Join me in raising awareness and funds for a cause near and dear to my heart by donating to @RealPrideLive’s #StonewallDay2021! Make a $10 donation and one lucky winner will be selected to introduce me virtually for Stonewall Day 2021! facebook.com/donate/7185232…
🏳️🌈@RealPrideLive, organizer of Stonewall Day, involves today's generation in the LGBTQ+ equality movement through activism, events, and community engagement. Pride Live stands committed to advancing full equality through community programming, activism, and awareness.
Proceeds go to benefit this year’s LGBTQ+ organization beneficiaries, including @TransLash, a Trans-led project whose mission is to shift the cultural understanding of what it means to be transgender in order to foster social inclusion and reduce anti-trans hostility.
A Big Lie is one so colossal that nobody believes it would be said without there being some truth behind it. The Big Lie today is that the election was stolen. There is no truth behind it, but it is so devastating that many believe it must be true. It cannot be left to stand. /1
Ted Cruz and his ilk are repeating the Big Lie. He cites “allegations” of electoral fraud, in the absence of any evidence, to put our democracy on hold. A Big Lie gains strength through the retelling. If we fail to recognize the lie, we start down a dangerous path. /2
When I was a child, unchecked and unproven “allegations” that we Japanese Americans were attempting to sabotage American facilities caused widespread hysteria. This was our Big Lie to fight. There was no evidence, just allegations. But still, the Big Lie took hold. /3
Listen up, folks. When I was a boy, politicians who were sworn to uphold the Constitution failed us, choosing instead to imprison my entire community of 120,000, most of us citizens. When we came out of the camps, we could have given up on America entirely. /1
But despite all we had been through those four years, we still believed in the promise of America. We didn’t seek vengeance, didn’t renounce our citizenship, didn’t call for those who had done this to us to be stripped of their power. We did something else entirely. /2
We doubled down. We worked harder than ever to ensure that America would live up to her values, so that something like what happened to us would not happen to others. We chose engagement over bitterness. Many of us are still fighting to keep our story alive and taught. /3
When this current nightmare is past us, we must not forget that it happened. I have known an America that descended into fascism before, when my entire community on the West Coast, 120,000 of us, were rounded up because leaders made people afraid. We have... /1
to work very hard to ensure history does not repeat, because it will want to. The next time a demagogue comes, with fear and racism as his weapons, we must spot the danger earlier, not grow complacent, not say “both sides are bad.” That is a road to ruin. We must... /2
recommit ourselves, right here and now, to defending our fragile democracy against the forces that rot it from within: misinformation, white supremacy, cult-like adoration of leaders, attacks on expertise and science. We must all become watchers at our posts..../3
The system by which an original minority of privileged, white slave holders could hold on to power in America is known as the Electoral College. And it continues to poison our democracy today. But change is coming. Inexorably, and resoundingly, coming. /1
Very soon, that same Electoral College math, which has handed the White House and the Supreme Court to the political descendants of that original privileged minority, will begin to turn against them, and brutally. Texas looms large. Florida is shifting. /2
Within four years, and perhaps even in 2020, Texas will join the blue state majority and forge an impenetrable electoral one, with 271 electoral college votes out the gate. The GOP knows this, and so it has scrambled to seize what it can, like a robber fleeing a home. /3
With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett one step closer today, many are wondering what any of us can do, with Roe v. Wade under threat as never before. I have a few thoughts, which I’ll share in this thread. /1
For many years now, we have seen how conservatives and anti-abortion radicals have trained their sights not only on overturning Roe, but on severely limiting local access to reproductive services, in some cases effectively eliminating it as an option altogether. /2
The right has long understood that politics is local, and that if they want to achieve the kinds of restrictions they envision, they would need to take over state houses, governorships and courthouses around the country. In this they were very effective. / 3