Dan Berger
@dnbrgr
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All of our heroes had criminal records || Writer of words, hater of prisons || Out now: STAYED ON FREEDOM …
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It’s here. After six-plus years of research and writing and learning and growing and waiting—it’s here.
Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, available wherever books are sold
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If your country can set the “final deadline” for another country’s war—a war against a stateless people whose signature features include mass starvation and disease alongside incomprehensible civilian casualties—your country just might be the bad guy
The official Israeli broadcasting authority reported, that the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has set the beginning of next year as a "final" deadline for the war waged by the occupation on Gaza to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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So glad Eric Adams cut library service to give more money to this
NYPD kicking off 2024 strong by brutally arresting someone for not paying a $2.90 MTA fare at the 7th Ave. F/G station in Brooklyn.
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So interesting how “we’re the United States of America for god’s same! The most powerful nation in the history of the world!” is never the answer to questions about ending poverty, providing health care for all, or ensuring a livable plant
QUESTION: “Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time?”
POTUS: “We’re the United States of America for God's sake! The most powerful nation in the history of the world!” 1/
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A perfect distillation of US history: never enough room for voting, always plenty of room for incarceration
Interesting fact: US Bank stadium in Minneapolis was offered by the Vikings as a polling place for the election, but they were turned down by the city. Tonight it’s being utilized to process the mass arrest of 6-700 people who were kettled on the highway.
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Me, a teacher: I’m very concerned that you’re regurgitating Nazi ideas.
Bret Stephens, a student: But I cited my sources.
Me: Your source was debunked garbage authored by white nationalists!
NYT, the student’s parent: we have removed the citations. A+ please!
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Hard to say, but I think mask mandates are less onerous and disruptive than the sickness mandate we now have, where we’re all supposed to be cycling through different illnesses all the time
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Between talk of how “mild” omicron is, discussion of easing or ending public health guidelines, and celebration at rising job numbers, it can be easy to overlook that 100,000 people in the US alone have died of covid in less than two months. An incalculable, incomprehensible loss
BREAKING: The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has hit 900,000 — less than two months after eclipsing 800,000:
@AP
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Prisoners in NY forced to make hand sanitizer they don’t have access to. Prisoners in California fight wild fires but can’t get jobs as fire fighters upon release. Prisoners in Florida do hurricane recovery. Incarcerated people are the most exploited first responders.
NY prisoners aren't allowed to have hand sanitizer despite the fact that they're producing 100,000 gallons of it a week, for folks on the outside, at 65 cents an hour.
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Biden famously led the Democratic Party’s tough-on-crime push in the 1990s as an effort to triangulate against the GOP, which ~did not work~ as a electoral strategy but did kill thousands, imprison millions, & otherwise harm tens of millions.
That’s his plan on immigration.
For everyone who is demanding tougher border control, this is the way to do it.
Here's my full statement on border security negotiations:
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With the news that Georgia has charged 60 stop cop city activists with RICO charges, it’s a good time to learn how the state has used RICO against leftists. One place to start: Ray Luc Levasseur. 1/
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I feel bad that people in countries with universal health care will never know the joy of open enrollment month, where you get decide between an expensive plan that offers some coverage and a cheaper plan that prohibits you from seeing doctors
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I am admittedly a simple man, but I don’t think the way to defeat Trump is for the Democratic Party to try and enact his policy objectives
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BREAKING:
#BlockTheBoat
protest happening in Tacoma to stop weapons & military equipment meant for Israel
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One thing to know about today’s 6-3 SCOTUS decision saying universities need to evaluate people “as individuals” rather than through ascriptive categories is that those same 6 justices last week held that even innocence is not sufficient grounds for incarcerated people to appeal
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Hi, this is sociopathic: “With an additional million or two people out of work, the newly unemployed and their families would sharply cut back on spending, while for most people who are still working, wage growth would flatline.”
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“The prison as a rule, to which there are few exceptions, is for the poor.” Eugene V. Debs
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It’s simple, really: the only precedent this court recognizes is “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
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With all the tenure and job announcements circulating here, I guess it’s time for me to announce my big news: I am pleased to say that, next year, I will be Distinguished Elementary School Teacher At My Own Home Because the Government Has Abandoned Us to a Pandemic!
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51 years ago today, George Jackson was killed by guards at San Quentin prison during a bloody uprising.
He was 29 years old, a bestselling author, and a revolutionary who had been incarcerated since he was 18.
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Almost exactly two years after Joe Biden said no one should have to pay for covid testing or treatment, the federal government will make uninsured people have to pay for covid testing and treatment.
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I don’t normally do threads on writings I dislike, but I find this article—& the underlying argument—to be both disingenuous and dangerous. Especially in this historical moment. 1/
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I have been referencing this brilliant comment since
@prisonculture
first tweeted it in 2016. I may have, once or twice, requested it on a throw pillow. I hadn’t even thought of the cross-stitch possibility! Thank you, Mariame Kaba, for brilliance in thought and action!
