John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈

Actor; salesperson representing the words “to be” and “why?”. Actors Equity/SAG-AFTRA.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

It does not matter whether the man federal immigration agents killed in Maine had work authorization. It does not matter whether he had a social security number. The state killed a man, and the national conversation turned first to his paperwork. That order of priorities is worth sitting with for a moment.

The debate underway is whether the victim somehow earned his own death. The question that should be asked, why agents of the state are killing people over immigration status at all, has gone strangely quiet.

It deserves saying plainly: this is not a normal practice anywhere. Most authoritarian states, whatever else they do, do not execute people over work permits.

Among Western democracies, the number of countries that do this is zero. I say that carefully, and I include the United States in the arithmetic. A country where this happens, and where the response is to audit the victim, has stepped outside that category, whether or not it has noticed yet.

Nobody knows where this ends. America will not repeat anyone else's history; it will make its own, and its own history books will one day have to account for this chapter. But the direction of travel is visible from here, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

What worries an outside observer most is not any single incident but the paralysis around them. When one side asks the government to stop killing innocent people, the answer is not reflection but reflex: do not listen to them, they are the other side. When even that request has become a partisan position, something essential has already broken.

And the pattern from here is familiar. One killing becomes several. Unrest follows, because decent people will try to stop what they cannot accept. And unrest, in turn, becomes the argument for emergency powers, manufactured or real, which enable more of what caused the unrest in the first place. This is not prophecy. It is simply how these sequences have always run.

For decades, people asked how ordinary countries slid into darkness. The answer was never a dramatic turning point with sinister music. It was a Tuesday, a news cycle, a paperwork debate over a dead man. Then another one.

To my American friends reading this: I know the majority of you want no part of it. But watching from the outside, we notice something your own media seems unwilling to show: one half of your country has effectively been silenced. Not argued down, simply removed from the picture. The cameras point one way now.

They find endless airtime for the people explaining why someone had to die, why a mother lunged at twenty-two masked men, why the latest body is somehow its own fault. The people asking why any of this is happening at all do not get a microphone.

A majority you can neither see nor hear is still a majority. I have known your country too long to doubt it. So the rest of us will say what your cameras will not: the America worth remembering does not kill people, documented or not, and every single one of you knows exactly why that sentence should never have needed writing.

Stay connected, follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

Masterpiece.

[Michelle Obama @MichelleObama]

Barack and I were so honored to have @AkunyiliCrosby create our portrait for the Obama Presidential Center. Her artistic brilliance shines through — and the way she infused such life and joy into the piece is truly extraordinary. We love it, and we think everyone who visits the Center will too!

[Esmaeil Baqaei @IRIMFA_SPOX]

"The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics, when it is especially an act of interior politics, and the most atrocious act of all", so observed the French philosopher Simone Weil.

From this perspective, targetting the drinking-water tanks in Sirik, southern Iran, strips the mask from the true nature of the power; a power that has spent decades cloaking itself in the language of 'human rights', 'international order', and 'moral responsibility' reveals its essence when it deliberately destroys the drinking water of Iranians. In that moment, it does not merely attack a target — it strikes at the very foundation of the noble narrative it has built about itself.

Empires do not fall when their enemies grow stronger; they fall when they can no longer sustain the bridge between what they proclaim and what they do.

The moment of decline is not the collapse of city walls; it is the collapse of the credibility of words that have long concealed reality. What remains is what T.S. Eliot so hauntingly described:
"Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion."

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Your boss did not become rich because you were lazy. Your boss became rich because your labor was worth more than your paycheck.

[Books Behind Borders @MHTruthUltra]

If genocide and pedophilia aren't your red lines, then none of your other opinions really matter.

[Halli @iamharaldur]

"Never again" they said, as they sat back and demanded no one interrupt while it happened again.

[Seth @fiercepatricks]

Friendly reminder that Pride isn't about turning your straight kids into gay kids. It's about not turning gay kids into dead kids.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Iran fires missiles at Gulf States—we all condemn—and the whole world stands up condemning Iran.

Israel wipes out entire villages and bombing cities thousands of years old in Lebanon, the World is silent.

Zero deaths in Gulf States.
3,324+ killed in Lebanon.

Double standards.

[Maha Hussaini @MahaGaza]

"If anyone has survived this starvation,
it is this chicken.
She survived my knife through nine displacements.
Every time I reached for her neck, someone stopped me:
my wife,
Ayloul,
and Zein [my children], who found in his chicken friend something worth saving.

In a tent whose thin strips were colder than the hunger surrounding it,
she felt she was a burden to us—eating anything,
moving so lightly no one could hear her.
Even her clucking was faint,
and her gaze seemed to apologise for still being alive.
But what truly saved her wasn’t us.
It was the egg.
Every three days, she laid one egg—warm—
in a time when even a loaf of bread had disappeared.
We would divide it:
half for Zein,
the other half for Ayloul,
and I would postpone my hunger,
filling myself just by watching them.
And between one egg and the next,
a question circled in my mind:
Do I slaughter her, so we can eat for two days,
or keep her alive… so we can endure longer?

