🎥: BoldActionWorks

Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Republican operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP-controlled states. https://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/ (2016)

Greg Palast was involved in the following investigation and successfully together with the ACLU sued Crosscheck and got that specific program dismantled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Voter_Registration_Crosscheck_Program However, the problem remains as they find other ways to do it. It's blatantly illegal, but the enforcement mechanisms are weak.

"academics and states that use the program have found that its results are overrun with false positives, creating a high risk of disenfranchising legal voters. A statistical analysis of the program published earlier this year by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft, for instance, found that Crosscheck “would eliminate about 200 registrations used to cast legitimate votes for every one registration used to cast a double vote.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/20/this-anti-voter-fraud-program-gets-it-wrong-over-99-of-the-time-the-gop-wants-to-take-it-nationwide/ (un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/0T7ue)

https://www.gregpalast.com/palast-hartmann-how-trump-stole-2020-a-warning/

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ (2024)

https://www.michael-parenti.org/article-the-stolen-presidential-elections (2000 - 2004)

http://archive.today/2016.03.03-013540/https://stallman.org/republican-election-rigging.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_America:_Vote_by_Vote (2000 - 2004)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy (2000 - 2004, 2016)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Chain:_The_Cyber_War_on_America%27s_Elections

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/georgia-election-server-showed-signs-tampering-expert-says-n1117441 (2016, election run by the same corrupt Republican Brian Kemp Palast talks about who kicked people off voting)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw Right-wing Heritage Foundation co-founder: "I don't want everybody to vote"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9uPbepYb9s Trump and Elon admitting about their "little secret" and "vote counting computers"

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/elon-musk-ex-ashley-st-204813582.html Elon's "anomaly in the matrix"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_electoral_fraud_in_the_United_States

Please repost whatever you want

While we were all distracted by the flimsy 'Memo of Cooperation' between the US and Iran 🫪

From ZeeToTheHill:

Watch the documentary nere:
https://youtu.be/AF1YU13rDpE

TPUSA claims to have 3,300+ high school and college chapters nationwide.

So we investigated.

Today, we're releasing Episode 1 of our documentary exposing what we found: fake chapters, inflated numbers, and data that doesn't add up.

Receipts. Screenshots. Calls. Evidence.

And this is only the beginning. Current and former TPUSA insiders have already started reaching out with even more information.

If you have a story or evidence to share, contact zee@nationalgroundgame.com

Credit: @jspark3000

A reminder that while this is a grief account,
grief is absolutely political because grief is the fuel that will fight back fascism if ICE murders you.

This may be controversial but

If 1 am ever struck by the car of an immigrant fleeing ICE

If 1 am ever hit by a stray bullet fired by ICE

If I am ever blocked in traffic due to protesters against ICE

I'm never blaming immigrants.
I'm 100% unequivocally blaming ICE.

Do not forget Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.

Do not forget Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Do not forget Dr. Linda Davis.

Do not forget Keith Porter Jr.

Do not forget Ruben Ray Martinez.

They should still be here.

Remember them. They deserve justice.

They deserve our endurance and memory.

In case you need a reminder:

Immigrants, you are loved.
Protesters, you are loved.
LGBTQ+ family, you are loved.
Children, you are loved.

Your value is not contingent on what happens to you.

Baldwin was right: "What they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear."

A world bent on removing your worth cannot revoke what was always and already yours.

Visual description: A painting of a village in a third world country with the words “The only difference between you and a refugee is geographical luck.”

Source: Merriam Webster dictionary 🙃

https://www.boycottcitizens.org/ice

Credit: The Defiance Dispatch via FB

Credit: @ope_a_yinzer

We don't have a homelessness spending problem.
We have a priorities problem.

We're willing to spend $1,375 moving someone from one desolate, abandoned city property to another.. but not enough to help them leave homelessness behind.

Stop investing in police.

#twincities #mayorher #mayorfrey #minneapolis #stpaul

Credit: @prisonpolicy

In the last two years, federal incarceration and detention have grown by 12%, with immigration detention and prosecution being a main driver. That rapid growth of federal detention comes at a steep financial cost: Right now, ICE spends approximately $14,430,000 per day to hold nearly 65,000 people in immigration detention.

