tekla 💜✨
@tekla.bsky.social
2.8K followers 1K following 4.5K posts
writer, artist, feminist, fancy. dedicated to reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ liberation, and racial justice. professionally trans over at A4TE, but all views shared here = my own.
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Reposted by tekla 💜✨
rahaeli.bsky.social
What Fr Dowling is doing here was not just "offering communion to detainees". A full on Eucharistic Procession is a really fucking big deal. In Catholic theological framing, those folks were the honor guard with the very great privilege of escorting Jesus himself to the detention center.
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notalawyer.bsky.social
the actual story here, which the media never talks about, is that police in this country have become a discrete right-wing political operation. the story isn't about cops leaving (they're lying about that), it's about the police trying to exert influence over elections.
misoshnik.bsky.social
Lmao is this supposed to be a bad thing?
A tweet from Bari Weiss that says “"It's shaken me to my core," a lieutenant said of Mamdani's unexpected victory in June. "The absolute dread I feel is palpable.
"
Today in @TheFP our @Olivia_Reingold talks to the cops who say they will walk if Zohran Mamdani is elected in November:”
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jeffvandermeer.bsky.social
This heartfelt and meaningful statement by Portland resident and author Cristina Breshears on another social media platform bears reposting here. I don't think the intent is to idealize Portland but to remind all of us what is important and why. (Posted here with permission.)
For nine nights now, the steady thrum of Black Hawk helicopters has circled over Portland. The sound is constant, invasive; a low mechanical beating above our homes. It’s expensive. It’s intimidating. And it’s unnecessary.

Our protests have been largely peaceful. There is no insurrection here. Yet this federalized military presence makes us feel like we are living in a war zone (the very kind of chaos this administration claims to be protecting us from). 

The irony is painful: it is only this occupation that makes Portland feel unsafe.

Each hour of helicopter flight costs taxpayers between $2,000 and $4,000, depending on crew, fuel, and maintenance. Multiply that by multiple aircraft over multiple nights, and you’re looking at hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars burned into the sky. Meanwhile, the Woodstock Food Pantry at All Saints Episcopal Church — which feeds working families, elders, and people with disabilities — has seen its federal funding slashed by 75%. How can we justify pouring public money into intimidation while cutting aid to those who simply need to eat?

This is waste, fraud, and abuse in plain sight:
* Waste of public resources on military theatrics.
* Fraud in the name of “public safety.”
* Abuse of the communities that federal agencies claim to protect.

Portland is a Sanctuary City. A sanctuary city is not a fortress. It’s a promise — a living vow that a community will protect the dignity and safety of everyone who calls it home. It means that local governments and ordinary people alike will refuse to criminalize survival. That schools, clinics, churches, and shelters will remain safe spaces no matter who you are or where you were born. But the term reaches far beyond policy. It’s an ethic of belonging; a refusal to criminalize need, difference, or desperation. 
Sanctuary isn’t weakness. It’s courage. It takes moral strength to meet suffering with care instead of punishment, to believe that our neighbors’ safety is bound up in our own, to insist that safety is not achieved through force but through community, inclusion, and trust. It is living Matthew 25:40 out loud and in deed. It is an act of moral imagination and moral defiance. To hold sanctuary is to say: you belong here.

When we hold space for the most vulnerable — refugees, the unhoused, the undocumented, the disabled, the working poor, the displaced — we become something larger than a collection of individuals. We become a moral body. We do more than offer charity. We offer witness. We declare that the measure of a nation is found not in its towers or tanks, but in its tenderness.

Sanctuary cities are not lawless; they are soulful. They represent the conscience of the nation, a place where the laws of empathy still apply. To make sanctuary is to affirm that the United States is not merely a geographic territory, but a moral experiment: a republic that must constantly choose between fear and compassion, between domination and democracy. 
A nation’s soul is measured not by the might of its military, but by the mercy of its people. When helicopters circle our skies in the name of order, while food pantries struggle to feed the hungry, we are forced to ask: What are we defending, and from whom? The soul of a nation survives only when we make sanctuary for one another. Not through walls or weapons, but through compassion and collective will. If we allow intimidation to replace compassion, we will have traded our conscience for control.

Please know that despite the hum of war machines overhead, the conscience of our city — whimsical, creative, stubbornly kind — can still be heard.

