Valerie Friedlander

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.

These are very bad times.

But there are a lot of good people here.

We must continue to take care of one another and fight for one another.

That's always been the work, that's always the work.

Remembering My Father and Talking to Strangers on Planes "I believe we're good enough to do better."

I wrote a very personal essay about two conversations—one with my father decades ago and one with a stranger a few weeks ago amid the upheaval of Trump 2.0.

leftists: that thing you teach us in school to be terrified of is happening

historians: that thing is definitely happening

star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it

news outlets: these protesters are out of control

You are part of history. Right now.

It's not easy to act in the now, in uncertainty.
We want to know what will 'work' & be 'worth it.'

Remeber: People take action, stand up, sit in, march, help, risk, not because they know what they do will 'work' but because they know that the doing matters.

Assigned Reading - Feminist Business Coach Becky Mollenkamp

Assigned Reading podcast hosted by my friend @beckymollenkamp.bsky.social is officially out! 🎉 Feminist essays + deep convos about joy, rage, power, and more. A must-listen if you’re craving something real. Listen now: beckymollenkamp.com/assigned

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Absolutely monstrous. I have no words for the inhumanity of anyone who tries to justify this.

So You’re A White Person Who Protested April 5th Great! It is Time to be an Accomplice.

open.substack.com/pub/changeca...

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

- Desmond Tutu

A new episode of Mindset Unlimited is out and I'm talking all about Energy and Leadership and a resource to help you be more at choice with how you are showing up to this moment.

Tune in to learn more!
Find it on your preferred listening platform here: unlimited.buzzsprout.com/1479082/epis...

Thank you so much for joining us!! It was wonderful meeting you and I loved the convo! 💜

If you are not furious at what our government did to these people, there’s something wrong with you.

The purpose of these tariffs is to be able to lift them to those who bow down to him and sacrifice their dignity. That is what he did to the GOP, the billionaires, and is doing now to Big Law. Those who stand up will be punished, those who bend a knee and humiliate themselves will be rewarded.

It really is just all about respect isn't it? If I want to be called something, call me that. It's just that simple. It's not up to you to understand it or get it. It doesn't change anything about you to just be kind, to offer basic human dignity to someone you intend to talk to. That's it🖤

Important. Either Trump is so far gone mentally he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or people are acting in his name without his knowledge. This was an order with enormous implications, and the President of the United States says he didn’t do it.

What Israel is doing is unconscionable.

The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, they put my elders - Japanese American citizens - in camps. Did you hear that? CAMPS. What do you think is next?

using this mortifying infographic as a visual reminder that you can support bc our lil indie Black podcast and help push back against these exact red bubble narratives 🤚🏽 (also plz read the entire thread.)

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

The evil at your door The deportation action as regime change

Language used by individuals associated with the federal government who deported people without trial or due process to a concentration camp in El Salvador, defying a court order, has a specific resonance that, historically, has been used to change regime type.
snyder.substack.com/p/the-evil-a...

What the fascist, eugenics-ridden right is trying to root out because they believe it is a built-in blemish, empathy, is in fact the only feature that could have prevented its own crumbling.

The distance between a legal resident who's not a citizen being deported without due process and a citizen being deported without due process is a hell of a lot shorter than many folks seem to believe, and when it does happen to a citizen, just remember it started here and who was quiet in response.

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

Trump and Vance act as if the problem is that Ukraine is resisting an ongoing Russian invasion. The problem is the ongoing Russian invasion. If they want to use American power to stop the war, apply it to the aggressor. Abusing the victim is not going to end a war of aggression.

American statements in the Oval Office indistinguishable from Russian propaganda and celebrated by Russian propagandists.

JD Vance is so staggeringly unqualified to be in this position. Just an absolute embarrassment. We are witnessing peak "I'm a white guy who read stuff on the internet so now I'm an expert on all things." Unreal.

Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine.

This is terrible and so dangerous

I would expect to see far more usage of private security & "deputized" groups (whether formally or not) to engage in policing, intimidation, & coercion in the US. The gaslight-y, obfuscatory "we don't know who hired them" line is classic authoritarian strategy. Just google "shabiha" or "baltagiya."