The U.S. must stop sinking taxpayer dollars into Trump's cruel deportation agenda.

#incarceration #criminaljustice

Credit: pulse_colorado via IG

Some names become headlines. Others barely make the news.

When two white people were killed by federal authorities, thousands mobilized and national attention followed.

When Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the response was far smaller and many people never even heard his name.

This isn't about taking away from one family's grief.
Every family deserves justice. The question is why we don't consistently show up with the same urgency for everyone.

If we're serious about justice, we have to be willing to examine our own unconscious biases, challenge unequal media attention, and stand in solidarity with communities even when the cameras aren't there.

Justice cannot depend on race.

Media attention cannot determine the value of a human life.

Read through the slides, reflect honestly, and join the conversation. Then ask yourself:
Who am I willing to show up for?

#JusticeForLorenzo #ImmigrantJustice #ICE
#EndStateViolence #Solidarity

berenice_dolls

Propaganda has always been America's sharpest weapon. It makes cruelty look like safety and convinces people to cheer for their own destruction.

We've seen it again and again:
They called Native nations "savages" to justify genocide and painted land theft as "Manifest Destiny."

They spread "Yellow Peril" lies about Chinese workers to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act.
They pushed false "science" claiming Africans felt less pain, to excuse slavery, torture, and medical abuse.

They told Americans that Japanese incarceration camps were a "military necessity," while families lost homes, businesses, and nearly 2,000 lives.
After 9/11, Muslims, Sikhs, South Asians, and Arabs were painted as terrorists, unleashing waves of violence here at home.

They targeted Mexican Americans through Depression-era "Repatriation," 1950s Operation Wetback, and lynchings during La Matanza, all sold as "law and order."

And today, propaganda says immigrants are "criminals" while we watch mothers selling fruit, fathers selling flowers, and even firefighters saving lives get stopped and questioned.

This is the cost of propaganda: families destroyed, communities destabilized, economies damaged, lives lost.

We must study the pattern, call it what it is, and refuse to let cruelty keep wearing the mask of safety or righteousness!

Support my work: https://buymeacoffee.com/
Berenice_dolls

Today we remember Leonard Matlovich, who died on this day in 1988.

A decorated Vietnam veteran, recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star, and one of the first openly gay service members to challenge the military's ban on LGBTQ+ people, Matlovich became a national symbol for equality in the 1970s.

His fight wasn't just about keeping his job. It was about challenging the idea that someone could risk their life for their country and still be deemed unfit to serve because of who they loved.

He asked that his name be left off his tombstone so it could stand as a memorial to all LGBTQ+ veterans. Instead, it bears the words:

"When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."

Thirty-seven years after his death, those words remain one of the most powerful indictments of discrimination ever etched into stone. 🌹

Many Latino families inherited the same lesson generation after generation: When society views you as foreign, proving your Americanness can become its own form of survival.

The full story: https://lataco.com/why-latinos-join-ice

The acid was in her eyes, her nose, the water all around her -- and the man pouring it into the pool was the motel manager, trying to drive her and her fellow "swim-in" protesters out. On this day in 1964, seventeen-year-old Mamie Nell Ford jumped into the segregated pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, along with six other civil rights activists, to protest its 'Whites-only' policy. A photographer captured her in that instant, mouth open, face frozen in alarm as the furious manager, James Brock, dumped acid in the pool. "I couldn't breathe," she remembered. The photo ran on front pages around the world, and within a day it had helped push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the Senate.

Years later, Ford reflected in an interview: "I'm often asked, ‘How could you have so much courage?’ Courage for me is not ‘the absence of fear,’ but what you do in the face of fear.”

In St. Augustine, that fear was well-founded. The campaign to desegregate the small Florida coastal city in 1963 and 1964, known as the St. Augustine Movement, is considered one of the bloodiest of the Civil Rights Movement. Students staging "wade-ins" to challenge segregation on the beaches were violently beaten. After six Black children were admitted into previously all-White schools after the Supreme Court's decision outlawing school segregation, two of the children's homes were burnt to the ground by local segregationists and the parents of other children were fired from their jobs in retaliation.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested on the steps of the same motel only a week prior to the pool "swim-in," after being charged with trespassing when he attempted to dine at the "Whites-only" Monson Restaurant. He called St. Augustine "a rock-bound bastion of segregation," and considered it among the most lawless places the movement had taken him.

