Melissa Ryan
@MelissaRyan
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I help people & organizations combat far-right extremism and online toxicity. Subscribe Hire me
Seattle, WA
Joined November 2007
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Pinned Tweet
No one could have predicted that my career path would make me the perfect expert to talk to the press about couch memes. But here we are. I had fun talking with
@PuckNews
's
@PeterHamby
for this story.
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but everyone should read the Federalist article. Because it articulates where the Right has been going for some time and makes clear that wielding power to force the rest of us to do what a small minority of Americans want is the real goal.
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A sitting US Senator is helping Libs of TikTok harass a doctor. This kind of incitement puts the target in serious danger of harm and could even get her killed.
@TwitterSafety
needs to step in ASAP.
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The thing about JD Vance is that this is how millennial men in the MAGA Right have talked online for years. I'm relieved America is finally getting a real taste of it because those of us who've been following it for years are terrified of these weirdos gaining more power.
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People think American politics is like the West Wing but it's actually a lot more like Veep.
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We have at least two election denialists sitting on the SCOTUS bench. It should be a 5 alarm fire.
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Taibbi, and by extension Musk, is basically inciting harassment and potentially against another former Twitter employee now. An employee who was apparently only just fired.
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Hours later I'm struck by just how low the bar is for Democratic Leadership. Beto sailed right over it by interrupting one presser for a few minutes.
Stop begging your colleagues to show some humanity and start disrupting systems instead of trying to preserve them.
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@LaCienegaBlvdss
If you can't handle the sound of a crying baby or toddler, maybe air travel or being in public isn't for you. Personally, I'd be embarrassed by my inability to cope with something so basic that happens all the time. But I just believe that's part of being a functioning adult.
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The actions he's talking about should chill you to the bone. Because they're not fringe at all. This is what the majority of MAGA wants and is dangerously close to achieving.
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It should also make clear that living in a Blue State will not protect you.
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@cmclymer
What if you have a husband you don't need to take care of because you married an adult?
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Also, this is exactly what I mean when I talk about there being no cost to being a far-right extremist. A powerful Senator can use his social media feeds to put a woman in danger, and there are no consequences.
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Some of y'all are shocked, and I get it. But this is what we're up against. This is the mainstream Right now. And they don't feel a need to be too cute by half about the agenda any longer. Which is why The Federalist felt comfortable publishing it.
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Anyway, there's an election in twoish weeks, and if you don't want to live in the hellscape the article describes, voting against MAGA candidates is a good first step.
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Twitter seems like such a great place to work. You sleep at the office. You can be fired at any time. And if the CEO really doesn't like you, he'll send an army of trolls right to your door!
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@megynkelly
This attack fell flat three years ago. Why revive it now? It just makes you look desperate for attention. From the same people who cheered Trump's attacks against you no less. That's just sad.
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In America, you can put people in danger, you can harass your colleagues who are people of color, you can traffic migrants, you can support a coup against the United States, and none of those behaviors will get you removed from office.
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I genuinely feel for everyone at ADL whose credibility will suffer because of Greenblatt. So many folks there do good work for the right reasons and that work will be forever tainted.
I also want to know what the hell is going on. Because there's clearly a story here.
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John Roberts wasn't trying to save abortion rights. He was trying to save his own legacy. Roberts wants the same things the other Right wing justices want. He's just smart enough to realize that their methods for getting there will ultimately destroy SCOTUS' legitimacy.
Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied his fellow conservatives to save the right to abortion until the end. An unprecedented leak sealed its fate
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I hate this framing of January 6 as an anniversary date because it implies that the coup stopped. It hasn't. It's ongoing.
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$100 says the only person with an accurate vote count of McCarthy's support is Nancy Pelosi.
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This final report from
@BotSentinel
on hate directed at Meghan Markle is wild. Just impressive work from start to finish from
@cbouzy
. And a subject that a lot of institutions wouldn't have taken seriously, but clearly should have.
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America isn't a functioning democracy. It hasn't been for some time. That doesn't mean all hope is lost but it does mean we have to internalize that and change our strategy and tactics accordingly. I really hope today galvanizes folks but I also hope it's a reckoning.
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I've written A LOT about the targeted harassment campaign against Markle and why it matters. Genuinely interested to see what we learn this week. From
@cbouzy
and others.
I still want to know who or what organization funded the harassment. There are serious resources behind it.
Meghan: "I wasn't being thrown to the wolves, I was being FED to the wolves."
