Published January 31, 2025
Content warning given with loving concern: references to suicide and suicidal ideation, hate speech and anti-trans campaigns. Protect your peace.
Government reports and resources that you and I paid for and have a right to see and access freely are being purged from CDC and other .gov websites. The erasure continues.
I spoke to former Treasury and OMB officials, and they said Elon Musk accessing government payment systems could give him the power to selectively turn off payments. They described what this really means in very clarifying terms. See below:
newrepublic.com/article/1910…
— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 11:51 AM
This photograph was taken two days ago at the FBI Academy in Quantico and submitted to the NYT under the condition of anonymity.
If a picture is usually worth a thousand words, this one is worth millions.
— Zach W. Lambert (@zachwlambert.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 10:55 AM
Elon Musk’s friends have infiltrated another government agency: the General Services Administration.
His former employees are trying to use White House credentials to access GSA’s tech, giving them the potential to remote into laptops, read emails, and more:
— WIRED (@wired.com) January 31, 2025 at 3:30 PM
If you don’t understand how bad things are, you need better information sources. If you don’t think things are bad at all, your information sources have poisoned you and you are in for one hell of a shock.
Meanwhile, as is often the case after I write something, I discovered someone else’s words that say the same, essentially, but better.
That’s from 2017.
What I wrote a week ago was:
Republican and Republican-adjacent people I know who’ve practiced Catholicism/Christianity a la carte forever seem to think they can similarly justify voting Republican, telling me this week that people vote GOP for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily hate. But I say that anyone voting Republican since 2015 has no excuse for not knowing what they’ve enabled and are complicit in.
If you hang your vote on one or two issues that are important to you, you’re not electing a percentage of a person. You’re electing the whole person and all of their agenda. You’ve effectively co-signed everything they believe in and will fight for. If you decided your 401(k) or your religious beliefs are more important to you than protecting me and other vulnerable people from harm, own it. Own your shit.
‘Nobody joins a cult’
That’s a quote from something I wrote in 2018. It’s a story looking back on Jonestown, and on the greatest fact-checking lesson of my life.
If you still support this man and his administration, how much more do you need to see? His response to the air disaster this week was so awful, so cowardly, so hateful, it should be the end of this now and forever. But I’ve said that about him dozens and dozens of times since 2015. And yet, he got more popular in so many circles.
A lot of people I know belong to a cult right now, one that will do far worse damage than Jim Jones did in 1978. I don’t know what it will take for them to wake up.
In the few hours a day I’m able to stay awake, I’m frightened as never before. Nightmares wake me, screaming, to remind me that there’s no peace for me, not awake, not asleep. People urge me to stick around, to stay alive, but for what? What will the world look like in a year, in four years? A week from now?
News today that the person who died by suicide Monday in Syracuse was wrapped in a large transgender pride flag hit hard for reasons you can probably understand.
If you don’t know about what the Nazis did to trans people and trans research way back when, you’re way behind.
I’m begging people to see what’s happening.
♥
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