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Today marks 50 years since San Quentin guards shot and killed George Jackson. He was 29 years old, a bestselling author, and a Black revolutionary. A thread: 1/
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Gosh, Washington Post—did the kidnapped teen die because she ran toward the police, or did it have anything to do with the fact that *the police shot her*?
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As numerous municipalities charge individual drug dealers with murder when someone overdoses, here is the world's largest drug dealer getting away with a one-time monetary fine
Breaking News: The Sacklers, the owners of Purdue Pharma, will be shielded from civil liability in exchange for up to $6 billion to address the opioid crisis.
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One way of reckoning with the enormity of this figure is to note that the United States today has more than twice as many people in jail awaiting trial than it had in all of its prisons in 1970
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My dislike of virtual teaching is outmatched only—but strongly—by my dislike of contracting or spreading a deadly virus
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Our actions are working, and they are not enough.
Nothing we do is sufficient, and everything we do matters.
We must be strategic, and we must operate on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Time is of the essence, and we have to act for the long haul.
This is how change happens.
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Minute by minute, the pandemic reminds us of our linked fates. The virus does not care about patents, pays no attention to borders. Our only hope is to provision our care for each other—all of us, everywhere.
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Once again, as Angela Davis said, we should derive our identities from our politics and not our politics from our identities. Being a gay millennial is not visionary or transformative when you pursue the same deadly and dead-end policies of the past
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Them: without Israel, no Jew in the world is safe
Also them: we’ve written the name of a Jewish antizionist on a bomb so that we symbolically kill you while literally killing Palestinians
I was sent this image by a member of my family in Israel. He was delighted that an IDF soldier has written my name on a missile to be dropped on people in Gaza - all because I am a Jew who wants every human being to be free from the river to the sea.
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No new ideas on the Right
To embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people, southern White Citizens Councils started their so-called "Reverse Freedom Rides," giving Black people one-way tickets to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, and better lives.
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I just got a letter from a person incarcerated in WA, who says that the facility refuses to test people--but if you get sick, you get thrown in the hole.
This is happening in prisons around the country. Solitary confinement is not public health.
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Students are unionizing & striking, campaigning to kick cops off campus, fighting tuition hikes & working to defend & expand critical programs in ethnic & gender studies. If you think it’s all “culture war not class war” you’re not paying attention to campuses.
Jacobin's Bhaskar Sunkara and the New York Times's Michael Powell discuss the new wave of activism on campuses and why a culture war is raging instead of a class war.
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A few months into being popularized,
#DefundthePolice
is now about as popular as Martin Luther King was after a decade of highly visible activism. This is **fantastic** news, & anyone saying otherwise is unaware of how social change happens—or just opposed to this righteous call.
if ~40 percent for "defund the police" is a disaster then throw me in the brier patch
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Letting someone die by incarceration is an act of violence.
MUST READ: “New York's new death penalty is death-by-incarceration. Between January 2011 & May 2018, 675 elder New Yorkers died in a NYS prison.” That’s why we need Elder Parole (S2144). Op-Ed by
@bradhoylman
& RAPP Director Jose Saldana:
#FreeOurElders
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“I care nothing about public sentiment. Public sentiment hanged John Brown. I haven’t forgotten that public sentiment supported slavery for years. If organized labor has a mission it is to make war in the public sentiment that makes these conditions possible.” Eugene Debs, 1894
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Whether covid, climate, the cops or anything else, I’d say a good starting assumption for leftists is to be guided by our vision of what we want to happen in the world rather than limited by what the status quo tells us is possible
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Well, it's public, so here we go: I am speechless, tears in my eyes, to say that Cuomo made David Gilbert parole eligible. It's not as good as the immediate release we wanted, but it means, for the first time, that he has a chance to come home.
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This is beautiful on its own, and also I note that seeing so many older people involved in such actions gives lie to the idea that divides over Israel are purely a generational issue.
Lots of old(er) Jews say no to genocide!
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Has the “learning loss” crowd weighed in on what two million newly unemployed workers choosing between food, rent, and utilities will mean for their children’s abilities to get an education?? 🤔
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This is how I teach about the civil rights movement in the context of the history of mass incarceration. As far as the segregationists we’re concerned, the civil rights movement was a vast criminal conspiracy! And all of our heroes have criminal records
Under the theory of the StopCopCity RICO indictments, the entire Civil Rights Movement was a criminal conspiracy
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Frederick Douglass to Andrew Johnson, or why centrist strategies only embolden worse reaction: “You enfranchise your enemies and disenfranchise your friends.”
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Seattle is the largest US city to call for a ceasefire.
Last night the city council resolution passed 6-0, with three abstentions.