Even when my friend Hamed broke his arm
and needed any protein in this void,
I decided to slaughter her for him.
He looked at her for a long time,
then said:
“No, Malek… I can’t bear this guilt.
I won’t drink her broth… I won’t be the reason.”
In that moment, I understood:
we were saving ourselves from ourselves.
It was a test of the last part within us
that had not yet turned savage.
We could not bring ourselves to harm a chicken—
yet this vile world found it easy to abandon our children."

- Malek Shinbary, Palestinian from Gaza

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

From the beginning until now, every moment of time spent on Twitter has been justified, ennobled, & provisioned with Hope, from this single post. Only recently followed Gandalv @Microinteracti1 . Grateful.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

@rirokpik I am troubled by the fact that I do not recognize half of these names let alone their stories nor their lessons, so thank you @rirokpik for posting this, and helping to shine a light on that gap for me. As well as so many of the folks replying with more suggestions.

[Michael de Adder @deAdder]

The Globe and Mail

[Amanda Gorman @TheAmandaGorman]

For Renee Nicole Good
Killed by I.C.E. on January 7, 2026

by Amanda Gorman

They say she is no more,
That there her absence roars,
Blood-blown like a rose.
Iced wheels flinched & froze.
Now, bare riot of candles,
Dark fury of flowers,
Pure howling of hymns.

If for us she arose,
Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief,
Crouches our power,
The howl where we begin,
Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater
Of the worst of what we’ve been.

Change is only possible,
& all the greater,
When the labour
& bitter anger of our neighbors
Is moved by the love 
& better angels of our nature.

What they call death & void,
We know is breath & voice; 
In the end, gorgeously, 
Endures our enormity. 

You could believe departed to be the dawn
When the blank night has so long stood.
But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,
When they forever are so fiercely Good.

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

A viewpoint informed not only by study, actions not only suggested by knowledge, but understanding only deep self-reflection in the mirror, about the “Why”, empowers. Thank you for sharing these logically precise thoughts @samagreene

[Sam Greene @samagreene]

I study authoritarianism for a living, so I do not say this lightly: America isn't facing an authoritarian future. America is living an authoritarian present.

(A long 🧵)

/1

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

Today I saw the face of what we’ve become: and it was buried in trash.

It was after the hospital. My hands still smelled of blood and iodine, as if I had just pulled death out of someone’s lungs. I stepped into the street not as a man walks, but as a shadow stumbles: worn, faceless, erased.

And then I saw them.
In the middle of the road.
Six souls. A family. Huddled together, not at the edge where the damned usually die, but in the heart of the road; as if they had taken position at the altar of some invisible God who no longer answers.

I should have turned away.

But curiosity is a wicked thing.
It’s not wonder; it’s hunger.
And sometimes, it eats you alive.

I walked toward them.
They were quiet. Too quiet.
A circle of bones and breath.

And there it was.

A meal.
Or what I thought was a meal.
A miracle, maybe, for a second.
But no.

It wasn’t food.
It was garbage.

A pile of trash.
Stinking. Festering. A graveyard of wrappers and waste.
And from that grave, they had scraped a few strands of spaghetti: cold, sticky, clinging to dirt as if ashamed to be eaten.

And then I saw him.

The father.
With hands no longer hands, but trembling instruments of despair.
He reached into the trash and lifted the food: not to eat, no, but to feed.

He fed it to his daughter.
A little girl.
Her eyes were too large for her face. Her lips, cracked. Her dress, torn like she had fallen through history itself.
And he fed her garbage, with love.

With tenderness.
As if it were soup.
As if it were gold.

He held it delicately.
Lifted it to her lips like a holy offering.
And she took it.
She chewed slowly.

She smiled.

And I…
I shattered.

Because in that moment, the universe reversed.
The sacred became foul.
The foul became sacred.
And I was no longer a witness;
I was a criminal.

How dare I exist?
How dare I walk upright while that child eats from the mouth of death?

I did nothing.

I stood there, paralyzed by the weight of my own uselessness.
I, who have words, hands, and breath, did nothing.

And worse: I walked away.

But no, that’s a lie.
I never left.
I am still there.

#GazaGenocide

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

Clarity. https://t.co/lajOUlR4VS

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

@ayman_eckford Thank you for this piece, which I found on the Los Angeles Blade. I certainly appreciate the sharing of your experience & rhoughts, but I especially appreciate the clarity in your writing. Looking forward to more of it. 🙂

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

@Deggans Agree. Is it naive to think that will lead to a reboot at some day thereafter & their machine starts humming along well again? 😉

[John Reimer 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnReimer_QED]

@stuartpstevens Very helpful explanation, thank you! 🙂