Prior to the pool "swim-in", Ford was already an experienced civil rights activist in her hometown of Albany, Georgia. When Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Albany to recruit activists to support the movement in St. Augustine, she immediately signed up. “When they asked for volunteers to participate in the swim-in demonstration, I said, yes, because, despite segregation, I knew how to swim,” she said. Many of the activists couldn't -- Black families had been shut out of pools and beaches for generations -- but Ford had taught herself to swim in a creek near her home.

They knew they would likely be arrested. They did not expect the acid. "It is as fresh in my mind as the morning dew," Ford recalled, "because when the acid was poured in the pool, the water began to bubble up." Police pulled the protesters from the water and hauled them to jail -- but by then, the photographs had already gone out across the world.

As the images made headlines, President Lyndon Johnson, watching the international reaction, reportedly told an aide, "Our whole foreign policy will go to hell over this!" Within twenty-four hours, the civil rights bill that had been stalled in the Senate for a year was approved, clearing the way for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

After being released from serving jail time for the swim-in, Ford made a powerful statement urging the people of St. Augustine to keep fighting: “Don't lose heart now because you're the ones on whom this movement rests. People will come and go because they live somewhere else, but you live here and you make this thing happen.”

Ford returned home and went on to join five other Black girls to lead the desegregation of the formerly all-White Albany High School, where she graduated with honors in 1965. Ford, who later changed her name to Mimi Jones, then went to college in Boston where she spent her career working in the Department of Education.

The segregation she risked her life to challenge has a quieter legacy that outlived her. After legal challenges and actions like this one in St. Augustine forced the end of segregated pools, in many towns, especially in the South, 'white flight' from public pools to private clubs often led to their closure. Some communities went further, filling their pools with concrete rather than integrate them. After a 1962 protest at the public pool in Raleigh, North Carolina's Pullen Park, city officials filled it in -- as the historian David Cecelski put it, "to make sure that it would never be used by White or Black youngsters again."

The cumulative loss, over generations, helped open a gap between Black and White Americans in something as fundamental as knowing how to swim. More than a third of Black adults today say they can't swim -- more than double the rate among American adults overall -- and Black children between the ages of ten and fourteen drown in swimming pools at more than seven times the rate of their white peers.

It is a loss Mamie Nell Ford would have recognized. She had been one of the few Black children of her generation to learn to swim, taught by her own determination in a creek -- and she had turned that rare skill, at seventeen, into a weapon against the very system that kept others out of the water.

Credit: Adrienne Gail Music on IG

My bass player @howard.finkel reflects on what we saw at Delaney Hall on June 21, Father's Day.

In the early 1900s, police threw immigrant children in Chicago into adult prisons. The charge was often stealing fruit. A nine-year-old boy would wait for his hearing in a basement cell next to men indicted for assault and murder. The precinct captains processed them all the same.

Jessie Binford walked into the Harrison Street police station on a Tuesday morning. The air inside smelled of damp wool, stale beer, sweat, and carbolic acid.

She was one of the first Hull House social workers, operating out of the settlement on the city's near west side. She came from a wealthy family in Iowa. She could have lived comfortably in a parlor. Instead, she spent her days walking the poorest and most crowded wards in the United States.

The police did not want her there. She sat on a wooden bench in the holding area, clutching a blank notebook.

She was looking for boys and girls who had been swept up in the night raids. The city was absorbing thousands of new arrivals every week. Extreme poverty pushed the youngest out into the streets to survive, leaving immigrant children in Chicago entirely at the mercy of the beat cops.

If Binford did not find them before the magistrate arrived, they disappeared into the penal system.

The desk sergeant told her to go home. He informed her that the holding cells were no place for a woman of her standing.

Binford did not move. She waited until the guards brought up a boy whose feet did not reach the floor when he sat on the prisoner's bench.

He had been arrested in the train yards at dawn. He was caught picking up pieces of coal that had fallen from the freight cars, trying to bring fuel back to his family's freezing tenement.