Seattle became the largest U.S. city to call for a long-term ceasefire last night and editors at The Seattle Times don't have their own story on it anywhere on their website's front page. It's completely buried. It did get covered! And then buried.
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I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that last summer’s Black-led uprisings for collective liberation are vastly preferable to this summer’s racist counterrevolution of property.
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You know, the burden of proof is really on those who criticize
#DefundThePolice
. Show us your plans. How has giving the police more money, tools, or authority—I.e., the last 70 years—worked in reducing the scale of police violence?
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I very much agree with
@prisonculture
, who has often said that
#DefundThePolice
is not (just) a slogan but a demand--& that, as a demand, it is the floor, not the ceiling.
What we are & have been witnessing is not rejecting a slogan but elite attempts to *reinforce inequality*
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In 1968, a year *after* the Supreme Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were “obviously an endorsement of white supremacy,” 72 percent of Americans disapproved of white-nonwhite marriages.
But go on, tell us more about unpopular ideas make for bad policy.
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I don’t see how one can look at the profound, even existential challenges we face and say “wokeness is our problem.” And to do so, frankly, is to align with very dangerous forces accelerating the crises of our moment. 11/
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This is what happens when you let segregationists hold on to power. These are the tactics that Alabama used when it banned the NAACP in 1956, when Mississippi released jailed civil rights activists on the promise that they leave the state...
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Why is the governor of NY tweeting out rhetorical questions when his own inactions have turned his state’s prisons into a mass graveyard? Does he think we don’t notice? Is this a joke? When will he do the right thing?
Why are black people dying from
#COVID
at higher rates than white people? Why are health outcomes worse in communities of color? Why did George Floyd die? Why does this happen again and again? It’s all related.
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Texas is usurping federal authority in order to do violence to migrants, so Biden is trying to get bipartisan approval to expand executive authority to do violence to migrants
Pres. Biden on the Senate negotiations:
“It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
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You know what reduces crime? Providing for people’s needs: housing, healthcare, protection from a deadly and raging virus.
You know what more police gets you? Fear, resentment, violence, incarceration.
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One of the most exciting intellectual developments is the effort to think through Native American & Black histories, settler colonialism & antiblackness, relationally. Here are some new books that do that & have been or will be published this year:
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Not sure what else I expected, but I’m still in disbelief that those in charge opted to “end the pandemic” through a combination of gaslighting and mass human sacrifice
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One thing that makes Biden & Harris’s respective political instincts & experiences such a liability right now is that “law and order lite” doesn’t work. You can’t thread the needle between confronting inequality & supporting police power. 1/
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Soft-on-covid is the new tough-on-crime: ginned up by media dinguses, both parties have convinced themselves that a nonsensical politics of organized abandonment that casually disposes of the racialized poor and disabled is the only way to win elections.
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The American Postal Workers Union and the Chicago Teachers Union join the growing call for ceasefire
The announcements from the
@APWUnational
+
@CTULocal1
could—activists, organizers, and many others hope—signal a profound moment for a shift in how U.S. labor is approaching the violence in Israel & Palestine. So far, labor has largely—though increasingly—refrained from doing so.
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I don’t know who needs to hear this, but people in power don’t need excuses to target the Left. They do it all the time without the specter of rightwing violence. We have to struggle over *what* the consequences for the far Right should be, not whether there should be any.
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It’s entirely possible that the Democratic Party is not equipped to stand up to the authoritarian right.
Nancy Pelosi just introduced, as part of the Jan 6 remembrance.... a song by Lin Manuel Miranda performed by the cast of Hamilton
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Call me naive, but I still think establishing a network of concentration camps is and should be an impeachable offense.
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Part of how we got to where we are is that in the 1970s, police & prison guard unions staged reactionary wildcat strikes until politicians gave them every single thing they wanted. When you’re winning, push harder. Let’s keep pushing—this is a fight we have to win.
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Let this be a lesson heard ‘round the world: if you bomb & starve a confined population, the United States will limit visas for a handful of people who are responsible for other forms of violence while still equipping the government with the infrastructure of genocide
Today, I announced a new visa restrictions policy targeting individuals and their family members involved in or meaningfully contributing to actions that undermine peace, security, and stability in the West Bank. Violence against civilians will have consequences.
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This is literally the lesson of every fascist and authoritarian movement ever. And yet, still some think "this time it will be different."
You can not compromise with fascists. There is no action you can take to appease them that will result in “lowering the temperature.”
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All who suggest that Israel is a “Jewish state,” where all Jews feel safe, should pay attention to how the state enables or enforces violent hostility against antiwar and anti-occupation Jews
This is just one aspect of an increasing attack against Israelis critical of the bombing of Gaza. People are facing being fired, potentially removed as students from universities, and physically threatened
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I don’t know exactly how to say this, because we are always all works in progress and concepts are constantly in flux, but:
We do not, in a moral sense, have time for leftists who aren’t feminist.
