Kent

🔥

You can donate to the Chicago Street Vendor Relief Fund to help buy out a local street vendor’s cart for the day. They’ve partnered with a bike patrol / cycling solidarity group, which rides around buying out the inventory then distributing the food at homeless & unhoused encampments & shelters.

I am never ever fucking EVER getting over these fuckers just driving around snatching our neighbors off the street.

Informational flyer about Rogers Park Whistle Protocols, explaining how to use whistles to alert neighbors of emergencies, with color-coded alerts, steps for use, and encouragement to form a crowd and stay loud for safety.

I'm so proud of everyone from my old neighborhood of Rogers Park in Chicago. I see what you have been and are doing. I am so proud of how organized the community is and how much more so everyone is becoming. It is inspiring. Just one example... And this is something EVERYONE can do. Everyone.

Must-Reads and the War on Chicago "Chicagoans will not be a conquered people."

I have a full day today, but I woke up early to put this edition of my newsletter together because I need you all to have this rundown of what we've been up against this week in Chicago as the federal assault on our city continues. To ignore these developments would be a damning mistake for us all.

“You come for my people, you come t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̵m̶e̶ 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘦”

Stop lying. Your state cops attacked protesters alongside ICE yesterday. I was there. I and others were violently attacked by ICE agents. Your state cops acted in concert with them during the attack.

I thanked the governor for his leadership these past 9 months, then expressed my utter disgust at state police being sent to Broadview. They said "OK, we will pass your comments along to the governor's team"

they answered just minutes ago

If you’d like to help more families safely evacuate Gaza City this group has basically spent every penny they’ve made getting trucks to get people out and they have more lined up as soon as they have funds to pay them

A half-sheet size flyer with green printing, ridiculing ICE agents. The design is modeled after the flyers commonly used by contractors in Chicago, who are frequently immigrants. These flyers often appear on the garages of homes.

A half-sheet size flyer with blue printing, ridiculing ICE agents. The design is modeled after the flyers commonly used by contractors in Chicago, who are frequently immigrants. These flyers often appear on the garages of homes.

After many requests, here are the files to print three different anonymous Chicago contractor-style flyers about ICE, as well my new zine of Tasks for the National Guard in Chicago. Print and resist, friends! drive.google.com/drive/folder...

Mapping Community Defense and Care in Our Neighborhoods This worksheet can help us prepare for Trump's military interventions at the neighborhood level.

Last night, about 60 Chicago activists and organizers gathered to discuss Trump's threatened military occupation of our city. Our convo centered around a worksheet that some friends and I put together this week—a tool that can help us build and strengthen local networks of support and protection.

The people who got everyone here simply aren't going to be the ones to get us out.

Aseel loves her cat Lisa so much

Fidaa recently lost a *lot* of donations as well as her account here when a person who was supposed to be helping her closed it. She has this new account and a new fundraiser and she really needs help. She is very worried about losing her children and the place she is staying.

That’s me and my gear! I’m incredibly stoked to perform/premiere (w/ Sam Wagster) a new original live score for this amazing film, in Chicago’s finest movie house

Prices :( 💔

Mahmoud is such a wonderful person and has suffered some heartbreaking losses since we started talking last year. Please support his fundraiser if you can.

Every single story you are hearing from the Everglades Concentration Camp has been and is already taking place in hundreds of prisons and jails in the U.S. That's what PIC abolitionists have been trying to get the public to understand for decades.

How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power

Surprised that this remarkable investigation into how Netanyahu prolonged the war in Gaza — killing tens of 1000s of civilians — for his own benefit has not gotten more attention. So: gift link.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/m...

The @jvp.bsky.social hunger strikers and other Jewish activists are at Senator Tammy Duckworth’s Chicago office demanding a meeting they were promised to talk about the genocide in Gaza. Staff refuses to speak to them. They aren’t leaving. #letgazalive #freepalestine

No one made Cuomo subpoena an alleged sexual harassment victim's gynecological records or lie about COVID deaths in nursing homes. He did that all by himself.

Chicago - downtown and Devon Ave

Teen Vogue continues to be a goddamn treasure and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

All of the talk about "peaceful protest" makes me think of all the times I have been part of a protest where the police cracked someone over the head and then charged that person with assault. They will call you violent. You can't control that or other people.

