Alanna Cotch

Hi. I'm the oldest of five. Somewhere this very moment, someone isn't following a rule that I always feel like I have to follow--and making me feel like a sucker as a result.

It’s a good thing Congress isn’t alive to see this

“How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?" June Jordan, 1984

Trans rights are human rights.

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

I don't know much but isn't that traveling?

You need ID to pet your neighbor’s dog. You need ID to mumble lyrics while waiting for a bus. You need ID to put mayo on French fries. You need ID to quote Anchorman to your parents. You need ID to do the electric slide. You need ID to go back and wander the paths of Mirkwood. So the President thi

A graphic in pink, blue, and green that illustrates how recent many Black History events are to the current day -- ranging from 1619 to 2024.

I'm sure we've all seen the graphic that lays out the United States ' relationship with slavery. It's good, but I never thought it was quite impactful enough. So I made my own.

I've used a few key events, including my birth, to highlight how recent these events are in history.

1 square = 1 year.

There will be people who are understandably desperate to hear this, but it's important to be clear-eyed about Rubio himself and what the Trump administration is doing. 🧵

Community college comp/lit professor here. Hard agree.

photo of Pam Bondi testifying in the foreground as a group of 7 women and 1 men raise their hands

Likely-historic photo by NBC News of all the Epstein victims asked to raise their hands if they've not yet been asked to meet with the DOJ as Bondi testifies in foreground

Invoking wealthy class solidarity to excuse sex crimes against children is sorta the Epstein Class in a nutshell

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

Y’all, it was a beautiful performance full of love, joy, and defiance. And I really don’t care what bigots say about it. It filled me up not because it was in opposition to another “team”. It filled me up because it was beautiful.

It was transforming the biggest NFL stage in the world into a sugar cane plantation that did it for me.

Like, the multiple layers of turning an American icon into a plantation and highlighting the history of exploitation of Black and Brown bodies by the NFL and American colonialism simultaneously?

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

Just a beautiful celebration. Loved it.

OK "god bless america" and then naming every country in the americas from south to north is absolute king shit

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

For sale: Nazi coat, gently worn

(Size small)

It's really distressing the extent to which in all of this Silverio Villegas González, the first man to be murdered by ICE in the streets, has been almost completely forgotten

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

We are observers, not protestors. We show up to document and film the atrocities ICE is committing. Using 5 year olds as bait. Kidnapping senior citizens. Breaking down doors without warrants. Murdering poets and nurses. Media has all of that information because *observers* were there to document it

Devastating.

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

Wise words from WEB DuBois to gird us today: "It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists & gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources."

Today’s General Strike in Minnesota was so beautiful. The care that humans have towards one another in this time of unprecedented state cruelty gives me tremendous hope. As a society, we know how to draw lines in the sand. Don’t disappear our friends, family, and neighbors.

The main picture shows a person being held down whilst pepper sprayed int be face. The headline reads Children as young as 5 detained. Other headlines include; Somali American citizen arrested held of TW days. Preschoolers detention ICE claimed enhanced power to enter homes.

Today’s Minnesota Star Tribune front page will be hung in museums in future.

Every headline, every inch of it documenting a failed state; a descent into authoritarianism.

are they not monsters?

“ICE agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots and taking our children,” [the superintendent] added. “The sense of safety in our community and around our schools is shaken and our hearts are shattered.”

a heavily armed paramilitary force with legal immunity is occupying a city and going door to door kidnapping non-white adults and children in furtherance of an explicitly white nationalist political project