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If I was running for reelection on a “democracy is on the ballot” line, I wouldn’t be bypassing congressional approval to send weapons to a regime committing genocide while ignoring popular will & sacrificing my agenda to a body of reactionary unelected judges—but that’s just me
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After three years of accelerated state violence & a lengthy primary that saw racial & economic justice put centerstage, the Democratic Party has decided to nominate a get-tough prosecutor to join the architect of the 1994 crime bill while uprisings against policing continue.
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Kinda running out of time for the whole “centrist bipartisanship will make Republicans come around” plan, let’s try something else
This is a friendly reminder that Ohio House Republicans are advancing a bill to teach BOTH SIDES OF THE HOLOCAUST.
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So many exciting books coming out this year on policing, prisons, the carceral state, and abolition!! Here are ones I know of, in no particular order. Feel free to add yours/ other exciting titles:
#mustread2022
#abolition
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If any non-Jews out there are starting a business, I am available to consult on whether your proposed brand name means “butt” in Yiddish
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We need to pay attention to--and work to end--the use of solitary confinement. It is there, in the long-term lockdowns & sensory deprivation conditions that daily house upwards of 100,000 people in US, where the cruel endgame of American punishment is made clear. 1/
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The author argues that we have to shed an “irritating” approach to politics that is insular and assumes the self-evidence of our critique for one premised on solidarity. That’s all well & good. But seeing that as “Unlearning the language of ‘Wokeness’”?
Pure rightwing drivel 2/
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Theory of change, 101
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Today is the anniversary of the death of poet, revolutionary, & political prisoner Marilyn Buck. She died in 2010, three weeks after being granted compassionate release following 25 years in prison for her role in the escape of Assata Shakur & support for Black liberation 1/
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Supreme Court justices in twelfth century BCE didn’t have security, so I don’t see why this group should 🙃
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FL GOP does hostile takeover of formerly progressive New College and then proceeds to hire their rightwing buddies at lucrative rates—including, as in this case, hiring a baseball coach to a school that doesn’t even have so much as a baseball field much less a team
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Everyone knows that the way to rebut bad-faith attacks from known liars is to agree with their underlying premise in a way that betrays your own base. That's just politics
After months of internal wrangling, Dems appear to have a deal to move forward on a police funding package that their party’s most vulnerable members have been clamoring for. Bill won’t become law but all part of a Dem effort to rebut R attacks. Backstory:
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Pretty wild that the only thing (potentially) stopping Democrats from enacting Republican legislation is the far-right GOP caucus
So as Democrats try to pass a bill that will brutalize migrants, send weapons to Israel and Ukraine, and starve Gaza, the only hope is Republicans are fanatical enough to vote it down? I just don't know what else to say about this moral abomination of a Presidency at this point.
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Today I am very pleased to launch the Washington Prison History Project, a digital archive of prisoner activism & policy. Check it out & follow
@waprisonhistory
for updates!
#prison
#CJReform
#abolition
#IHRD2018
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Here’s that much-discussed return to normalcy...
Police in Minneapolis have kettled upwards of a thousand people on the freeway, and have begun making arrests of trapped protesters. They’ve stated that everyone attending the protest is under arrest for unlawful assembly and public nuisance.
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It’s quite a two-for-one deal: criminalize Palestine solidarity activism while legitimating antisemitic narratives of Jewish foreignness. Another example of how this administration uses antisemitism to target non-Jewish communities as well as Jewish ones.
it is impossible to overstate how serious of an escalation this is against the Palestine solidarity movement. Trump is circumventing Congress to officially equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and force universities to treat BDS as a hate crime
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But what troubles me most is this: we are in an epochal battle for survival—as a left, but also as a planet. Rightwing forces, both institutional & paramilitary, are targeting Black people, queer & trans people, women—the implied subjects of “wokeness”—for elimination 10/
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The assault on wokeness is being used to ban books, kill protestors, harass or fire workers who challenge racism and sexism in their workplace or communities, & to attack people simply for being (or being related to those who are) gay or trans. 12/
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So...I have some thoughts on this. The
@nytimes
asks “Would we fix our prisons if we could see what happens inside them?” It seems rhetorical, but this question is an old one, and it has an answer: no. At least not simply by virtue of seeing abusive conditions. 1/
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@JoshuaPotash
Only $10,000 and for people making less than $125,000! Perfect storm of half-measures
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People talk a lot about polarization these days, but then a crisis like covid comes along and we see leaders from both parties work together
To expose vulnerable and marginalized people to illness, precarity, and premature death
Every state has now adopted an unpopular rightwing population abandonment strategy that prioritizes the wealth and convenience of the rich over the health and lives of the disadvantaged and vulnerable
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