[CLICK here if you would like your name added to this letter] النسخة العربية من هذه الرسالة متاحة أدناه. Open Letter to the Bluesky Team About Their Treatment of Palestinians in Gaza The signatories of this letter are all members of the Bluesky community, many of us have actively participated on the platform since its inception. We came to Bluesky because it was a breath of fresh air, a place that felt different from many of the other social media platforms. The lack of a central algorithm, the ability to build and use custom feeds, and the lack of penalty for link promotion contributed to an environment that allowed diverse and interesting voices to find their footing and community on Bluesky. While some of the signatories of this letter have had no issues with speaking their mind publicly on Bluesky, unfortunately that is not true for all the signatories because many are Palestinians currently living in Gaza. These Palestinians are journalists, artists, engineers, teachers, grandmas, entrepreneurs, a man who owned an ice cream shop, a pediatrician who has been featured on CBS Morning News, aid workers, architects, waiters, pharmacists, students–and perhaps most essential to the backbone of Bluesky, posters. All of these people provide unique and interesting voices to the Bluesky community. However, unlike the other signatories of this letter, these Bluesky community members have struggled to keep their accounts on the platform. Most of them have lost multiple accounts and/or have had their accounts labeled as spam. Some cannot even make an account without it immediately being removed from the platform. Gazans undertake immense efforts to simply be on Bluesky. Sometimes, they walk for miles just to have access to the internet. They scale rooftops where they are exposed to potential military attacks just for the opportunity to get better cell signals–one signatory of this letter tragically lost her brother this way. They use what little money they have to pay …

Gazans have also been aggressively targeted and unfairly reported by bad actors. Many accounts openly encourage the reporting and targeting of any Palestinian. Several groups exist for the express purpose of looking for Palestinian accounts to report. We believe Bluesky owes Gazans, and the entire community who benefits from their voices, a greater duty of care especially in the context of the horrors they are enduring. We ask Bluesky to implement the following changes: Provide information on all Bluesky-affiliated websites in Arabic that explains the rules and expectations of the site in clear language. Investigate the accounts that are mass-reporting Palestinians on Bluesky. The mass reporting of Palestinians on Bluesky is a group effort to render the platform a hostile place for a community based on their ethnicity. As such, it is racism, and should be understood as such. Reports against Palestinians who have broken no community guidelines must be understood as racism, and the accounts that submit those reports should be disregarded in the future. Many Bluesky users encourage Gazans to tag or reply to them, and this is not always understood as unwelcome behavior. If an account is reported as Spam for tagging or replying to others, treat only reports from the tagged/mentioned account as legitimate, seeing as they were the only ones who received a notification. Send emails regarding disciplinary action every time it is taken. Gazans do not always get an email explaining what they did wrong, and those that do are required to parse a language they do not speak in order to understand their violation. Have these emails contain an easily visible link to information about their violations in Arabic. Respond to appeals in a timely fashion, many Gazans simply never hear back from Bluesky after they appeal a decision. In addition to removing Gazans for alleged spam behavior, Bluesky has also sometimes indicated that they are deleting an account for being a scam or …

End IP bans on any account from Gaza and allow them to make new accounts where they can comply with Bluesky rules and continue to be valued members of the community. We understand that even if all these changes are made, many Gazans may still violate Bluesky rules in the future, but we hope that Bluesky will abandon their punitive approach to these violations and instead embrace an attitude of education, cooperation and community care– one that works to ensure people in Gaza can participate in a way that keeps their voices heard. We also call on the Bluesky community to help and support these accounts however they can. We want to continue to build a healthy community with better community members and this cannot be done if Gazans continue to be shunned. We can use this as an opportunity to show how to protect all vulnerable groups in the future. We hope that Bluesky does not follow the path of other social media platforms and instead forges ahead with a different philosophy. After all, that is the reason so many of its users are there. Bluesky's ethos of "No Caesars” should apply to all members of its community. [To add your name to the list of signatories, click here.]

We were hoping that this letter to @bsky.app could first be shared by a Gazan, but we were too worried that doing so would get their account deleted so we are sharing first.

You can sign on to the letter about the unfair treatment of Gazans on Bluesky here:

docs.google.com/document/d/1...