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Robyn Eckhardt

@robyneckhardt.bsky.social

1.5K followers 2.1K following 1.4K posts

Former food journalist with past lives in Asia and Italy. Author, “Istanbul & Beyond”, about Turkey’s lesser known eastern cuisines. Dogs/cats/nature. The Pacific Northwest is best. 🌧️

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · May 4

The state of our country sucks but spring in the PNW does not. What a spectacularly beautiful day in Portland.

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 2h

On my time in Portland in 2023 I was struck by the degree to which its vibe resembled that of the SF East Bay early 90s, pre tech boom.

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 2h

We know by the choppers circling our neighborhoods at night, going on what, day 16?

Reposted by Robyn Eckhardt

Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 2h

Emergency naked bike ride is just a really funny idea

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The Oregonian @oregonian.com · 6h

“We’re cold, but not as cold as ICE,” said a sign on one rider’s back.

Portland cyclists strip down in pouring rain to protest ICE facility and Trump troop deployment

“We’re cold, but not as cold as ICE,” said a sign on one rider’s back.

www.oregonlive.com

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 1d

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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Reposted by Robyn Eckhardt

Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social · 6h

On this date, Matthew Shephard died 27 years ago. He was beaten, tortured, and left for dead on fence for being gay. Please keep him and his wonderful mother Judy in your thoughts. And let's all work for a world where such horrific things do not happen to anyone. ❤️🏳️‍🌈

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 5h

Plus the contrast of the ridiculously kitted out ICE goons with their semi-automatic weapons facing down frogs, peacocks, cartoon characters. The ICE creeps look absurd and they know it.

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 6h

I can see it! Joy.

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Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 6h

You all are so relentlessly insufferable. (not Kevin)

STOP GATEKEEPING PROTEST

THATS NOT HOW PROTEST WORKS

THE MORE PROTEST THE BETTER

THE MORE KINDS OF PROTEST THE BETTER

the same people screaming “do something!” also screaming “not like that!”

Y’all are shooting yourselves in the foot.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 6h

Someone in my mentions is upset because these people haven’t suffered the worst at ICE’s hands and therefore they shouldn’t be praised for being out on the streets?

Yeah, no. To push back on these people we need everyone — especially those with relative privilege — to get up and get involved.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 9h

Portland, you magnificent weirdos

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 6h

idea unlocked: furry army.

Morgan Jerkins @mjerkins.bsky.social · 6h

I think I want to go to Portland. I can show up to a cafe and order a lavender vanilla matcha latte while dressed in a brown bear costume.

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 6h

Bring litter boxes. It will drive them insane.

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Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 9h

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

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A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 9h

So much writing about sirens, alarms, bells, and other sonic warnings. I’d love to read something about the whistle as a lone, tinny screech of caution + resistance.

Gregory Pratt @royalpratt.bsky.social · 14h

ICE / Border Patrol threatening to arrest a cyclist for following and recording in Chicago

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 9h

Yippies gathered to “levitate” the Pentagon in the 1960s. Don’t remember much from social movement studies courses but I do recall many instances of the deployment of humor and that one stuck.

Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 10h

I believe this.

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 10h

Payment is upon publication.

Malaclypse the Middle @malaclypse.bsky.social · 11h

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand:

This wasn’t accrued for.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 14h

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand:

Archives banned making copies.

Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 10h

Again: have they looked at their Commander In Chief.

Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 10h

My reaction to JD Vance confirming that they are “considering” the Insurrection Act: I don’t give a shit what you do you MF I’m going to the No Kings protest. I’m not particularly courageous, but I am brimming with rage. I can’t be the only one.

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elias isquith @eliasisquith.blog · 16h

i think it’s noteworthy that a lot of centrist pundits have decided to just take it as a given that jd vance lies constantly and to treat this as almost part of his intellectual program so that only gauche rubes would bother to mention or care about it.

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Sexy CHOAM Nomsky costume @samthielman.com · 15h

I hate profiles of conservatives who are worried that their country is changing and would welcome profiles of liberals and leftists who are afraid of same thing from the opposite direction and treated their concerns the same kind of reflexive deference

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 11h

Do it Turkish-style and call it Kumpir Kart.

Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 11h

Portland OR are you listening? Done right, this could be a popular food cart. (Also, nothing like a hot sweet potato with butter on a rainy winter day.)

Lydia Polgreen @polgreen.bsky.social · 11h

I don't understand why no one has started a fast-casual baked potato chain. Choice of white or sweet; many different topping possibilities. Affordable, tasty, nutritious, filling.

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Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 11h

Old enough to remember a baked potato spot in a Lansing mall in the 80s. Also, Wendy’s baked potatoes with a few toppings around the same time.

Robyn Eckhardt @robyneckhardt.bsky.social · 11h

Mine do. Until I open dinner cans.

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Jump! @dla.bsky.social · 12h

Trump controls a lot, but he doesn’t control us.
It’s OUR time to defend Democracy.
The next nationwide “No Kings” day is 10/18/25. Find a protest near you and bring others with you so we can reach the 3.5% needed to stop our slide into authoritarianism:
www.americanprogress.org/article/how-...

How Peaceful Protest by Just 3.5 Percent of Americans Could Force Major Policy Changes From the Trump Administration

History shows that when just 3.5 percent of a population—about 12 million Americans—engage in peaceful protest, their demands become nearly impossible to ignore. This is particularly relevant today, a...

www.americanprogress.org

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