Harry: "They were happy to lie to protect my brother. They were never willing to tell the truth to protect us"
A new trailer for the dramatic second half of
@Netflix
's Harry & Meghan, out Thursday.
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@royal_suitor
Funny how quickly it shifts from "Shut up, Meghan" to "Come back so we can abuse you some more!"
Maybe building your entire monetization strategy around racist, misogynist abuse of one person isn't sustainable in the long term. They need Meghan, but she doesn't need them.
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Finally finished Spare. Not at all what I expected. I read it mostly to learn more about Harry and Meghan's experience with harassment, but it gave me a lot to think about: institutions, millennials, and
@RottenInDenmark
comment that the royal family is a "human rights abuse."
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If you're following all the Fox News/Murdoch drama in the US, don't sleep on what's happening in the UK. It's easy for Americans to dismiss news about the Royal Family as celebrity gossip, but the monarch is a head of state, so it's ultimately a story about media and government.
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Whole Lotta dudes are up in my mentions right now defending Elon's right to target former employees with harassment. Apparently if Musk targets a shitty person with harassment and incitement it's OK.
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No wonder Harry and Meghan got their kids the hell away from these people. I wouldn't have the person who wrote that at my home if they'd said it about a stranger. But to invite folks who have that level of hatred towards the mother of my Grandchildren? Oh hell no.
That would be the same Jeremy Clarkson who was at a private Christmas party with Camilla, the Queen Consort earlier this week (alongside guests including a Daily Mail editor and Piers Morgan).
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I just received the best gift ever from
@ktlove
. My very own homemade
@JortsTheCat
. He. Came. With. Butter. On. Him.
#daymade
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Oh wow, this blew up overnight. If we're just meeting I write about the GOP's march to fascism a lot in my newsletter. It's free and you can subscribe here.
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New from me:
#TheTwitterFiles
is a large-scale harassment campaign, organized by a tech CEO exploiting his company's resources to put former employees in harm's way. My analysis:
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@Armadillidium45
@LaCienegaBlvdss
Because children exist, families travel, and you're theoretically an adult. And as stressful as you find travel, it's so much more stressful for families with children. Honestly, if you can't deal with this, maybe you don't belong on a flight.
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Threats against Rep. Jayapal's life -- at her home -- won't get nearly the attention of Kavanaugh heaving to leave a restaurant out the back door.
Or worse, they'll be equated as the same thing. Because both sides.
When police arrived in front of Rep. Jayapal’s home they say the suspect was standing in the middle of the street with his hands up. A gun was holstered on his waist. He allegedly told police the victim he was targeting was of “Indian decent”
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I try hard not to despair. But we're losing to the fascists. To a movement with no regard for human life, even children. And we keep fighting like we always have. Me included. It's long past time to change strategy. It starts with admitting to ourselves just how much we've lost.
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You'll never guess who Piers Morgan is bullying for clicks right now...
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Hey
@CVSHealth
, my father passed away in July. I'm a beneficiary for his Aetna pension. I've been trying to get access to what my brother and I are entitled to for MONTHS now. This is no way to treat children who are grieving. What do we have to do to get you to care?
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@CaseyNewton
Good that someone finally realized Twitter is gonna need more than duct tape to keep running on election night.
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If you've ever had a doctor tell you that your baby would almost certainly not make it to term and if by some "miracle" they did theirs would be a short life of suffering, you'd know that Karen Swallow doesn't even begin to understand the words love, justice, or mercy.
In Opinion
"Abortion is a failure for every woman and her unborn child — a failure of love, justice and mercy," Karen Swallow Prior writes in a guest essay. "Texas’ new abortion law is far from perfect, but I hope it can move us closer to these ideals."
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In the end,
@ToddStashwick
's captain Shaw died as he lived: just trying to get Picard and Riker off of his ship and out of his life.
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This is fascinating. Especially when you start to think about who or what entities might have put financial resources into a Twitter campaign against Markle.
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Shocked that Elon Musk just endorsed the party that's trying to do to America what Elon is doing to Twitter.
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Most white politicians, even the most racist MAGA candidates, would have enough sense not to say this to a primarily Black audience. The levels of delusion here are extraordinary, even by the low bar Trump has previously set.
Trump rolled out Birtherism 2.0 today and it did not go well
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I don't have time to do a thread today but I wrote about the Harassment of Meghan Markle and Why It Matters for CARD this week.
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Don't worry, we'll get suburban parents back with our national paid family leave rollout.
Oh wait...
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Twitter Files has been one big incitement campaign. To drive engagement on Twitter at the expense of former employees. And if someone gets hurt or worse? That's just the price of doing business, I guess.
