Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.
The article is under the cut because paywalls suck
This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:
Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …
All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —
Michael Kirk: What was the word?
Bannon: Muzzle velocity.
Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.
Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.
Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.
But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.
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What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.
You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.
But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.
There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.
But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.
That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.
But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.
The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.
I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?
The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.
What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.
In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.
This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
“That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.”
These are people that believe perception and PR are everything, so they're trying to create the perception that they can destroy and remake government without consequences or constraints. And for a while people were stunned and overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all.
But now people are moving. Many, many lawsuits have been filed and the people are starting to claim their power.
Don't despair and don't give up. We're not done yet.
me, when Jonny Sims appears in any piece of media he's been part of: oh hey. what's Jonny Sims doing in this piece of media I started consuming solely because Jonny Sims was in it.
I'd like to remind everybody that this isn't just about A03 or civil rights organizations. This could be applied to any 501 organization. That includes churches, schools, museums and library support organizations. All sorts of support organizations like soup kitchens or places like goodwill. Those are all non-profit organizations and they all have a 501 status. This is a threat to every civil organization we have that is meant to help the public.
So please contact your representatives. Please look this up on Twitter and click the link so you can call your representatives and voice against this. Because there's a hell of a lot more at stake with a bill like this than just ao3. People's lives could be at risk.
The House will vote THIS WEEK to determine whether the incoming Trump administration will have the power to shut down non-profit organizations with no due process.
Congress has already tried to fast-track this legislation once and failed because of the onslaught of calls to their offices. We can’t let them do this quietly. Congress giving Trump the power to crush dissent and target organizations fighting for justice is a betrayal. Tell your representatives to vote NO on this dangerous bill!
This means that it's heading over to the Senate, where they'll tinker with it and vote again.
If it passes the Senate, it goes to the President, who has the option to veto.
Which means NOW you reach out to your Senators (both of them) and tell them that you want them to vote NO on this Trojan horse of awful.
But: we have two more chances to keep this from becoming law. The fight's not over yet.
And that's not even the good news!
For various reasons of political fuckery/ rules lawyering, this bill had to go through TWO rounds of votes in Congress to get through.
It didn't pass the first time because it had a higher threshold of votes to meet (2/3 Congress Critters had to vote yes) and it failed because it couldn't clear that bar.
So the people behind the bill sent it through AGAIN in a way that needed fewer votes to pass (only 1/2 of Congress Critters had to vote yes). This time it got through.
But along the way, almost 40 people changed their vote to "No". ALL BECAUSE OF YOUR OUTREACH.
That's huge.
Here's the home page for the bill. Check out the "Roll Call Votes" section to see how your Representative voted:
Summary of H.R.9495 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act
Personally? Mine flipped her vote from "Yes" in the first round to "No" in the second.
Outreach. Works.
So, what do we do now?
Click the link above, and see how your Rep voted
Send them an email thanking them for their support/ telling them how disappointed you are. Why? Because it's important to let them know you pay attention to how they vote.
Contact your Senators (both of them) and ask them to vote NO
Contact the White House and let President Biden know you want him to veto this thing if it hits his desk
Resources
Not sure who your Representative or Senators are? Click here and type in your address:
Find your members of Congress by typing in your address on Congress.gov.
Not sure how to contact your US Representative, Senators, or the White House?
I personally use Resistbot. It's free, fast, and easy:
Text RESIST to 50409 to contact your federal, state, or local elected officials; create movements; and more. Over 30,000,000 letters deliver
On twitter I’m seeing dozens of threads from Black activists warning people against burnout, giving all sorts of useful tips about preventing and managing it for the sake of a long-term, sustainable effort.
On tumblr I’m seeing a hell of a lot of young white kids yelling at anyone who actually follows those steps, and acting like burnout is a moral falling rather than a well-proven psychological phenomenon.
Be careful who you get your information from. Don’t let guilt lead you to make choices that will harm both you and the movement.
I’m going to reblog this again since I see more individuals are inquiring about burnout prevention tips in the notes and it’s why I sought out this resource. I hope it helps you!
If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...
Start helping with citizen science projects
Public participation in science is increasing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to researc
What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!
You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases
Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.
Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.
Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.
Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.
Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.
Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.
--
I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.
Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help
Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.
Yup, these are actually *really* important. And a small bit of work helps, so it’s doable even if you’re snowed under with survival work or in too much pain to concentrate for longer periods.
It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.
I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.
It unexpectedly helped me with learning how to decipher premodern handwriting too, which proved really useful in my academic stuff. You *will* pick up valuable skills doing this. Put it on your CV.