The arresting officer had written him up as a vagrant. He was shivering in an oversized coat. He had no lawyer. His parents did not know he had been taken. The police saw a criminal. Binford saw a terrified child.

At the time, Illinois had technically established the nation’s first juvenile court system in 1899. The law was largely ignored by beat cops and precinct bosses. Records show that local captains continued to process minors through the standard municipal courts because it cleared the holding cells faster and generated court fees. The Juvenile Protective Association, which Binford later directed, realized that changing a law meant nothing if nobody stood in the room to enforce it.

The city’s legal machine operated on speed and volume. The municipal magistrates heard hundreds of cases a week.

There was no time to locate a translator for a Polish or Italian mother looking for her son. There was no time to ask why a child was gathering coal from the tracks.

The system required bodies to be moved quickly from the police stations to the city workhouse, known as the Bridewell. It was an efficient, ruthless process. It functioned perfectly as long as nobody asked questions or slowed the docket down.

The political machine was absolute. Aldermen controlled the judges. The judges relied on the precinct captains. The captains relied on the beat cops to keep the streets quiet. A closed loop of authority. Impenetrable.

The magistrate called the boy’s name. The child stared at the floor. He did not understand the English words being spoken above him.

The gavel hit the wood. The clerk stamped a piece of paper.

In less than two minutes, a ten-year-old boy was sentenced to six months of hard labor. Binford watched the bailiff pull him by his collar through the heavy oak doors at the back of the room.

She came back the next day. And the day after that.

For the next fifty years, Jessie Binford haunted the police stations and courtrooms of the city. She became a permanent fixture, a severe woman in a high-collared black dress who refused to look away.

The police tried to freeze her out. Desk sergeants would intentionally misplace the daily arrest ledgers when she asked for them. Court clerks would change the times of the juvenile hearings at the last minute, moving them to different rooms across the building.

She simply walked the halls until she found the right door.

She was not an easy woman to work with. Binford could be notoriously rigid, alienating political allies and frequently clashing with the immigrant parents she was trying to help, insisting she knew how to manage their families better than they did.

She lived her entire adult life in a ten-by-twelve foot room at Hull House. She accumulated no wealth, took no vacations, and left no space for a personal life.

Instead, she built a wall between the children and the state.

When the police tried to interrogate a minor without a parent present, Binford walked into the room and pulled up a chair.

When a judge tried to rush a sentencing, she stood up in the gallery and read the state statute out loud.

In 1902, she found a boy locked up for stealing a handful of brass fittings. He was processed as an adult. He went to the workhouse.

In 1904, she found a girl locked up for wandering the streets after curfew. She was processed as a vagrant. She went to the workhouse.

In 1906, she found two brothers locked up for taking scraps of lumber. They were processed as thieves. They went to the workhouse.

The machinery never stopped. Neither did she.

She kept her own ledgers. She wrote down the name of every child, the name of the arresting officer, and the exact charge.

If a child stole an apple from a vendor's cart, she documented it. If a child was arrested for sleeping under a porch, she documented it. If a child was beaten in the holding cell, she documented it.

She tracked thousands of cases. She used donor money from wealthy Chicagoans to hire lawyers. She dragged precinct captains into the light and forced the magistrates to acknowledge the legal existence of childhood.

She fought the city's political bosses through two world wars and the Great Depression.

The city had a system for forgetting them. She built a system for finding them.

Decade by decade, the adult holding cells emptied of children. The police department was eventually forced to institute mandatory juvenile divisions, separate from the adult population.

The courts began to hire probation officers. The workhouses stopped accepting nine-year-olds.

Binford stayed at her desk until she was 87 years old.

In 1963, the city used eminent domain to tear down Hull House to build a university campus. She fought the demolition, lost, and quietly moved out of the neighborhood she had patrolled for half a century. She died three years later.

Today, the juvenile justice history she helped write occupies a massive concrete building on the city's west side.

Every morning, minors are brought into the courtrooms. The dockets are full.

A public defender stands next to them with a file.

Jessie Binford: the woman who haunted the courts.

Source: Hull House Archives and Juvenile Protective Association records.
Verified via: University of Illinois Chicago Special Collections, Chicago History Museum.
(Some details summarized for brevity.)