“Fascism” isn’t a slur for politics we don’t like. It’s a precise word with precise meaning. And in the face of what’s happening right now in America, it’s the most honest one we have.

I’ll lay it out as plainly as I can. 🧵 If you know me, you know I care about words. Not as provocation or flourish, but as a matter of integrity. I use them to tell the truth and want to get them right.

And you know I’ve spent my career working on threats that seem unimaginable until the moment they define our world.

The work to abolish all nuclear weapons globally isn’t just a foreign policy issue, and the problem runs deeper than the risk of conflict. These weapons represent a clear and present danger to the work of progressive movements to build a more just, prosperous and equitable world. Nuclear abolition is RACIAL JUSTICE issue:

From atomic testing in the Pacific Islands and Algeria, to mining uranium and storing toxic waste on tribal lands, it’s Black, brown, and Indigenous folks who have disproportionately suffered at the hands of the nuclear weapons complex.

107 years ago, half a world away:

A nine-year-old girl helps her family bury their belongings just outside the village of Moush. Her hair, so long she often stepped on it, was wound behind her head in a white ribbon. She wiped at soil-stained hands, nails caked with dirt. Hidden among their possessions was the history of their family line, recorded in a Bible now committed to the ground. Praying in a language sentenced to die, she looked to her father. She didn't know this was the last day she would see him.

The Turks were coming.

It's hard to imagine a better way to make the war in Ukraine more dangerous than to move nuclear weapons of any kind closer to the center of this conflict, rhetorically let alone operationally. It is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do.

Let me explain. 🧵 newsweek.com/natos-poland-o… In the chaos of war, and especially in this one, where mis/disinformation is rampant and facts are hard to come by, we should be doing everything we can to minimize the opportunities for catastrophic mistakes, miscalculation, and escalation. That goes 1000x for nuclear weapons.

Today in the US, more than 4000 children are hospitalized with #COVID19, which is double what we saw 2 weeks ago. At one Indiana hospital, half the kids went to the ICU and ~25% were put on a ventilator.

Tell me more about how Omicron is "like a cold" and "no big deal for kids." Some folks on here chiming in with disbelief and demanding sources, as if it's not the easiest thing in the fucking world to pull up loads of credible reporting on this in less time than it takes to express your ignorance.

Here's one to get you started: theguardian.com/us-news/2022/j…

Well, it's 9:28 on a Wednesday night, and the decision before me is either get on the Peloton or make an extra large Manhattan.

I think I need both? Simultaneously? Yeah, no, just the Manhattan.

With news breaking that Trump advisors say he's "unstable" and "out of his mind," now seems like a good time to remind everyone we really did hand this desperate psychopath the absolute power to use nuclear weapons and kill millions of people.

Here's how it would go down: People always try to tell me this can't be how it works. They need to believe that someone — the Defense Secretary, the Joint Chiefs, or a general, somewhere, surely — has to sign off on it. Because the facts sound too obviously crazy to be real.

I get it, and I'm sorry, BUT.

An old friend of mine is a doctor in the Midwest. She also heads up her county’s board of health.

Tonight, she met for 2 hours with colleagues at the local hospital to discuss contingencies as the #COVIDー19 pandemic escalates.

What she described knocked the wind out of me: “Imagine 6 women, most of them moms, sitting around a table. One nursing a baby. All healthcare providers, making plans. Setting fear aside."

"We discussed things like what do we do when we we run out of hospital beds? Where can we put patients?"

At @globalzero, we're taking the #CoronavirusPandemic seriously. For the next several weeks, that means:

✅ Mandatory telecommuting
✅ Work travel suspended
✅ No in-person participation at events
✅ Self-quarantine for 14 days after personal/household member trips to hotspots Our team is used to working remotely, but it can be pretty isolating on a good day, let alone when you're practicing social distancing. So we've carved out 15 minutes every day to say hi and check in on each other via video. Also a weekly virtual happy hour ("beer thirty").

🚨THREAD🚨

With the President of the United States threatening actual war crimes and "disproportionate" attacks on Iran, now feels like a good time to remind everyone that, yes, we really did hand a volatile reality TV star the absolute power to use thousands of nuclear weapons. Folks always insist this can't be how it works. They need to believe that someone — the Defense Secretary, the Joint Chiefs, or a general, somewhere, surely — has to sign off on it. Because the facts sound too obviously crazy to be real.

Allow me to burst that precious bubble.

1/ With Mattis and Kelly heading for the door and the myth of “adults in the room” evaporating, now feels like a good time to remind everyone that, yes, We The People really did hand a flailing, impulsive ignoramus the unadulterated power to end life on Earth as we know it. 2/ On a daily basis folks insist to me this isn’t how it works. They need to believe that someone — Sec Def, the Joint Chiefs, or a general, somewhere, surely — has to agree. Because the alternative sounds too insane to be real life.

Allow me to burst your precious bubble.