to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia in direct defiance of SCOTUS, tell them the administration should also bring back Andry Hernandez Romero (see updates), and share how alarming it is that he’s talking about sending US citizens to rot in El Salvador next (see updates). Also speak to them about the other issues on your mind, of course.

• If you have a Republican representative or senator, please remind them that the madness and chaos of this administration could be stopped by congressional republicans at any time and that you’d like to see that happen ASAP.

• Saturday, April 19 will be another mass demonstration day like the 5th. Please make a plan to participate in a peaceful protest, here’s a link to a good roundup of events in Maine.

UPDATES:

• Pardon the language, but this is absolutely fucking terrifying and we should all be alarmed, calling our reps, and attending protests. 47 is openly saying he wants to send US citizens to the Salvadoran megaprison CECOT, and told Salvadoran leader Buckele that he’ll “have to build five more” of these prisons to house all the people they’re going to send. Fascism, concentration camps - we are there already. They don’t care that the constitution forbids it, they’ve already directly disobeyed SCOTUS rulings regarding CECOT. Get loud, call your reps, show up on Saturday.

• I’ve been meaning to amplify the story of Andry Hernandez Romero for a while now. He’s a Venezuelan makeup artist who entered the US legally during the Biden administration seeking asylum. He was detained and later deported without warning by the current administration to CECOT in El Salvador due to his tattoos - and if you click on the link above you’ll see how bogus this is. Hernandez is gay, and the discrimination he faced in Venezuela is what prompted him to seek asylum in the US. Goodness knows what sort of treatment he will be subjected to at CECOT. There have been photos circulated of him having his head shaved on arrival - he is weeping and praying. I just can’t fathom how broken people’s souls must be for them to support this administration’s treatment of human beings whose only crime was to try and live a safe, happy life in the US.

• Some scary news coming out of Texas about new strategies to try and ban contraceptives. Texas, which has a long history of trying to pretend abortion pills are poisoning the groundwater (they aren’t), has introduced a bill to force wastewater treatment plants to test for abortion medication AND the hormones found in birth control (it doesn’t say “birth control” or “contraception” explicitly, but rather lists the hormones in birth control pills, because they know if they’re honest about what they’re doing, people are more likely to oppose it. This bill could also be used to target gender-affirming care by requiring certain plants to test for testosterone and estrone. It also lists pregnanediol, a byproduct of progesterone, which is a hormone associated with pregnancy. Students For Life vice president Kristi Hamrick said earlier this year at a conference, “This is not because the environment was my first weapon of choice - it’s because it’s the one we have now… Environmental law has teeth. It already exists. And, frankly, I’m for using the devil’s own tools against them.” This is BONKERS. Make sure you’re following Abortion, Every Day for excellent and thorough coverage of all the threats to reproductive rights.

• This is also very hard to read, and to be honest I’m sort of out of energy to go into any detail about it, but we’re in the midst of losing the regulations that protect our health and safety as workers, consumers, and people who just want to breathe clean air and drink clean water. Scary times.

Today’s news feels pretty heavy and scary and it’s days like this that I appreciate more than ever that there are people reading this and I’m not just screaming into the void. Thanks for being here! Together, we’ll get through this.