Other places you can go to do citizen science, from the notes
(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)
MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)
Smithsonian archives (transcriptions, many subjects)
Cornell Bird Lab (birds)
FoldIt (folding proteins)
Fathomverse (sea animals)
Project Monarch (butterflies)
In person
Bioblitz (nature)
Species watch (species)
Audobon Society (birds)
Also:
Even if you don't have time to spend, but do have some processor cycles to spare, check out the projects available at BOINC's Compute for Science: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Hey guys, these projects make a HUGE difference for science. For example, I run bplant.org and iNaturalist is the #1 source of images in ID guides and articles and other educational materials I develop. The plant observations are also helpful for assessing plant ranges and how these ranges are changing with climate change. And it also helps me identify local seed sources for use in restoration plantings. Use of iNaturalist, even casual use like a random person uploading pics of plants they see growing in their yard, or a random parking lot they were in, or a random vacant lot, those observations are MAJORLY helping in (1) education (2) science (3) conservation.
This stuff makes a huge difference.
Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.
I thought I'd go back and repost this because there are probably a lot of people out there who, like me, reallllyyyyyy need something to distract them right now
So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead
I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.
Volunteer from your phone. Make a difference worldwide.
From their website:
Data Everywhere
In today's technology-filled world, we have access to vast amounts of information at our fingertips. This includes geospatial data, which helps us understand places and the “where?” of things - a vitally important piece of successful humanitarian programs. It is important for getting from point A to point B as well as for coordination, understanding needs, tracking impact, identifying gaps, and a multitude of other concerns. For responsible use by humanitarians, this information must be assessed, refreshed, and validated as populations, infrastructure, and the surrounding environments experience the inevitable changes that occur as time, conflicts, and disasters unfold...
MapSwipe is a free open source mobile application available on iOS and Android that empowers anyone with a smartphone to make a meaningful impact contributing to global mapping efforts. MapSwipe crowdsources the review of satellite imagery to:
As a 30 year old man who escaped the Alt-right pipeline, you're not going to be happy about the answer.
All I hear from leftists is how much they hate me for my immutable traits, how much they blame me for everything wrong with the world, how much they want me and everyone who looks like me dead.
Whereas Alt-right types would call me "brother" and welcome me into their ranks so long as I hated the right ways.
Do you understand the difference?
I'm an ally and support equality because I feel it's the morally correct choice to make, but holy fuck is it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that means fighting for a lot of people who see you as the scum of the earth.
Read this and then read it again and then read some fucking bell hooks because this is a legitimate problem on the left.
"To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being." - bell hooks, The Will to Change https://bellhooksbooks.com/product/the-will-to-change/
I haven’t really seen any of the more recent U.S. election news hitting tumblr yet so here’s some updates (now edited with sources added):
There’s evidence of Trump cheating and interfering with the election.
Possible Russian interference.
Mail-in ballots are not being counted or “recognized” in multiple (notably swing) states.
30+ bomb threats were called in and shut down polling stations on Election Day.
20+ million votes are still unaccounted for, and that’s just to have the same voter turnout as 2020.
There was record voter turnout and new/first-time voter registration this year. We definitely should be well over the turnout in 2020.
U.S. citizens are using this site to demand, not only a recount, but a complete investigation into election fraud and interference for the reasons stated above:
Contact the President, Vice President, get help with a Federal Agency, or request a Presidential Greeting.
Here is what I submitted as an example:
An investigation for election interference and fraud is required. We desperately need a recount or even a revote. The American people deserve the right to a free and fair election. There has been evidence unveiled of Trump cheating and committing election fraud which is illegal. There is some evidence of possible Russian interference. At least 30+ bomb threats were called in to polling places. Multiple, notably swing states, have ballots unaccounted for and voting machines not registering votes. Ballots and ballot boxes were tampered with and burned. Over 20 million votes that we know of are unaccounted for. With record turnout and new voter registration this year, there should be no possibility that there are less votes than even in the 2020 election.
Sources (working on finding more links but if anyone wants to add info, it’s appreciated):
FBI addressing Russian interference and bomb threats:
The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None
Emails released by Rachael Bellis (private account, can’t share original tweet) confirming Trump committing election fraud:
Pennsylvania's Centre County officials say they are working with their ballot scanner vendor to figure out why the county's mail-in ballot data is "not being recognized when uploaded to the elections software:”
Wisconsin recount:
The Milwaukee Election Commission, 'out of an abundance of caution,' will delay the reporting of about 105,000 absentee ballots that could d
[ID:
Multiple screenshots and images.
The first is a screenshot with a link and information for contacting the White House directly regarding election fraud. The instructions include choosing to leave a comment to President Joe Biden directly and to select election security as the reason.
