Kate Thomas

U.S. government pays for 2025's most expensive political ad campaign The next closest ad campaign is the $41 million effort to support California's redistricting measure.

Love to see my taxpayer dollars hard at work 🙄https://www.axios.com/2025/10/15/trump-self-deportation-ads-noem

Pretty sure we’re living one

It is honestly absurd at this point. STOP STEALING CREDIT FOR OTHER PEOPLE’S WORK jfc

Ezra Klein is Wrong About Abortion Abortion *is* a big tent issue

Are you f*cking KIDDING ME. How are we back here again?!! jessica.substack.com/p/ezra-klein...

we are not well

Tech giants have spent more than $100 billion on data center construction just this summer in the name of “progress”- but this new report from @mediajustice.bsky.social reveals just how much the opposite of that is happening in Southern communities:

mediajustice.org/resource/the...

This is so fucking frustrating. In aftermath of an act that was sooo preventable, so horrible & so unnecessary, THIS is where rightwingers are landing?! How can my brain even register surprise over sh*t like this. You’d think I’d be numb to it now but I just…am not.

In today’s Senate Commerce Hearing the White House endorsed support for federal preemption of state AI laws. The fight against preemption did not disappear with the moratorium—in fact, Sen. Cruz introduced a bill today putting us directly on the path to preemption. A thread on its risks below: 🧵

The problem with allowing guns everywhere is that no one is safe anywhere.

Some Arlington pharmacies begin offering Covid-19 shots without prescriptions | ARLnow.com Amid shifting federal guidelines on Covid-19 vaccines, some pharmacies around Arlington are now offering the shots without requiring a prescription. Only days ago, all CVS locations in Virginia requir...

I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS www.arlnow.com/2025/09/10/s...

Zero Click Marketing? The Truth About Search Traffic in 9 Charts | Orbit Media Studios Zero-click searches are from zero-intent searchers. They just want a quick answer. Here's the truth about search traffic in nine charts...

This is really valuable advice on how to feel—and what do —about the the giant shifts in organic traffic many of us who work in digital have been noticing: www.orbitmedia.com/blog/zero-cl...

The Supreme Court just ruled this meme is constitutional.

the maga constitution doesn’t allow any institution, public or private, to explicitly work to ameliorate racial inequality but allows the government to racially profile

Thousands stream down the streets of DC on 9/6/25 to protest Trump’s military occupation of our city

For when Trump tries to claim that hardly anyone turned out to #FreeDC today

Of the 4 most numerous jobs that AI is set to replace – marketing analysts, customer service reps, sales reps & biz analysts – none of them are unionized.

That's not a coincidence. And it highlights a critical vulnerability in how workers are positioned to respond to AI-driven job displacement.

Women make amazing leaders. Happy to see forward momentum with upcoming gubernatorial races (well, the Dem-leaning ones, anyway!) thehill.com/homenews/cam...

I don't get how people don't realize that a technology that replaces junior and entry level positions in a field destroys that field.

There's no skipping steps. You have to be a junior before you can be a senior, and if you don't have senior people, you don't have a field.

So what are the solutions? Well, reverse engineer everything above. Find people who know how to build organic audiences--lots of people, not just one or two. Fund them, and fund them well. Don't make them jump through 50 hoops over the course of 12 months to get a $50,000 check. That is useless, it wastes their time, and they can't do anything useful with it. Drive the car like you stole it. Be aggressive, fast, generous and ratchet up your fault tolerance. Understand that in order to be effective you are going to have to build a media ecosystem that holds contradictions and is representative of the Democratic populace, not some imaginary median voter who everyone assumes is a platonic centrist (despite evidence to the contrary, which is another post.) There are lots of different kinds of Democrats. There should not be a monolithic template for talking to them and if Dems try to force all of these efforts into one, they will end up talking to no one. Learn the difference between bad and good content, and not by message testing or doing paid spend it but by putting it in front of audiences and seeing what works organically. (People also use really shitty metrics to decide whether something is having political impact, but that's a whole other post too. I could write a treatise on why ad performance on meta as a metric is stupid but this is already running long.)

Super super smart (per usual) by @espiers.bsky.social, per usual on the problem with Democratic media efforts. www.elizabethspiers.com/why-dems-kee...

“Your hairdresser has to deal with more regulation than your AI company does." We're letting maybe 10 people shape humanity's future with zero public input. No oversight or accountability. Just billionaires in boardrooms deciding our technological destiny.

If that doesn't scare you, it should.

"but crime is a real issue, people are worried about crime and you have to take that seriously"

No you don't! If people are getting more scared about crime while crime is happening less frequently, it's a made up issue and you should make a point of yelling that all the time

Emory is my alma mater and I couldn't agree more -- IT IS INDEED THE FUCKING GUNS.

Me three months ago:

Your daily reminder that Trump's budget is the largest upward wealth transfer in US history. The bottom 40% lose income while top 0.1% get windfalls. It slashes Medicaid, ACA, & food aid to fund billionaire tax cuts. This isn't fiscal policy—it's systematic looting disguised as governance. STAY MAD.

Be this woman when you have the chance

🥹😭🤮🤮🤮

Y’all. I saw my psychiatrist *out in the wild* in a workout class this past Sunday. At first I didn’t recognize her because why would I & also she is brave & wore zero make-up to the class and I have only ever seen looking her professionally coiffed w/ a full face on. Has this ever happened to you.

You may be thinking "How can an entire political party be organized around the policy of taking from everyone and giving to the rich? No one would vote for them." Well that's where Lying comes in

Folks! The ban against states regulating AI is DEAD! It’s was voted 99-1!

This victory belongs to us all! Unfettered GenAi is an issue for us all, and groups from all walks of life came together to demand we regulate! Your calls and action made the difference! So thank you everyone! We did this!

WHY is this still a thing. Women make up ~50% of the damn population!