Portland is not the problem. Portland is the reminder. A reminder that a city can still choose to be sanctuary. That a people can still choose to be human.
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beijingpalmer.bsky.social
above all, poster bushido demands that you should not cry foul about a fight you started.
faineg.bsky.social
PSA: if you quote post me first, you have formally invited me in

i abide by poster’s vampire rules
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meredithshiner.com
It’s impossible to overstate how much “abolish ice” is the normie position now here in chicago — just countless random moms at toddler soccer on a park district field asking me where I bought my anti-ice t-shirt. average people don’t like our neighborhoods being terrorized.
lauraolin.bsky.social
A friend ran the Chicago marathon today and said he couldn’t count the number of FUCK ICE signs along the way.
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rlmartstudio.bsky.social
This week in 1988: 1,000+ ACT UP demonstrators shut down the FDA headquarters, demanding (and eventually winning) action on developing HIV/AIDS treatments. ACT UP's militant and creative actions always included powerful visual artwork, and paved the way for movements in the decades to come.
A photograph from the 1988 ACT UP demonstration outside the FDA. Many people are participating in a die-in on the front steps, holding mock tombstones with messages like "RIP - killed by the FDA" and "Dead from lack of drugs." A line of police officers (some with classic 80s mustaches) wearing riot helmets stands between them and the building; one cop wearing white gloves is walking through the demonstrators. Affixed to the 2nd story windows of the building is a series of posters and a large blank banner reading Silence = Death.
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eyesontheright.bsky.social
The violence in Chicago has gone too far
Meatwad leading a group of people dressed in animal costumes, including a panda, a unicorn, a bee, and a fox.
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golikehellmachine.com
my father (a retired white engineer who has been in oklahoma for 40 years) is my weathervane for what normal people who just watch the news periodically think, and he was like “so, they want to call the guard out on a bunch of kids wearing frog suits? is that true?”, the admin is losing the PR war
atrupar.com
WELKER: Are you looking at invoking the Insurrection Act?

VANCE: We have to remember we are talking about this bc crime has gotten out of control

W: Crime is down in both Chicago & Portland

V: Crime is down bc they are so overwhelmed at the local level they are not even keeping stats properly
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moiradonegan.bsky.social
A shocking amount of men seem convinced that if they evince enough self pity they will be delivered of respect, status, and the sexual attention of women. Really can’t overstate that this is not how it’s going to work out.
tekla.bsky.social
Exactly this. These people think their actual circumstances could never change.
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cooperlund.online
We live in a political era where everything is posting because most people are comfortable and bored, and looking at the trajectory of this administration, I don't think that moment is going to last. I think people are about to have real problems and it's going to shift all of this.
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cooperlund.online
Given that we know how online JD Vance is, we must also consider that he is actively going on ABC to reference this meme so he can smirk about it in groupchats later. Call me old-fashioned but I think that the office of the Vice President should be above that.
tekla.bsky.social
I went to a really fun party last night with some of my most favorite people and I would just recommend that everyone spend time with humans you love. it’s really good.
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schnorkles.bsky.social
One of the things that I think the internal politics of ICE/CBP is probably grappling with and didn't quite get when all this kicked off is that the fact that the surveillance state could be turned back on the secret police in a way that makes it very hard for anything they do to be ignored.
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kenwhite.bsky.social
Every time someone makes me read something Peter Thiel said it’s like “Scrooge McDuck is Jesus Christ and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel and Daisy is Mary Magdalene and that’s why women voting has lowered American sperm count.”
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hyperlexic.bsky.social
The most important thing we need to do is radically reform to allow a ton more housing to be built - both to make living a lot more affordable, and to grow our congressional / electoral vote power.
hyperlexic.bsky.social
You’re absolutely right that we’re not building enough housing. The construction rate collapsed in 2006 and never recovered. This is why rents are so high.
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davidjroth.bsky.social
It's striking that even in the defenses of Bari Weiss's broader thing no one ever says that she or her website does good work. Even the people that admire the success she's had selling lite reactionary shit to rich old guys top out at "people do seem to like it." You could defend Jake Paul that way.
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tekla.bsky.social
“Sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns”
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evilrooster.bsky.social
I am actually speechless at the power of this imagery and the effect it will have on anyone who has ever taken their Catholicism remotely seriously.
richraho.bsky.social
Chicago priest Fr. Larry Dowling describes procession to ICE facility: “No one had the courage to speak directly to us. No one from Homeland Security could stand in the presence of the Monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. No wonder. Evil is repelled, recoils in the presence of Christ.”
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nicholasgrossman.bsky.social
“Who was president in 2020?” remains one of the most pertinent questions in American politics—absurd, yes, but here we are—and that extends to “who was president January 1 - 19, 2021?”
joycewhitevance.bsky.social
That’s a nice trick, since Biden wasn’t the president on Jan 6.
tekla.bsky.social
these extensions and earrings are tacky
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bridgetemob.bsky.social
Fr. Larry Dowling was the pastor of St. Agatha, a Black parish in North Lawndale (a Black neighborhood MLK lived in to protest housing discrimination.) Fr. Dowling retired in June 2024. After a 6-month sabbatical, inc travel to West Africa, he has been active in prayerful protest for immigrants.
richraho.bsky.social
Chicago priest Fr. Larry Dowling describes procession to ICE facility: “No one had the courage to speak directly to us. No one from Homeland Security could stand in the presence of the Monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. No wonder. Evil is repelled, recoils in the presence of Christ.”