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The Right's embrace of Kanye online today is so thirsty. They claim to hate Hollywood and pop culture, but the truth is they're desperate for it.
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Biden clearly struck a nerve over at Facebook. We're on day two of their attempt at crisis comms.
Moving Past the Finger Pointing: Support for COVID-19 vaccines is high on Facebook and growing.
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I'm so annoyed at the person who came up with "ultra-MAGA" and everyone deluded into thinking it's an effective message.
Folks, let's get one thing straight: The ultra-MAGA agenda has always been about taking away women’s rights, in every single state.
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I'm so glad to see Zeynep's piece today. I've followed the targeted harassment against Markle since 2018. All along I've maintained people need to take this more seriously. It's the nexus of online harassment, media, disinformation, culture wars, pop culture, and government.
Gift link to my NYT piece on why the Harry/Meghan stuff is not mere celebrity kerfuffle and what the *actual* news there.
Maybe this is why Spare sold so well, despite the dismissive media coverage that largely skipped over the actual matter at hand.
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At a certain point Thomas, Alito etc. are just mocking us. They're banking that there's no political will from their fellow elites holding government office to do anything as they work to tear America apart at the seams.
So far it's been a good bet for them.
Clarence Thomas delivers a rather extraordinary critique of Brown v. Board of Education just after Brown's 70th anniversary, suggesting that the Brown court significantly overstepped its constitutional authority in its quest to end Jim Crow.
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Told y'all. Fertility treatments are absolutely in danger. A whole lot of people who assumed the end of Roe wouldn't matter to them are about to learn otherwise.
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Every Olympics I wonder why minors are allowed to compete at all. You hear a lot about how figure skaters and gymnasts lose their skills when they hit puberty but that only seems to be true for women. Which makes me think it might just be patriarchal bullshit.
My heart breaks for this young woman. She's 15. She has not been treated right by the adults in her life. For whatever you might think of Kamila Valieva being permitted to compete (she definitely should not have been permitted), remember that she's 15. She's a child.
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I got some pushback on Sunday when I called Greg Abbott a fascist and compared him to Putin. Americans really need to wake up to our homegrown fascism problem. And call out human rights abuses when we see them in plain sight.
"Texas officials have begun investigating parents of transgender adolescents for possible child abuse, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, after Gov. Greg Abbott directed them last week to handle certain medical treatments as possible crimes."
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New from me: Targeted harassment of female celebrities always seems to be in the news, but most folks don't realize that far-right media outlets engage in these campaigns for clout, clicks, and cash.
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The point was never to spread disinformation but to incite violence.
They do it because it works.
Every republican panic unfolds in an extremely predictable pattern and the next escalation is often a bloody one.
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@LaCienegaBlvdss
The response to this tweet is something else. I don't care if you hate kids or don't. I don't care what you think of my parenting. But your inability to cope with a minor inconvenience has me concerned for the future of humanity. How do y'all deal with actual challenges?
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I also appreciate how Harry clearly doesn't care if you like him, agree with him, or think he's a flawed human being. He's just got 38 years' worth of shit to get off his chest. You can almost feel his relief when the book is done.
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I maintain that at the end of the day, Royals are just taxpayer-funded celebrities, but also it's gross that people are born into it, exploited from the time they are babies, and expected to take part in a lifelong pantomime for the entertainment of others.
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Spectacular. Genuinely curious at how many media outlets will just accept this explanation without doing the basic math that debunks it.
So Herschel Walker's new denial is that the money he sent didn't actually pay for an abortion because the recipient is "the mother of my child" and he just sent her money for mom stuff. The only problem is that the child in question was born years after the abortion.
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Bezos' ex-wife refers to giving away $100 million as "Tuesday."
Jeff Bezos announces he's giving Van Jones $100 million to donate to charity as Jones sees fit. Bezos calls this a "Courage and Civility" award
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Susan Collins will put more effort into protecting herself from sidewalk chalk artists than she will protecting everyone else's right to an abortion.
Susan Collins calls the cops to investigate “defacement of public property” after someone wrote a message in chalk on the sidewalk near her home asking her to codify Roe.
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Having done all that he can to destroy society at Facebook, Peter Thiel is off to his next adventure: supporting pro-Trump fascist candidates who can finish the job.
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Today is the 6-month anniversary of the Capitol Insurrection, a violent attempted coup against the United States Government. It's shocking to me how little accountability there's been and at this point, I'm not easily shocked.