The screenshot then instructs people to include any or all of the following information in a paragraph as a comment to the president:
32 fake bomb threats were called into Democratic leaning poll places, rendering polling places closed for at least an hour.
A lot of people reporting their ballots were not counted for various reasons.
This all occurred in swing states.
This is too coincidental that these things happen and swing in his favor after months of hinting at foul play.
Directly state that an investigation for tampering, interference, fraud is required, not just a recount.
The second image is from the FBI Twitter account that reads:
The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far. https://t.co/j3YfajVK1m — FBI (@FBI) November 5, 2024
The next four Gmail screenshots of an email sent to Rachael Bellis from Chris T. Spackman that read together as follows:
Dear BELLIS, RACHAEL E., The Dauphin County Board of Elections received a challenge to your absentee ballot you applied for in the November 5, 2024 General Election. The challenge argues that a provision of the Pennsylvania Election Code takes precedence over the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), which requires states and counties to permit U.S. citizens who move overseas to vote by absentee ballot for federal offices based on their last U.S. residential address.
The full text of the challenge that was filed appears below this email.
You may respond to the challenge in any of the following ways:
1. Call the Bureau of Registration and Election at (717) 780-6360;
2. Email a statement to the Bureau at Election [email protected]. Any statement you submit regarding the period during which you lived in Dauphin County, any family or connections that you still have here, and why you are now residing abroad would be read into the record.
3. Appear in person at a Board of Elections hearing scheduled for Friday, November 8 at a time to be determined in the Commissioners Public Hearing Room, 4th floor of Dauphin County Administration Building, 2 S 20d St, Harrisburg, PA 17111. The meeting is also likely to be livestreamed on Facebook on the Dauphin County channel.
Sincerely,
Christopher T Spackman
TEXT OF CHALLENGE BEGINS
Dear Dauphin County Board of Elections,
I am submitting this challenge to an absentee ballot application pursuant to 25 Pa. Stat.
3146.8(f).
25 Pa. Stat. 3146.8(f) Any person challenging an application for an absentee ballot, an absentee ballot, an application for a mail-in ballot or a mail-in ballot for any of the reasons provided in this act shall deposit the sum of ten dollars ($10.00) in cash with the county board, which sum shall only be refunded if the challenge is sustained or if the challenge is withdrawn within five (5) days after the primary or election. If the challenge is dismissed by any lawful order then the deposit shall be forfeited. The county board shall deposit all deposit money in the general fund of the…
The rest of the forwarded email is cut off.
The last image is a screenshot of the official statement from the Centre County, Pennsylvania Board of Commissioners released on November 6, 2024 that states:
Centre County Working with Ballot Scanner Vendor to Export Election Results.
(Bellefonte, PA) -Centre County Elections Office is working continuously to provide mail-in ballot data in order to post unofficial results.
To this point, all ballots have been scanned, including all mail-in ballots.
Centre County's Election team and IT team have identified that the data are successfully being exported from the mail-in ballot scanners, but that the data is not being recognized when uploaded to the elections software.
Centre County's Administrator, John Franek, Jr. stated, "We have not stopped working, and we will continue to work until unofficial results are posted and reported to the Pennsylvania Department of State."
As a next step, Centre County has begun working with the equipment vendor to adjust configurations to make the two systems-the mail-in ballot scanner and the elections software where data are uploaded -compatible with one another.
i share a lot of fundraisers on here but right now i want to take a moment and bring extra attention to @ibrahim-family's campaign, #25 on the @gazavetters spreadsheet:
he's only fifteen years old. younger than my youngest sibling. and he's responsible for saving the lives of his family. can you imagine having to grapple with that at 15? would you be able to handle the pressure?
every day he messages me, full of anxiety when my responses lapse, and when i share his posts or tell him what i can do to help he tells me he loves me.
today he told me that his uncle was martyred just hours earlier.
when the genocide is over, ibrahim is still going to need love and support, but right now he needs the resources to survive. please, please, please donate what you can to his campaign, no matter how small.
Hello
I am Ibrahim, 15 years old, I seek your help and assistance to save … Safaa Alanqar needs your support for Help Ibrahim's family e
ibrahim's fundraiser is almost 75% complete, but donations have dipped in frequency. compared to other fundraisers this one has an extremely low goal– at this point he just needs €2500! if 100 people could give 25 euros today he'd be set. consider being one of those people!!
if you're feeling powerless right now—and god knows I am—here's a reminder you can donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, the Trans Law Center, Gaza Soup Kitchen, the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, and hundreds of other charities that will work to mitigate the damage that has been and will continue to be inflicted
life continues. we still have the capacity to do good, important work. that matters
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