Danielle Kempe, CFRE

I have encountered a lot of confusion here in Chicago, as well, among newer folks who think "the cops are on our side" because they are often seemingly abiding by state law and not directly assisting ICE. So many people have asked if we can call the cops when ICE harms and abuses people. It's hard.

Just came from a local organizing meeting & my god people the cops are never ever ever ever gonna be on “our side” especially in a police state
Our imaginations have been so captured we can’t imagine our way out of this trap it’s literally the #1 obstacle ppl want to rely on what made this possible

…he is doing that in business shoes and a suit better than I did in proper dress for practice.

Not only doing the side quests, but doing them WELL.

@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social out here doing all the side quests

The thread is Mundane Halloween Costumes

I love this one because she nailed the theme, relatably

Are you fucking kidding me? So now that the fascists are in control of government and behaving like terrorists, its not terrorism because they're part of the state? That's the stupidest fucking definition of terrorism I've ever heard. A classic "lies, damn lies, and statistics" case.

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans agree that spending by wealthy donors and corporations in our elections gives rise to corruption — including majorities of Republican and independent voters.

Money in politics is the root of our dysfunction.

We must overturn Citizens United.

my husband could attest that i literally broke down in tears the other night because Zohran is campaigning the way i have been begging candidates to for the last twenty years.

almost all of them have been too afraid.

I personally don't have an invisible safety net and never did, my family came from extreme poverty. I've blogged about this often. My big advantage is I got started in my early teens and toughed it out. Since I was never rich, it didn't bother me to be poor.

God knows how many times this has happened: Zero.

Much like Vance lying about Haitian immigrants eating people's pets, this is 100% racist bullshit being spewed by an unabashed white nationalist.

Congrats to everyone who patronizes the Nazi bar he runs.

Awful: Pentagon officials told lawmakers Trump now claims authority to bomb people merely “affiliated” with “narco-terrorist" groups, Rep Adam Smith tells me. But under questioning, they wouldn't say what “affiliated” even means!

Lots of fresh info in my new piece:

newrepublic.com/article/2025...

yeah, this is a guy opening the books for long enough to see what's in them, closing them, and backing away like the bomb squad

Fucking neat that it’s dark already

Adams has railed against vaccines, and science in general, for many years. Kennedy cut funding for promising work including mRNA vaccines for prostate cancer. Just, the audacity here.

FBI fires top official amid Kash Patel’s outrage over reports of agency jet use Patel reportedly became furious after revelation he flew to visit girlfriend as agency fires official who oversees fleet

FBI fires top official amid Kash Patel’s outrage over reports of agency jet use | FBI | The Guardian share.google/n5XjKl44tA5n...

PBS has a good article about some of this for those wanting to know more about the general anti-empathy thing.

Unsurprisingly, racism and misogny play a lot into how it became more of a thing.

The thing is, if you don't have artistic ability, AI will not magically make you one, and if you do, AI could have been a useful tool to support artistry if it hadn't instead been trained as a plagiarism machine :-)

The audacity of the people at Vicks

Listen, DayQuil and NyQuil are my heroes

But zzzquil is just adult dose liquid diphenhydramine

And “painquil” is just adult dose liquid acetaminophen

The rebranding of generic OTC meds into little branded hybrids too $$$

I don’t like it!

when you appeal to empathy or decency they say, "we're making the hard choices,"; ie, we enjoy hurting people.

they experience the ability to oppress others as pleasure and as a guarantor of their own status.

this is why studies don't matter and can't affect their views. they don't really care if it's actually a problem to give people money because they personally enjoy harming poor people and crushing them beneath their feet.

hating poor people is fun. it's leisure entertainment. they love it.

like, it's not just that they don't want poor people to buy steak.

it's that they positively enjoy the sense of power it gives them to police what poeple are allowed to have; to judge others; to put in place harmful policies as punishment.

more, rich ppl feel like they're entitled to the sadistic pleasure of policing poor people.

people don't feel they need to police that stuff because the wealthy are supposed to be entitled to grotesque expenditure, while the poor (and esp. non white poor people) are entitled to nothing.

wealthy people spend money on all sorts of useless shit. Jeff Bezos paid for a monstrously expensive gaudy and ugly wedding. Trump gold plates his toilets.

but there's always a moral panic that some poor person somewhere is spending their snap benefits in ways that allow them to get too much enjoyment out of life.

study after study after study shows that literally just handing people money and telling them "do what you want with this" reduces homelessness, increases food security for children, makes it more likely people will find and retain jobs.1

I would not be me without libraries. An inspiring and devastating read—with helpful action ideas.

Recently my brother in law explained what gerrymandering was to a coworker and they didn’t believe him because if that were really happening there would be riots in the street