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I'm really out of patience with people who still refuse to be vaccinated. And I can't be the only one.
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I keep saying this in hopes that people will hear me: Trump and the GOP aren't trying to win the next election. They aim to seize power by any means necessary. They're not hiding the plan, either.
I believe we'll still beat them. But I want folks to be clear-eyed about this.
Trump: The most important part of what is coming up is to guard the vote, and you should go into Detroit, Philadelphia, and some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places, and we have to watch those votes..
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I want Harris to win by a large enough margin that we never hear from this faux-Hillbilly asshole again.
REPORTER: Do you believe Mark Robinson that those were not his posts?
JD VANCE: I don't not believe him
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Amazed someone in that comms shop finally realized just how awful the optics of letting Andrew wear his uniform but not Harry was. Only took them a week.
𝐔𝐏𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐄: In a dramatic u-turn, palace officials have informed Prince Harry that he CAN wear his military uniform at a final vigil. On Saturday evening, Harry will join seven other grandchildren at Westminster Hall to stand in silence for 15 minutes by the Queen’s coffin.
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@DrOz
This tweet tells me that either your staff hates you or you've stopped listening to their advice.
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@tressiemcphd
This guy sucks and the fact that his affluent parents also didn't offer to treat her for *anything* shows you how he became the man he is today.
The fact that she took a SECOND JOB for a vacation with HIS FAMILY should have been this dude's first clue.
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Always important to keep in mind that what these folks ultimately want is the right to say and do whatever they please without consequence. A right they don't believe their political and cultural opponents should also have.
The “cancel culture” and anti-“wokeism” moral panics rely on a complete inversion of the actual balance of power, portraying traditionally marginalized groups as mighty forces that urgently need to be reined in – and those in elite positions as desperately in need of protection.
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Ted Cruz is encouraging folks to harass a preschool teacher and by extension children and families at the school.
This kind of targeted harassment is going to get someone killed. But there's no cost to Ted Cruz for fanning the flames. Even though we all know the danger.
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Can we stop calling Elon Elmo? As the parent of an Elmo-obsessed toddler, seeing this is distressing. Also, think of the poor
@sesamestreet
social media team!
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Targeted harassment campaigns are meant to silence their targets and drive them offline. Black women are attacked disproportionally. I can think of multiple entities that would have an interest in driving Markle offline, but to spend resources on it is something else.
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Huge and important scoop from
@theprogressive
. "A Department of Justice counterterrorism expert has deep ties to white supremacist groups."
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I keep saying Democratic outside groups should run attack ads against the SCOTUS Six this year. The Court keeps giving us all the ammo we need. Any billionaires want to fund my Super PAC?
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And I assume the same is true for the UK if you swap Veep out for The Thick of it.
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FWIW, Harry's allegations against certain UK media outlets in Spare should have been a bigger story. Especially since he has receipts. But there was a complete media blackout on that portion of the book.
So curious why that is...
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I keep thinking Pence was trying to decide if the bigger risk was going to jail for a coup led by Rudy Giuliani or death from the MAGA mob that was already assembling in DC.
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What kills me is neither Thomas will face any accountability at all, and then the same folks in power who decline to do anything will bemoan the lack of faith in institutions and wonder why political engagement is so low.
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Kevin Bacon is serenading his goats with a Beyoncé song. This, right here, is why I don't give up on the Internet.
Hot day, hot song. The goats and I are feeling Heated,
@Beyonce
. Loving this track.
#GoatSongs
#Renaissance
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I'm not one to get into anyone's marriage but I keep wondering if Justice Thomas was one of those spouses concerned by his wife's fall down the QAnon rabbit hole or he was right there with her all the way.
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One thing no one mentions in their Ms Rachel backlash pieces is that the Right started coming for her the minute she began using her influence to advocate for things like early childhood education and paid family leave.
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@tressiemcphd
My favorite thing about House Hunters is predicting if the couple is still together by the time the episode airs. Amazed no one on the Internet keeps track of this actually.
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People who incite violence against vulnerable people and groups know exactly what they're doing.
The violence is a feature, not a bug.
The harm is a feature, not a bug.
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Just in case you were wondering if Clarence Thomas believed the same conspiracies and disinformation that his wife does. Now we know.
In his dissent, Thomas claims that COVID vaccines were developed with the use of "aborted children."
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@DeepInIttt
I fly with my kids often. And I fly for business more than most people. Adults throwing tantrums on a plane is much more disruptive than babies and toddlers.
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Wendy Rogers clearly didn't get the GOP's latest messaging memo re: Zelensky.
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