This summer, we signed up for a week of dive lessons. I’d never really learned how to use a diving board.
It was an hour a day of throwing my body into the air and hoping I did it right. It was some of the most fun I’ve had in years, and I’m so glad we did it.
How do you get there? Is it bitterness? Being raised around a bunch of other people so coddled that they can't fathom failure? A desperate need for acceptance?
Would be great to read some pieces (or even better, get some TikToks) about how absolutely fucked in the head you have to be to go "Hey, this is an open question. Maybe it should happen?"
You know, it's important to accept yourself. And I accept (I think), that there's a part of me that understood every part of this and thought "Well that sounds quite appealing."
(And just to balance things out, there's also a part of me that thought "Oh, Chloë Sevigny? Yes.")
June 11: GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn introduces a bill to defund NPR and PBS because of their "left-wing propaganda" and "radical leftist gender ideology."
October 7: The news industry's main trade group gives Blackburn its "Support Journalism Champion Award."
Worth noting that a lot of senior Trump folks live in VA, and are pretty bitter about how much their neighbors hate them (Miller, Vought, etc), and so you can imagine that like any half-formed junior high boys, they'll delight in lashing out at those around them.
(And this is a warm-up, I imagine, to what's going to have to take place in the years ahead. This Admin has taken a light touch with VA b/c Youngkin's Gov, but that changes shortly. VA needs to be ready.)
Virginia State Senate Dems just brought down fire and fury regarding the “Compact,” notifying the President and Rector that UVA would lose ALL STATE APPROPRIATIONS if it signs and cedes the University to “federal political control.” Notably, their letter directly restates points made here by @siva.
The “compact” for higher ed is an unserious document written by unserious people from a position of spectacular ignorance. No one should take it seriously. Sadly, my bosses are taking it seriously.
Taking this on should be a special project for Virginia electeds like @markwarner.bsky.social, @kaine.senate.gov and @beyer.house.gov. This affects all Americans, but your constituents have a front row experience with all of this.
At its core, the militarization of U.S. cities is an affront to Democratic, and democratic, governance—a gambit to set up a national police force, with the president as its chief, where neither the Constitution nor federal law allow it.
For @nymag.com, I probe how to put a stop to this perversion.
OK. It's going to be coming out soon because of the relentless investigations of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, so I might as well admit it before the news breaks:
This point has to be made vigorously and regularly in the courts. Over and over.
(And we need electeds to start repeating it, too. All of this reflexive bipartisan support for the impunity of law enforcement and state surveillance has to be a casualty of this era.)
My new @thedispatchmedia.bsky.social piece tells how DHS continues to deny that citizens have a right to videorecord its agents and raids even in the face of overwhelming court precedent that the First Amendment protects their right to do so. Nor is it just a matter of positions taken in court. /5
I certainly want him to worry about a primary from his left. The man has not caught up to 2025 yet. He was the right Dem for VA in the 00s. Now? Doesn't look like it to me.
